After I got back from the Imagine Cup Accelerator event I just had time to wash some clothes, repack my suitcase, catch up with school and job before me and Hege jumped on the plane back to London and the Designertopia event. This is a new conference Microsoft EMEA is hosting for the first time, targeted at designer and developers. There where two simultaneous tracks, one "creative" and one "technical".

As you can imagine the core focus of the event was on the new tools for building great user experiences that Microsoft is shipping in the coming year. We got a chance to se some really cool demos showing what's possible with Expression Blend and Expression Media. I think one of the coolest sessions was Jon Harris "The Power of Expression Blend for UI design". He basically built an application in Blend in 45 minutes. I think this demo really showed how powerful this tool has become. The new Beta 2 release looks really solid and I can't wait to play some more with it!

The Expression Web Designer also looked really good. Hopefully I finally can get CSS layered layout right!

We where quite a nice gang of Norwegian people attending the conference, so we hade a nice get-together at the Hard Rock cafe Thursday evening.

Hopefully Microsoft will make this an annual event, since I really think it addresses a different audience than the one at events like TechEd and PDC.

Hege Have uploaded some pictures on her Flickr site, so be sure to check them out! You should allso check out Microsofts new "Design Center".