David Boschmans' Weblog

PDC 05: An exciting Day 1

This morning PDC 05 was officially kicked off with the keynote of Bill Gates and Jim Allchin. [Watch it here].

Bill Gates started with a fun video on his recruiting efforts and talked about the industry trends and how they influence the Microsoft platform investments. Next talking point was the enhanced user experience: from HTML and the ATLAS framework to a smart client application illustrated by Office 12, Windows Vista and the Windows Presentation Foundation.
After that Chris Caposella, Vice President Information Worker product management group, started demoing Windows Vista. Some of the cool new features like virtual folders, the sidebar, etc that are present in the Windows Vista build being handed-out at PDC, were shown.

Chris also talked about the IE7 parental control and anti-phishing efforts. IE7 cool features shown were:

• quick tabs: tabbed browsing taken to the next level
• easy printing of web pages: shrink the page to the paper format
• RSS support: auto-detect all rss-feeds being present on the page and subscription

Next was an exciting overview of the new Office 12 features and how the Office System has evolved to become a real server system. The best example of this is the Office 12 and SharePoint integration.
Some killing Outlook features were also demoed:

• creating tasks from a message; a uniform task type for all applications.
• play and view PowerPoint slide decks from within the Outlook message preview window
• rss integration in Outlook; subscribe to an rss feed in IE7 and it shows up in Outlook.
• search box integration
• and many more!

Next on stage was Jim Allchin talking about and showing the next step for the Windows Platform. Jim went through the major building blocks that compose Windows Vista:

• UI:
  • ATLAS: the Atlas Client Script Framework is an extensible, object-oriented 100% JavaScript client framework that allows you to easily build AJAX-style browser applications with rich UI and connectivity to web services.
  • WPF/E (Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere)
• DATA:
  • the LINQ Project, .NET integrated query language
• COMMUNICATION:
  • Infocard: is the code name for a WinFX component that provides the consistent user experience required by the identity metasystem
  • WCF or the Windows Communication Foundation: a Web services technology and unified API that helps developers and organizations overcome the challenges of building connected systems both within and beyond the enterprise 

All this brand new stuff was turned into reality by Don Box, Chris Anderson, Scott Guthrie and Anders Hejlsberg. They integrated all of this new technology into an end-to-end scenario. They even leveraged VirtualEarth. Amazing!

All in all I very much liked the keynote and I'm pretty excited on these new technologies. The keynote very well  illustrated the deep investments in Windows Vista, Office 12, and other technologies that developers can use to build great applications and solutions that enable “The Next Step” of computing. It should be clear to everyone that the Office developer story becomes very important and that it will remain important in the next years. I know some people who will be very happy with this! ;-)

After the keynote I picked up "the goods" which include the Windows Vista build 5219. This pre-beta2 build was used during the keynote for all demos and I'm being told that it runs pretty stable for being a pre-beta 2 build. Peter is currently installing it ...:-)

After lunch I attended the session "VSTS: Behind the scenes of Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server" which provided an overview of the TFS capabilities. An often requested demo - how to achieve continuous integration in VSTS? - was shown to illustrate the capabilities of TFS.

Second session of the day was the most interesting: "Choosing the right presentation technology: Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Forms, ASP.NET, IE and more.
The session covered all the existing and upcoming technologies - ASP.NET Atlas, WPF, Windows Forms - that could be used to show something on the screen and how they integrate with eachother. Amazing demos too!

Tonight there's the PDC reception and afterwards there's a party at the White Lotus. See you there!

pdc05

[Updated] Some more links on the technologies mentioned above: Atlas, LINQ and the New user interface for Office 12 core applications