MIX is a unique conference in the Microsoft world as its not nearly as big as the PDC nor Tech Ed in sheer sizeimage, yet it could be the most interesting conference. MIX combines the developer and designer communities for web development and has historically been the launching pad for WPF and Silverlight related news. MIX is held in Las Vegas, which is a great conference city and is pretty easy to get to. Because its a smaller sized conference (less people), its easier to network, have more conversations, and you get more of a sense of the people around you.

Who is MIX for?

MIX is for designer and developers. Lots of AJAX, ASP.NET, Silverlight, RIA in general, XAML, cool design fun and more.

But its so expensive, isn’t it?

Yes, but … its getting cheaper by the day too, the cost started out for me at $1300 for hotel ($900) and flight ($400) … my flight was just reduced by $100 and my hotel by $560.  The Venetian is running a special of $199 per night and if you stay 2 nights, you get the 3rd night free. So its about $150 a night for 3 nights including taxes. You can stay even cheaper if you book another hotel a little off the strip too.

I’m speaking there.

I just found out that one of my topics was selected for MIX, so I will also be presenting at MIX 09. My session title is “When Errors Happen: Debugging Microsoft Silverlight”. The idea came from many of the trials I went through in figuring out good ways to debug problems when developing RIA applications. The abstract is as follows:

When Errors Happen: Debugging Microsoft Silverlight

Come see how to debug Silverlight applications using Fiddler, Internet Explorer 8, and the Web Development Helper tools. Learn how using the right tool save precious time and effort whether dealing with cross domain policy recognition, RESTful response analysis, or just a general error.