The first day of MIX11 focused a lot on emerging web technologies, mostly HTML5 and the abilities that it brings to the table; websockets, canvas, data-* attributes and unobtrusive Javascript/jQuery.  I’ve taken a bit of a dive in to both websockets and data-* attributes already (with the later being a requirement for serious unobtrusive script) so do check those out.

Expanding on that importance of HTML5 and the future of the web, IE9 was a very hot topic.  There was a lot of comparison against The Other Fastest Browser (read: Chrome) and IE9 showing it up in nearly every way.  It seems (so far anyway) that MS has really outdone themselves with IE9, especially in the performance and standards support categories.  IE9 looks to have ridiculously good support for all of the emerging web technologies, and is (by their demos anyway) far and away faster than any other browser right now.  It’ll be really interesting to see how the other browsers respond to this.

More on Day 1 after the break.One last thing that I heard mentioned quite a few times in relation to web development, and keeping things clean (ala “Sane Markup”) was Microsoft’s MVC3 framework and Razor engine.  This framework really helps enforce keeping all of the different points of logic of your web application separated.

Microsoft also brought up several, several times their NuGet repository to bring a lot of open source projects in to Visual Studio and your applications through an integrated interface and a constantly updated repo.

Overall, a lot of good stuff coming in the web technologies department, and there are going to be a lot of changes in how web applications are developed using these technologies, and ultimately in how users expect their web applications to behave, look, and feel.