Hello from Las Vegas, where I’m attending the MIX 11 conference. MIX is Microsoft’s biggest event about web and devices technologies, and is a real opportunity to have an eye on what is coming in this area from Microsoft.

Today’s keynote was presented by Dean Hachamovich – Internet Explorer corporate Vice president – and Scott Guthrie – who’s responsible for all development platforms for the .Net framework. The main announcement today was the availability of a preview of Internet Explorer 10, which continues to go in the html and CSS standards adoption and also puts a real focus on performance with it’s hardware accelerated rendering capabilities. Here are the links:

Besides Internet explorer, Scott Guthrie (helped by Scott Hanselman), showed us some demos of WebMatrix, a lightweight development environment targeted to web (ASP.Net MVC and php mainly) and from which you can easily create new application from a lot of open source platforms. We also have seen some demos about the Orchard CMS, developed by Microsoft on top of ASP.Net MVC 3 and another cool demo from Niels Hartvig, founder of the Umbraco CMS, about their Windows Azure support. They have a really great deployment to Azure module which can handle also from the admin the scalability of the platform by defining rules used to upscale the deployment to more servers (or downscale if the traffic becomes lower). This demonstrates again how innovative the Umbraco CMS platform is.

After this first day keynote, I heard the the second day’s keynote will be full of great announcements, so stay plugged for the next post !