When I attended the Mix n Mash 08 event in Redmond a few weeks ago, there were a number of things that whetted my appetite for attending MIX08 in March.

1) I asked Scott Guthrie if there will be anything new shown at MIX08 that none of us has seen before that will shock us and he said "yes". That may even be worth the price of admission!

2) Bill Gates described MIX as Microsoft's most important event for developer technology. Here are a few key quotes from the transcript of our conversation with him:

You know, MIX has become a great event for us, and I'm certainly in a lot of meetings where we're developing neat new stuff, and people say, well, will it be done by MIX or why don't you hold that till MIX. So, along with the PDC, which is more just the basic platform type things, I'd say MIX is our most important event for what we're doing in terms of developer technology.

Silverlight is a big deal for us, and MIX will be a huge milestone in terms of the feedback we've got, and the new things we're doing there, that we're pretty excited about that and making that both richer and broadening the set of devices that that connects to, and ourselves having our key applications take advantage of that in a pretty rich way.