The Irish Microsoft Technology Conference (IMTC 2007) was held in Cineworld Dublin yesterday. Not quite the same setup as MIX ‘07 in Las Vegas but it was great venue for a conference, big screens, comfy chairs and Ben & Jerry’s. Three screens held presentations simultaneously so we only got along to a few. Unsurprisingly, a quick hands-up poll suggested that the vast majority of attendees were .NET developers, and that not many non-MS folks had come along.

Tim Sneath was first up with two presentations covering Silverlight 1.0 and Silverlight 1.1 the full titles being “Rich Web Experiences with Silverlight and Javascript for Developers” and “Building Silverlight Applications using .NET”. Tim, like all the other Microsoft evangelists, keep both talks interesting by mostly scripting demos on the fly. Very interactive including some debugging using Firebug on Firefox. Perhaps unsurprisingly, IE7 was noticeably quicker than Firefox for the demos.

Carrie Longson gave a presentation titled “Desiging the Ultimate Experiences with Expression Studio”. It was absorbing to watch a designer at work particularly for developers who often don’t get to see how it all comes together (using Expression tools).

Steve Marx talked about “Exploring AJAX Patterns” but particularly looking at ASP.NET and AJAX together. Steve was quick to point out that the X (for XML) part of AJAX is more often than not ignored then proceeded to work through a juggling demo highlighting the asynchronous aspects in particular.

Microsoft announced Silverlight earlier this week, to general acclaim.

What’s not obvious from some of the coverage thus far, however, is that the platform demoed at Mix07 will ship in two parts: Silverlight 1.0, to be released sometime this summer; and Silverlight 1.1, to be released at some point thereafter. In the keynote (NB: Windows Media Player link), Scott Guthrie, GM of the Silverlight team, refers to this merely as “Beyond Summer 07.”

It’s the 1.1 release (given that it seems something of a quantum leap over even v1.0, they could almost refer to it as Silverlight 2.0 - and, who knows, they might do, yet) which contains the .NET Runtime support which, in turn, might (finally!) consign Javascript-as-a-general-purpose-programming-language to the dustbin of history.

If Silverlight (or something like it/better than it) takes hold, then I can imagine a time when you simply will not be able to convince a recent CS graduate of just how pointlessly difficult programming the Web once was.