Wow, if there were three Scott Guthries! Joe Stagner does what he can to help mere mortal developers like me understand how Our Hero Scott Guthrie can be so productive. This is sooo Joe Stagner.
The Best of Mix 08. Our New England Microsoft High Priest Chris Bowen posted the best Mix 08 summary I've seen. When my SilverLight Window opens I'll definitely be checking out the Expression Professional Subscription Chris mentioned. ($999 for the works. Here's the Expression Professional Subscription FAQ page.) Another Mix point Chris mentions is Silverlight 1.0 for Mobile. This is huge, as Steve Gillmor implies in The Power of Choice, "...the potential for Silverlight to appear on any mobile platform that provides an SDK (hello, Cupertino)." Not exactly the same philosophy Apple seemed to have followed in "approving" applicants in its iPhone SDK program.
LINQPad to learn. I still haven't moved to LINQ in everyday programming. I've been doing all of my development in Community Server for some time where the Data Provider model rules the day, but when I move to LINQ, the LINQPad query tool from Joe Albahari, author of C# 3.0 in a Nutshell looks like a great learning tool.
When Rocky talks, geeks listen. Rocky offers a personal review of Mix 08. He's such a popular speaker that he rarely gets to enjoy being a pure spectator as he was at Mix 08. At ReMix07 in Boston last October I was inspired by Rocky's WPF presentation, yet he says about Scott Guthrie's Mix 08 keynote, "The real reason for keynotes though, is to inspire. And this keynote didn't disappoint. The demos of Silverlight and related technologies were awesome!"
Return to Deadwood. A bonus of the daily exercise session (at least during the winter months in Vermont on the [NordicTrack]) is that you can watch videos in the middle of the day. During my 2007-08 Vermont winter non-running workout sessions I've been watching Stargate Atlantis on my iPod, now Zune (which is a superior video experience to the iPod.) I recently started watching Deadwood and am hooked all over again. There's so much that's great about this HBO series, but I think the line Ellsworth says to Joanie Stubbs on his first visit to Cy Tolliver's Bella Union pretty much captures it, "Thank you for allowing me my full range of expression."