Microsoft on Monday begins its MIX07 conference in Las Vegas, to talk up its graphical application design and Web development strategies.The company officially declined this week to elaborate further on specific revelations planned for the conference. But it is already known that a beta release of the company’s Silverlight technology, formerly called Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere, is planned for release at the show. Silverlight is a browser plug-in expected to rival Adobe’s Flash technology for graphical presentations and multimedia. Microsoft at the event is expected to reveal plans to offer some source code to Silverlight via open source. Adobe this week, meanwhile, announced it would open-source its Flex SDK for Web development, enabling developers to make modifications to it. A quick look at the session agenda for MIX07 reveals topics such as AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), Amazon Web services and one session questioning whether ASP.Net and PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) can get along. The company’s Expression design tools line, Visual Studio development platform and LINQ (Language Integrated Query) technologies also will get attention. Ray Ozzie, the creator of Lotus Notes and now chief software architect at Microsoft, will give a keynote presentation at MIX07. Despite Microsoft’s tight-lipped approach of late, this has not stopped speculation by Miguel de Icaza, vice president of the developer platform at Novell, from making his own guesses about the show in his blog. De Icaza is perhaps best known as one of the authors of the Mono platform, which enables .Net applications to run on Linux. Among other predictions, de Icaza forecast a version of Silverlight for Linux and an announcement about a dynamic language runtime. But he acknowledged his predictions were just that – guesses. “I have no idea what they are gong to be announcing,” de Icaza said in an interview on Friday afternoon. Microsoft declined to comment on the blog. Software Development