Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Internet Explorer at Microsoft, announces the global availability of Windows Internet Explorer 8 during the Day 2 keynote address at MIX09, Microsoft’s Web designer and developer conference in Las Vegas, March 19, 2009.

Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Internet Explorer at Microsoft, announces the global availability of Windows Internet Explorer 8 during the Day 2 keynote address at MIX09, Microsoft’s Web designer and developer conference in Las Vegas, March 19, 2009.

Deborah Adler, principal of Deborah Adler LLC, discusses user experience and design during the Day 2 keynote address at MIX09. Adler designed a new prescription medicine packaging system called ClearRx for Target Corp. MIX09 is Microsoft’s Web designer and developer conference in Las Vegas, March 19, 2009.

Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Internet Explorer at Microsoft, demonstrates some of the features in the newly announced Windows Internet Explorer 8 during the Day 2 keynote address at MIX09, Microsoft’s Web designer and developer conference in Las Vegas, March 19, 2009.

Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President, .NET Developer Platform at Microsoft Corp., announces the release of Silverlight 3 Beta during MIX09, Microsoft’s annual conference for Web developers, designers and businesses. Las Vegas, March 18, 2009.

Bill Buxton, Principal Researcher for Microsoft Research, talks to attendees at MIX09 about the importance of great design and creating a first-rate “return on experience” for customers. Las Vegas, March 18, 2009.

Scott Guthrie (left), Corporate Vice President, .NET Developer Platform, Microsoft Corp., shares a laugh during a post-keynote "Ask the Gu" Q&A session with Jeff Atwood of StackOverflow.com and Jeff Sandquist (right), Senior Director of Evangelism, Microsoft, during MIX09. Questions from the session came from viewers and attendees via Twitter. Las Vegas, March 18, 2009.

Scott Stanfield, CEO of Vertigo Software Inc., demonstrates a new application that uses the Deep Zoom feature of Silverlight during MIX09 to allow readers to “read” through a print-quality magazine online, moving from page to page and issue to issue quickly and easily. Las Vegas, March 18, 2009.

Code generation from the XAML editor, to generate the C# event handlers

Code generation in the C# editor

Ability to run Silverlight applications directly from Eclipse

Code completion in the XAML editor

Eclipse4SL on Mac, overview: the Project explorer, the Silverlight rendering surface, the advanced XAML code editor, the Controls Palette

Accelerator

Address Bar

Developer Tools

Domain Highlighting and Tab Coloring

InPrivate Browsing

InPrivate Filtering

Search Suggestions

SmartScreen Filter

Web Slice

Silverlight 3 Beta allows developers and designers to apply content to a 3-D plane. Users can rotate or scale live content in space without writing any additional code. Other effects include creating a queue in 3-D and transitions.

With Silverlight 3 Beta, users can now write pixels to a bitmap. Thus, they can build a photo editor to do red-eye correction, perform edits on scanned documents or create specials effects for cached bitmaps from elements on the screen. Shader effects include blur and drop shadow.

The new out-of-browser experience in Silverlight 3 Beta enables users to place their favorite Silverlight applications directly onto any PC or Mac desktop, start menu or application folder, without the need to download an additional runtime or browser plug-in. Further, the new experience enables Silverlight applications to work whether the computer is connected to the Internet or not – a radical improvement to the traditional Web experience.

In less than two months a single developer built the Perfect Car Finder: Photo Edition for kbb.com, an experience that takes advantage of rich controls, superior data access capabilities, and cutting-edge features such as Deep Zoom in Silverlight. This Silverlight-enabled experience allows users of kbb.com to interact with the images of many cars at once and adjust characteristics such as price, body style, and mileage to find the car they want.

ISC Technology Inc. uses Microsoft Expression Blend and Microsoft Silverlight together with Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition when building projects. This new approach to building software, like the application depicted above, has resulted in improved collaboration between designers and developers, an earlier focus on the user experience, more customer-friendly solutions, and faster development times — all of which have helped ISC’s new Interactive Design group become profitable in only two months.

K2 recently announced the release of K2 blackpoint, a solution that enables users to visually build workflow applications within Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. The K2 blackpoint Web designer uses Microsoft Silverlight, enabling business users to easily create workflows in SharePoint.

Since its launch in September 2007, Microsoft’s corporate Web site has delivered more than 200 Silverlight-based campaigns as well as applications such as video, navigational options, widgets, gadgets and upcoming display advertising – some of which uses the innovative Deep Zoom feature in Silverlight.

MSN Entertainment is using Silverlight to make the “fun part of MSN” even better by taking some of its already popular content, such as celebrity photos, and creating new, engaging, interactive experiences that help MSN differentiate itself in the crowded entertainment business. With more than 20 million monthly users, MSN Entertainment represents MSN’s most popular owned-and-operated online destination.

MSN Entertainment is using Silverlight to make the “fun part of MSN” even better by taking some of its already popular content, such as celebrity photos, and creating new, engaging, interactive experiences that help MSN differentiate itself in the crowded entertainment business. With more than 20 million monthly users, MSN Entertainment represents MSN’s most popular owned-and-operated online destination.

MSN Entertainment is using Silverlight to make the “fun part of MSN” even better by taking some of its already popular content, such as celebrity photos, and creating new, engaging, interactive experiences that help MSN differentiate itself in the crowded entertainment business. With more than 20 million monthly users, MSN Entertainment represents MSN’s most popular owned-and-operated online destination.

Netflix Inc. recently chose Silverlight to power its Watch Instantly online service, which provides Netflix customers with the ability to watch movies instantly on their PC or Mac via Silverlight. With Silverlight, Netflix members enjoy a faster, easier connection and a more robust viewing experience due to the high video quality built directly into the player.

Microsoft Virtual Earth, an integrated set of services that provides high-quality geospatial data and rich, engaging location-based applications, uses Silverlight to provide customers with an unsurpassed platform for seamless, interactive, Web-based mapping. Virtual Earth provides Geographic Information System customers with a total view across their organization’s spatial data.

Microsoft Virtual Earth, an integrated set of services that provides high-quality geospatial data and rich, engaging location-based applications, uses Silverlight to provide customers with an unsurpassed platform for seamless, interactive, Web-based mapping. Virtual Earth provides Geographic Information System customers with a total view across their organization’s spatial data.

Microsoft Virtual Earth, an integrated set of services that provides high-quality geospatial data and rich, engaging location-based applications, uses Silverlight to provide customers with an unsurpassed platform for seamless, interactive, Web-based mapping. Virtual Earth provides Geographic Information System customers with a total view across their organization’s spatial data.

The SketchFlow player enables ideas and concepts to be demonstrated quickly and effectively to clients. The freely distributable player allows clients to follow multiple paths through a concept, testing different scenarios and interaction models as well as providing feedback in context via text comments or directly annotating on the prototype.

The built-in SketchFlow “wiggly” styles shown here ensure that stakeholders concentrate on reviewing the overall concept of a prototype rather than focusing too early on details of the design.

The application flow panel, a feature of SketchFlow in Expression Blend 3, enables the rapid creation and experiment of the user interface flow of an application.

Expression Blend 3 enables the direct import of Adobe Photoshop files, ensuring a smooth integration with traditional workflows the designer may already have in place. On import, layers can be easily regrouped and elements retain their original formats; layers, layer positions, text and vectors remain available for editing within Expression Blend.

Design time sample data in Expression Blend 3 makes it easy to build data-connected applications without access to live data. Sample data can be generated within Expression Blend 3 or imported from an XML file and is available via controls on the artboard at design-time. Expression Blend 3 allows extensive customization of sample data, and users can easily switch between using sample data and live data at run-time.

The revised user interface in Expression Blend 3, which includes a brand new design surface, radically improves the overall design experience, making Expression Blend 3 more accessible to visual designers.