Although the software announcements made today were somewhat disappointing (no releases, just more betas, CTPs, and RCs) the cross-platform functionality offered by XNA 4.0, Silverlight 4.0, Visual Studio 2010, and Windows Phone 7 were compelling. A number of partners gave demos today that showcased some of the really interesting new features of Blend 4 Beta [download here] that I will be discussing more later tonight:

• eBay demos Desktop Simple Lister (with help from Cynergy)
• Netflix demos Smooth Streaming on WP7
• Foursquare demos location aware services WP7
• Other great demos: Seesmic, Major League Soccer, and Shazaam

Another big announcement was that they’ve open sourced the Silverlight media framework, that was used to deliver the smooth-streaming HD experience for the 2010 Vancouver Olympic games. The code is available at http://smf.codeplex.com

The focus was very strong on targeting multiple platforms that support Silverlight or XNA with a single code-base. This ubiquity of development has always been a major goal for Microsoft and so-far the case they’ve made is very compelling. I can’t wait to dig into the nuts and bolts of it and post more developer and designer focused analysis.

Microsoft made a flurry of announcements this morning via press release (link to come). As I watch Sterling Quinn, the 16-year-old Yo-Yo champ (20 minutes is too long for a warm-up FYI) I’ve read that Microsoft has:

“Announced the availability of comprehensive tools”

• Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone
• Windows Phone 7 add-in to use with Visual Studio 2010 RC
• XNA Game Studio 4.0
• Windows Phone 7 Series Emulator for application testing
• Expression Blend for Windows Phone CTP

“Available for download today”:

• Silverlight 4 RC
• Expression Blend 4 Beta – “New features such as Path Layout enable developers and designers to build and animate innovative user interface design via a groundbreaking visual layout mechanism, without the need to write code.”

“Several leading companies will be creating exciting applications and games for Windows Phone 7 Series.”

“Silverlight adoption has continued at a rapid pace with installations approaching 60 percent of all Internet devices worldwide – an increase of nearly 15 percentage points in just four months.”

More to come. Stay tuned in here or follow me on Twitter @indexzero.

MIX10 gets started this Sunday. Looking forward to seeing what Microsoft et al. have up their sleeves for Windows Phone, Silverlight 4 and WPF 4. There also seems to be a stronger focus on web standards and Javascript this year:

• HTML5 Now: The Future of Web Markup Today (Part 1 of 2)
• HTML5 Now: The Future of Web Markup Today (Part 2 of 2)
• Building Great Standards-Based Websites for the Big Wide World with Microsoft ASP.NET 4
• SVG: The Past, Present and Future of Vector Graphics for the Web
• How jQuery Makes Hard Things Simple
• Six Things Every jQuery Developer Muse Know
• Reactive Extensions for Javascript

Here’s a list of some of the talks that I’m planning on attending:

• An Enterprise Perspective on Silverlight 4
• Total Experience: A Design Methodology for Agencies
• Microsoft Silverlight Optimization and Extensibility with MEF
• Developing Natural User Interfaces with Microsoft Silverlight and WPF 4 Touch
• Design the Ordinary, Like the Fixie
• Creating Effective Info Viz in Microsoft Silverlight
• Touch in Public: Multi-touch Interaction Design for Kiosks and Architectural Experiences
• Total Experience Design
• The Mono Project
• The Art, Technology and Science of Reading
• Creating Great Experiences through Collaboration
• Media Processing Workflow
• Syncing Audio, Video and Animations in Microsoft Silverlight Applications
• Microsoft Silverlight “Media” : Moving at 60fps
• Smooth Streaming Live in HD: 2010 Olympic Winter Games

You can read more about my adventures on the floor at MIX10 by following me on Twitter, @indexzero, or checking back here periodically. Hope to see some of you there!