In fine tradition, Microsoft Australia hosted its version of the annual MIX event in Sydney. The conference, aptly named REMIX, featured the upcoming Silverlight 3, SketchFlow and Blend 3 products, though, much to my chagrin, somewhat superficially.

REMIX crammed MIX into a single day - and it was choc-full of Aussie talent. The event was essentially a Microsoft roadshow, which makes me wonder a bit at the $200 price tag. Nevertheless, there was a good turnout of around 500 delegates, all chomping at the bit for a cappuccino from the complementary espresso machine (nice touch).

Amidst a sea of developers dressed in our blacks and grays, the day began. Shrouded in mist, lit up in purple and backed by the Two Steps from Hell soundtrack, the Microsoft boys arrived. To their credit, they didn’t take themselves too seriously; smart move - the audience didn’t seem much for pomp and ceremony.

Pervasiveness was the theme of the day, and this happens to be one of Microsoft’s strengths. The choice of content highlighted Microsoft’s place in the entire development lifecycle - from conception & prototyping (Blend & SketchFlow), through development (Silverlight), teamwork (VS Team Suite), deployment and scalability (Azure) to end user tooling (Windows Mobile, IE8 & Windows 7).

The keynote was a mixed bag of end-to-end solutions from Microsoft’s partners and a little bit on the company’s push into Natural User Interfaces (NUIs) with Surface. Even IE8 made an appearance, showing off her unique Web Slice feature. With it, users can drag cooperative HTML elements into their favourites bar for handy viewing. If the content changes, the user is notified - very useful for monitoring auctions and sale items.

There was also a demonstration of the Emotiv UI device, a local invention that monitors brain activity. The facial gesture recognition didn't generate much reaction, but both the emotional and cognitive response monitoring certainly raised eyebrows. The latter was impressively demonstrated as the speaker “thought” a spinning cube towards the screen.

Due in July, Silverlight 3 was always going to be a huge draw card for delegates. Unfortunately, the only session on it was chiefly an inventory of new features. I'd certainly like to see more in depth Silverlight, WPF and XAML content at REMIX next year.

Regardless, the session was informative. What we’re seeing with Silverlight 3 is a greater parity with Flash - perspective 3D, easing functions, effects and pixel shading, writable bitmaps (useful for reflections), network monitoring events, save file dialogs, element to element binding and GPU acceleration. Out of browser is a nifty feature too, and though it may seem like it, it’s not quite a direct competitor with AIR. Less desktop application and more sandboxed web application with a desktop presence. It does however, alleviate the need for a separate runtime installation.

SketchFlow was up next. Essentially, it’s a prototyping tool that comes with Expression Blend 3 (it’s in the Beta, but not the MIX Preview, sorry to say). Think Balsamiq inside of Blend. The obvious advantages of tying it to the tooling is the ability to upgrade fidelity smoothly, even when the designers give way to the development team.

The presenter, Matt Morphett, did a stellar job communicating the needs and desires of designers to the receptive developers. I particularly liked his diagram on the motivating forces behind software design. It depicted the three central players: Architecture (development), Business and Users. What started as a SketchFlow talk, began to sound like a take on agile development by a designer, but it all tied in nicely. He ended by showing us a handy feature of SketchFlow: an MS Word output of a specifications document based on the wireframes.

Next up came Blend 3. The next iteration has learnt from big brother - Visual Studio - sporting movable and dockable windows along with customisable project templates. They’ve improved the Asset Library (thankfully), provided support for code behind and Intellisense, and added resource dictionaries (think CSS includes). All this however, was overshadowed by Behaviors [sic], a very funky addition to Expression Blend.

Behaviors give designers the ability to drag and drop functionality onto controls in Blend. Let’s say you write up a generic Fullscreen toggle Behavior, a designer can then simply drag this feature onto a button and, hey-presto, they've added functionality to their executable prototype. This is a very nifty feature that I’m hoping Adobe have taken note of.

My day concluded with a session on Surface. A local company here - Amnesia - have been working on a proof of concept with Lonely Planet. Together they’ve developed a real world use case for the bulky table full of cameras and a PC. It didn’t disappoint.

Here’s a demo video if you can sit through the sponsor ad.

Surface is about evoking an emotional response. If you can tie this to a brand, you’ve got yourself marketing gold. Microsoft doesn’t expect to take over the world with Surface, but they do seem to think their innovation has a place in the future - especially when you see it through their eyes. Difficulties in programming these interfaces are abound - multiuser engagement, sound ownership, and left vs right handedness for example. At least Surface runs both XNA and WPF applications; now we just need to get our hands on one and have something to develop for it.

All in all, REMIX 09 was a great showcase of Microsoft friendly, Australian talent. It was well organised and run, and quite enjoyable. However, I’d like to see more technical content to justify the cost. When you factor in that everything presented was on Microsoft - products, solutions and contributions - you wonder why it’s not free. Maybe I’ve just been spoilt by Adobe.

Read more from Justin J. Moses.