Come get the bits from this year’s MIX

Microsoft’s MIX has not even started and the new bits are already in the wild and waiting for you to come and get them…

The good bag of candies is open, come get what you like:

Silverlight 3 Beta SDK: The Microsoft® Silverlight™ 3 SDK contains online documentation, online samples, libraries and tools for developing Silverlight 3 applications. Usage of the SDK is subject to the SDK License (included in the package).

Silverlight 3 Tools for Visual Studio: This package is an add-on for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 to provide tooling for Microsoft Silverlight 3. It can be installed on top of either Visual Studio 2008 SP1 or Visual Web Developer 2008 Express with SP1, and it provides a Silverlight project system for developing Silverlight applications using C# or Visual Basic.

Expression Blend 3 Mix Preview: announced during the keynote and after blown away demos of all the new features, Blend 3 is shaping its way to become the tool for experience designers, as Bill Buxton stated, that has been always needed and never existed.

ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Final: ASP.NET MVC 1.0 provides a new Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework on top of the existing ASP.NET 3.5 runtime.

And all new and fresh out of the oven things no one new of before:

Microsoft .NET RIA Services March '09 Preview: Microsoft .NET RIA Services simplifies the traditional n-tier application pattern by bringing together the ASP.NET and Silverlight platforms. RIA Services provides a pattern to write application logic that runs on the mid-tier and controls access to data for queries, changes and custom operations. It also provides end-to-end support for common tasks such as data validation, authentication and roles by integrating with Silverlight components on the client and ASP.NET on the mid-tier.

Which have to say it’s the first product offering from Microsoft using the noun RIA as part of it’s name, guess this is a good step towards making RIA into the mainstream, specially nowadays where the competency in this field is somewhat growing with JavaFx joining the party a few months ago.

So go on and play… and make sure you keep coming back for more news.

Update 1: And the goodies keep coming now in the form of a configurable UI controls for Live Messenger, just as a JS Library to integrate with your properties. This means you can add support for you live messenger right in your web properties.

The following is a video that shows how the new toolkit from the Liver Services team works:

Update 2: Just also out of the presses is Expression Web SuperPreview, a companion tool for Expression Web to help you with multi-browser targeting development. Super Preview supports preview from both local as from remote browser, kind of call in the multi platform world that we live on today. Get the bits here and go here to learn more about this release.

Update 3: Web Platform Installer 2 has also been updated and set out free as a beta. From the website it says:

The Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 (Web PI) is a free tool that makes it simple to download, install and keep up-to-date with the latest components of the Microsoft Web Platform, including Internet Information Services (IIS), SQL Server Express, .NET Framework and Visual Web Developer. In addition, install popular open source ASP.NET and PHP web apps with the Web PI.

Now yours for download here.