The MIX07 conference this past spring in Las Vegas was sold out. Fortunately, Microsoft has spun-off a few regional REMIX conferences for those who couldn't make the Vegas conference.

Earlier this week was REMIX07 Boston, which also sold out, though the sell-out # was a bit lower at 700.

One of the really interesting things about this event was that it was, for the most part, orchestrated by the MSDN Developer Evangelists in the East. Most visible to me in this task were Peter Laudati, Bob Familiar, Andrew Duthie, while many more DE's (including the MSDN Presenters) also were critical in pulling this off. My hat's off to all of you.

Besides getting a bunch of us local yokels (and regional user group leaders to present) they had some big name fantastic speakers at this event - Rocky Lhotka, Jeff Prosise, Fritz Onion, Brad Abrams, Molly Holzschlag, Richard Hale Shaw and a closing Keynote by Lou Carbone, who is a bit of a legend in the User Experience world..

There was also a really interesting presentation on the work that MIT is doing with RFID tags in MIT's AutoID labs. Since these guys are all over REST, although HTTP's performance is sluggish compared to transmitting over TCP, I told the speaker, Prof. John WIlliams, that he really ought to take a look at Astoria and invited him to poke his head on my Astoria session later that afternoon. (I couldn't help myself!)

I also had the good fortune of being the only other person hiding out in the speaker room with Lou Carbone and had a great chat with him.

On the first night there was a party for all attendees sponsored by PhizzPop, "a new part of MIX Online that lets agency designers and developers interact, share, and show off their stuff" built on top of Community Server (thanks to Dave Burke, a Vermont based CS consultant, for that insight).

If it hadn't been for the party, I would barely have seen anyone (admittedly I spent all of Tuesday morning in my hotel room because I had had some new ideas about Astoria pop into my head while I was trying to sleep the previous night).

I was happy to see a big crew of pals had come up from Florida including Dave Noderer and Stan Schultes. Rocky Lhotka was there (who I was happy to hear had spent the weekend enjoying the beautiful fall color we are having in New England) and I met Miguel de Icaza (who lives right in Boston) as well as Molly, who is, as expected, a riot. Then of course lots and lots of folks I had spent the prior weekend with at Code Camp. Russ Fustino posted a slew of fun pictures from the party! That's where I stole the picture from. Thanks, Russ.

Stan Schultes, me, Miguel de Moonlight Icaza

At lunch on Tuesday, I was happy to spend some time with Carl Franklin (and here about his fantastic birthday party this summer which I had to miss... go ahead, rub it in Carl... and his recent trip to Bulgaria for this year's DevReach conference), followed by an appearance by Patrick Hynds. As I walked into the room where I was about to do my Astoria session, there was NYC-ite Andrew Brust finishing up a talk on the very cool PopFly. I was even more surprised to see Asli Bilgin, also a New Yorker, who I haven't seen for years.

One of the more interesting things I saw at REMIX was StandOut from ElectricRain, a whole new way of creating presentations using very cool software that was built in WPF (and Microsoft has noticed!). The company has a heavy background in Flash, but was unable to realize their ideas for this software in Flash and picked up WPF when it was still called Avalon, buggy as hell and without much guidance or documentation. Now they have a fabulous application and I want to throw away all of my powerpoints. The best way to get a clue of what this product is all about is to watch one of their walkthrough demos. What was even nicer for me is that, though the company is based in Boulder, their Product Design Director lives right here in Vermont. (Look for Nick to do a presentation at a future VTdotNET meeting.)

Here is a a Technorati page to find lots of blog posts about the event.

Like Dave, I got to enjoy the very nice hotel gym, but it was after a sleepless night and since I walked in there without water, a towel or my iPod, I made it through only 15 sweaty minutes on the elliptical before I was bored out of my mind.