Bill Gates' Mix '06 Keynote Is Up

Since not all of us could be there live, at least we can watch the webcast of the Mix ‘06 keynote speech (it’s almost 3 hours long, and to be honest I would fast forward to about the 1:30 mark unless you really enjoy hearing BillG drone on about “innovation” and whatnot, though the BBC demos about 40 minutes into it are pretty cool).  Notables from the keynote:

• MySpace.com runs (and has been running) on asp.net 2.0 x64/SQL Server 2005 x64 (which is something I’ve suspected for a while via their Netcraft site report.  Apparently they started off with Coldfusion and ditched it for asp.net early on, they remap the old .cfm links to .aspx pages).  They have 65 million users and serve up 1.5 billion page views of just user home pages daily.  It takes 150 servers just to accomplish this task (who knows how many servers they have total), but this is down by almost 50% compared to their pre-asp.net 2.0 solution.  Also by moving to asp.net 2.0, they saw processor utilization go down by almost 70%, so they now have plenty of room to scale with their existing set of servers.  They also seem to be hiring.
• The BBC demo was pretty sweet and really shows off some of the capabilities of the sidebar in Vista.  He also showed a pretty neat WPF demo of what they’re currently working on.
• The one on one with Tim O’Reilly was a total snooze fest and took way too long.
• The guy anchoring the IE related stuff had one too many cups of coffee, but gave a nice demo of where IE7 is going (plus he apologized to the entire world about previous versions of IE…about damn time).  There is a very good chance I might go back to IE if they get it right this time.
• The first few minutes of the “Infocard” demo reminded me of what MS wanted to do with Passport (ala Hailstorm) a couple of years ago, which wasn’t such a good idea.  By the time that demo was done, I was pretty much sold (but have a few questions of my own, which I’ll wait to ask after I can get some more details), so either the presenter did his job and duped me, or it really will be a neat (and useful) feature.
• Scott Guthrie (who admitted to having too much coffee) gave an amazing demo of Atlas (the main thing I garnered besides the cool factor is that Atlas != Ajax…Atlas is a first class asp.net citizen and adds a lot to Ajax).  I’m definitely sold on this now and will be devoting quite a bit of time to it in the near future.  He capped it off by showing how we can write “Gadgets” that can interact seamlessly with Atlas web applications.  This is the must see bit from the keynote.
• The CEO of Fluid capped everything off by giving an equally amazing demo of how WPF can be used in web applications to provide a user experience unlike anything I’ve ever seen.  In his words, the prototype they built for Northface took one developer 6 weeks to build, and he had no prior Windows development experience.  Truth or not, the demo was great, and it looks like WPF is gonna knock it out of the park.

This is the one MS conference I would have given anything to attend.  Love ‘em or hate ‘em (or both), MS is really raising the bar when it comes to web development.  Retooling is always kind of a pain (though mostly a welcome one), but it looks like they are attempting to make the transition an easy one.  If I wasn’t sold before, I’m definitely getting closer…the Atlas stuff is awesome.  I’m looking forward to catching up on the forthcoming webcasts from Mix ‘06.