MIX (Microsoft)

MIX is a Microsoft conference held annually for web developers and designers at which Microsoft showcases upcoming web technologies. The conference is held each spring at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas. Unlike many of Microsoft's technical conference, MIX has been promoted more heavily to designers by inviting popular speakers from other popular web design conferences, such as SXSW, and has sponsored a CSS design contest each year to promote the conference. Microsoft has also used this conference as an opportunity to promote new web design and development tools such as Silverlight and Microsoft Expression Studio.

On January 24, 2012, the official Microsoft blog stated that there will be no MIX 2012. MIX was replaced by BUILD later that year.

MIX 06 was held from March 20 to March 22, 2006. It focused on the new Internet Explorer 7 and WPF (a part called WPF/E later became known as Silverlight). It featured a keynote by Bill Gates in which he said "We need microformats".

MIX 07 was held from April 30 to May 7, 2007. The primary focus of the MIX 2007 was promoting Silverlight. The majority of the session content was focused on demonstrating Silverlight applications and the development tools used to build them. The main keynote, given by Scott Guthrie was also promoting Silverlight. Microsoft Expression Studio was also released to manufacturing thereafter.

Along with the main conference in Las Vegas, several reMIX events were held throughout 2007 in other cities. The reMIX conferences represented the sessions from MIX with different keynote speakers.

MIX 08 was held from March 5–March 7, 2008. The first beta release of Microsoft's Windows Internet Explorer 8 was demonstrated and contained many new features, including WebSlices and Activities.

MIX 09 was held from March 18–20, 2009. Availability of the final version of Internet Explorer 8 was announced, as well as a demonstration of Silverlight 3 and Expression Blend 3.0 betas. Microsoft released beta tooling for software developers to create applications using Silverlight, which is Microsoft’s framework for creating rich Internet applications. Microsoft released version 1.0 of ASP.NET MVC on March 13, 2009, just prior to the MIX event. MVC stands for model–view–controller and refers to a particular process for building web applications. Microsoft also announced at MIX 2009 that Silverlight 3 would support H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video, an emerging Web video standard adopted by such sites as YouTube. In addition, Microsoft said applications built using Silverlight 3 can run offline as well as in a Web browser.

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