Well, I am officially on-site in Las Vegas for the first ever Microsoft MIX Conference. The event is at the Venetian, one of my favorite casinos in Vegas (Bellagio is probably #1 because the on-site poker room gives it the edge over the Venetian's slightly more upscale rooms and decor).

I am interested in this event on a number of levels. The techie part of me is excited to see some of the hopefully cool stuff the product groups have cooked up to show off our next generation of web technology. The techie part of me is also worried a bit about the messaging Microsoft will use during this event. It is an interesting conference in that it is small (~1400 attendees) and has a very diverse mix of attendees - business folks, designer/artsy folks, and technical folks like developers. It think it will be hard to craft a consistent message that resonates with all three groups - at least at the keynote level. I have heard some of the initial pitches around some of the various technologies and scenarios and I left either scratching my head saying "its that it?" or I have left thinking "that wasn't all that interesting."

The techie-side of me has, however, seen bits in action and talked bits and bytes with internal MSFT folks and I know there is a really good story there, but I think it has been masked in trying to appeal to all three groups. Again, I suspect that the individual focused breakouts will be killer, but that the keynote stuff may be a bit disjointed. Then again, I could be completely wrong, so I am execited to see what happens. A quick glance (and I mean quick - less than 5 seconds - hey, I am in Vegas and the conference hasnt started yet. I can survey the schedule tomorrow while I am trying to eat breakfast and adjust to the time change) shows some really interesting sessions. The one that immediately caught my eye was something along the lines of building a site to support REST, SOAP, RSS and some other buzz words. The title sounds cool and it sounded techy so it will be on my list of things to check out tomorrow.