Greetings readers!

I had hoped to get a podcast up tonight but because of dinner taking nearly 3 hours, I didn’t have the prep time I need for the show. Schedule depending, hopefully tomorrow. I do have a HUGE surprise for you guys on the show but I will likely hold that off until next week when the show is back to normal. Anyway, lets talk Day 2 at MIX 2010!

Like yesterday,  today started off with a big keynote.  Yesterday’s focus was Windows Phone 7 Series (a name I still hate even after having it explained to me today) and the topic of today’s keynote was Internet Explorer 9 (Internet Exploder 9 for those who are cool).  A few things was said about IE9 back at PDC but at the time they had only been working on it for 3 weeks so nothing was able to be shown until today.  As much of an Internet Exploder hater as I am, I will say that what they showed off has me extremely impressed.

A number of demos were shown that allowed you to see how much better performing IE 9 was compared to Chrome and Firefox at some tasks because it is taking advantage of GPU acceleration for a lot of the rendering and stuff.  I am not sure about the technical aspects of the demos but Chrome by far performed the worst out of all 3.  I would have loved to see a comparison with the new Opera (my browser of  choice) since it is the fastest browser there is according to various benchmarks.  As impressive as these tests seemed to be, what really made my jaw drop was when they had a netbook running multiple 720p videos in the browser at the same time and still only using around 35% of the CPU.  They were as smooth as butter and no frame drops compared to Chrome where just one video had the CPU pegged and it was dropping a bunch of frames.  This was all with HTML 5 which is impressive.

If you want to try out the power of IE 9 (although it is no where near finished and has nothing in terms of security or anything so it should NOT be used as a primary browser), head over to IETestDrive.com.  I really wish that more applications would take advantage of the GPU so there can be real innovations in terms of content possible.

I have a ton of other IE related news that will either comprise of another post of be apart of the next podcast but it is too much and far too interesting to be thrown in here.

After the keynote, I bounced around to a couple of different sessions.  I attended a session on how to create Silverlight apps which was really cool because it showed how the same app that you can run in your browser will run in a Windows Phone 7 Series device with no changes (although changes should still be made to make it a more appropriate experience).  I then attended a Silverlight debugging session what was kind of pointless since I didn’t know Silverlight and it was more for people experienced with it and that face some common debug issues and this was how to fix some of the most common ones.  I then spent a few minutes in a presentation on some kind of security vulnerability that mainly seemed to effect Chrome but it was still interesting.  When the video is put up, I will try to remember to share a link as it is quite interesting.

Later, myself and fellow insider Joe Osborn got to sit down with Todd Brix, Senior Director for Mobile Platform Services Product Management and got to pick his brain about everything from the future of Zune to whether or not Microsoft Points will be used on Windows Phone 7 Series devices.  The meeting went great and I have a bit of big story type news that came out of the meeting but that is deserving of its own post because the news is so huge.

After that was done, they day was largely done at least for me until we went to a dinner that was amazingly expensive and nowhere near my taste.  If you are used to the whole 5 star restaurant and fancy food that you would see on the Food Network kind of thing, you might enjoy it but as somebody who eats mostly things like pizza, fast food, chinese food, ect, it was not to my liking.  The meal was like 4 or 5 courses and it was all I could to do swallow of the items without a display of projective vomiting.  I could clearly never handle the rich person kind of life style.

Tomorrow there is no keynote but several more sessions.  I will also be sitting down for an on camera interview with Raffi Krikorian from Twitter’s Platform Team.  With any luck, maybe I can get some juicy news from that interview.  The conference ends at 4PM tomorrow so the odds of me being able to get a podcast recorded and up at some point tomorrow are looking good assuming my homework doesn’t take up too much time.

Check back for more news from MIX 2010 and the major news that I promised to share very soon!