At the last minute, I had to forego heading out to Las Vegas for MIX but thanks to streaming, I was able to watch the 3 hour keynote given/hosted by Ray Ozzie and Scott Guthrie. I say "hosted" becasue there were many many amazing demos of work different companies have been doing.

There will be so many people blogging about the keynote that I don't want to reiterate everything. A few highlights were seeing some major innovation in IE8 (along with Dean's cool t-shirt - the ie logo and the e in "eight" result in a clever image) and  Silverlight 2 goodness - especially Vertigo's silverlight app for Hard Rock Cafe (go Scott (even if he doesn't post a lot on his blog!)). Thanks to Guy Burstein who posted all of the critical links in a few blog posts this morning, there's also one to the technology that Vertigo used called Deep Zoom.

Okay, Scott Guthrie juggling for a Cirque du Soleil audition was pretty cute, too.

The real goods are:

• IE8 Beta
• Silverlight 2 Beta and dev tools and SDK
• Expression Studio Beta (don't forget Expression Blend 2.5 March 2008 Preview)
• A passing mention that the next preview of MVC is available.

Because he did such a good job at it, I'm going to take advantage of Guy's posts with lots and lots of links.

I missed the discussion of the one DATA related thing because of a phone call! "SQL Server Data Services: Microsoft announced a preview of SQL Server Data Services, a building block service designed for developers and businesses that need scalable, easily programmable and cost-effective data storage with robust database query capabilities. " Sheesh. Roger Jennings has blogged about this particular piece.