Seb Lee-Delisle, a self proclaimed Flash ambassador for Brighton (from his blog) has a rather nice write-up of Microsoft’s MIX conference which he was invited to attend last week. You can read his two part summary here and here.
Meanwhile, Tim Anderson, a UK-based journalist who has been tracking both Microsoft’s and Adobe’s RIA-related developments has an article on SilverLight at MIX 07 and a write-up comparing SilverLight and Flex on his blog.
Whilst Microsoft has desires to interact with the design community, both Tim and Seb noted that the majority of attendees (90%+ as far as I could see) were existing .NET developers, many of whom were eager to learn more about SilverLight 1.1 and RIA. It’s great to see so much interest in improving user experiences and the development of Rich Internet Applications from this community – it’s a shame however that they’ll be waiting until the tail-end of 2008 or sometime in 2009 (allowing for some penetration of the SilverLight 1.1 runtime) before they can deliver their applications when they could be doing it today using Flex.
Andrew Shorten's Blog 
You mean that in the Microsoft community there are any designers ? 🙂
Just kidding … I think that MS/.NET developers are very interested in Silverlight more than designers. But for what I understood, Silverlight (and the product’s family behind the player) is also oriented to designers.
Doesn’t Microsoft tell the world that Silverlight is the Flash Killer ?
At the very beginning the success of Flash was given to designers and creative programmers who took ActionScript in its early version to develop amazing things.
So, in my opinion, Microsoft needs designers more than .NET developers 🙂
We’ll see ….