Tonight’s .net user group meeting featured Glen Gordon from Microsoft.  He did a presentation on Mix 09 highlights.  The vast majority of information was about Silverlight 3.  Quick rundown:

Silverlight and Blend 3.0 goodness:

• New functionality to assist with easing effects to provide a more natural look/feel.  You can do this today with Spline KeyFrames in Silverlight 2.0, but this should make such an effect easier to develop.
• SaveFilterDialog – allows end-users to save files from your SL application.  Your code won’t know where the location because SL lives in the sandbox, and will be provided a [system.io] Stream with which to write (thus still blissfully unaware of the actual physical location).
• Sketch Flow in Blend is just plain beauty.  In short, this allows designers/developers to “mock” up applications in a way that communicates the non-functional state that an app *should* be in during development.  Under the hood, it can still be real/valid XAML, but the appearance is sort of like hand-writing with regard to look/feel further emphasizing to clients the need to think about the app’s functionality and *not* the font color of a label 😉    .  Additional goodies include end-user feedback ability; users can interactively view the SL mockup using a tool known as the “Sketch Flow Player” and actually submit annotations and feedback).  Sweetness!
• Behaviors within Blend 3.0 are an extensible way to package up functionality that can be expressed by a designer in Xaml.  Awesome.
• There is a feature in Blend 3.0 which allows basically mocked up data to show in SL controls within the design experience to see more “life like” representations of the UI.
• Source Code control in Blend (no brainer here)
• INTELLISENSE IN BLEND (no more toggling back to VS## for that!)
• Easier navigation functionality in SL 3.0 for “page to page”.
• Plenty of other nuggets too (ex: I think much of the controls in the SL toolbox become full citizens of SL 3).

Other notables:

• Cool info on the Mobile Tagging with Microsoft.  There is a Tag Application named “gettag.mobi” which can read bar-code-looking images containing encoded information.  Ballance downloaded the app onto his IPhone, aimed it at the Tag Glen had on the screen, and voila.  Very cool.  More info
• Here’s my tag:
  
• New tool from Microsoft allows comparing pages in different browsers, even if you don’t have those different browser versions locally.  It’s called “Super Preview Test”.  More info
• .Net RIA services is a technology to assist n-tier development, such as propagating server-side validation to the client, and other goodies like integrating authentication and roles with technologies such as silverlight.  This is not a silverlight-specific technology, and in fact is slated to be useful for ajax development, asp.net, and even within services.
• Azure came up.  Yeah, Microsoft’s answer to cloud computing.  Not much came out of this one.  Hmmmmm
• Web Platform installer – This tool simplifies packing up application dependencies into a single package.  More Info
• Windows 7 releases October 27
• Silverlight 3.0 should release late summer of this year