MIX is on at the moment in Las Vegas, and Microsoft is really showing off all of the cool things coming this year.

The big focus of MIX10 is of course, Windows Phone 7. Now this is a developer & designer conference, so the focus is on how to use Silverlight and XNA to make apps and games (respectively) for what is turning out to be a pretty cool phone.

At the time of writing you can grab the latest Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools, which includes:

• Visual Studio 2010 Express RC
• Windows Phone 7 Add-in for VS2010
• XNA Game Studio 4.0 CTP (Which sits on top of VS2010 Express)
• Windows Phone 7 Emulator (DX10 capable card required for hardware emulation)

Those are all of the tools you will need to get started developing apps that you will be able to sell to WP7 users. There are some pretty cool things in there (*cough*XNA*cough*) already, but if you are thinking “Hey this is a designer conference, where are the designer tools?!” well fear not, MS has also released a preview of Blend 4, which has a ton of cool new features, and of course supports development for Windows Phone 7. You can read more about the Blend 4 preview at Christian Schormann’s blog.

IE9

The next version of Internet Explorer is coming fast, and the real focus this release isn’t on little social add-ons like WebSlices or Accelerators – instead this time they decided to focus on speed and standards. We all know IE has lagged quite a bit in the past when it comes to speed and standards (although they’ve really improved recently). IE9 is set to take this to a new level, with a focus on HTML5 support, and leveraging the resources in your computer to make the browser run faster.

For those who are technically minded, the browser now uses DirectWrite and Direct2D to make the GPU help out in rendering those webpages; and JavaScript is now compiled in the background on a separate core (where possible) to help accelerate those JavaScript intensive sites.

If you want to try this out for yourself, Microsoft has released an in-progress Platform Preview of IE9 to the public. Of course this is incomplete, and it is just the rendering engine, so you won’t find any address bar or your usual back/forward/refresh/home buttons – however you can use this to see how far IE9 has come since IE8.

Finally CSS3 rounded borders! (also animated)

So where can I get it all?

Everything you need for Windows Phone 7 can be found at http://developer.windowsphone.com/

You can find the IE9 preview at http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/