Windows Vista
Since I joined Microsoft Belux last year I've been thinking about moving my blog to MSDN. But ever since I didn't really saw the added value of moving my blog as both sites are using the same platform:
CommunityServer. But since a couple of weeks I've heard a lot of very positive feedback on the recently deployed 2.0 version of
CommunityServer that powers the
MSDN and
TechNet blogger sites. So far the experience is far better than on DonNetJunkies. Today I finally decided to move my blog to
http://blogs.msdn.com/davbosch/. I want to thank
Donny for hosting my blog since August 2004.
So please subscribe to my new blog on the MSDN blogs:
Thanks for reading my blog and I hope you will continue to do so at http://blogs.msdn.com/davbosch/default.aspx!
This week I've been working hard on the agenda for the Developer & IT-Pro Days 2006 in Belgium. This year's Dev & IT-Pro Days take place the 7th and 8th of March in the ICC in Ghent. This technical training event offers all attendees a combination of practice oriented information and in-depth technical training sessions.
Since yesterday all sessions and most of the abstracts can be found on-line. Thanks to Wim for that!
Take a look at the list of great speakers that will be covering all these topics and please don’t hesitate to provide us now with some great feedback on the agenda. Only the attendees will benefit from this, as we still have some time to tweak things.
Developer & IT-Pro Days 2006 – The Connected Generation
Why attend?
- Technical education: During the two-day technical event, experts will demonstrate the different aspects of our platform and how networks and applications can be created, deployed and maintained. It is a technical event and not a marketing event. Participants will go home with new technical knowledge that they can apply immediately in their daily job.
- Technology Evaluation: Besides diving deep into the current products and technologies, attendees will also get a hold of information that helps them prepare for the future. Systems, applications and technologies are constantly evolving. Be prepared to face the future.
- Community and Networking: Grab the opportunity to educate and consult, to take advantage of peer-to-peer learning opportunities. Network with your peers; talk with them about the challenges that we’re facing at in IT. Check out the Belgian user groups and join them if they cover topics of your interest. The Developer & IT Pro Days is an excellent event to expand your network and to leverage the developer and IT professional community.
- International and national top speakers: Just like on the previous events, we have the pleasure to present a number of international and national high quality technical experts and speakers in their specific area of expertise.
When and where?
Who should attend?
- IT professionals
- System architects
- Network administrators
- System administrators
- Information Workers
- Software developers
- Software architects
- Database Administrators
- Web Developers
- Academics
Registration
- Register now. The first 400 persons to submit their registration will get a Microsoft Press Book for free.
Partners of Microsoft in this event can be found on http://www.microsoft.com/belux/nl/devitprodays/default.aspx#partner
More info on the Developer & IT-Pro Days 2006 can be found on http://www.microsoft.com/belux/nl/devitprodays/default.aspx.
See you there!
WCF (Windows Communication Foundation / “Indigo”) and WF (Windows Workflow Foundation) have announced Go Live licenses, which allow customers to use the January Go Live releases of WCF and WF in their deployment environments.
More information about the Go Live program is at http://msdn.microsoft.com/winfx/getthebeta/golive/default.aspx
More information on this Go Live license and technical resources can be found on
Tim Sneath's blog:
The Vista “where to get the beta” site will also point to the WinFX Runtime January CTP.
Yasser Shohoud points to his WCF Architecture Overview. The article covers the fundamentals (endpoints, behaviors, service and channel descriptions and the WCF Runtime) and the code examples sections provides us with a few short code examples that illustrate these concepts covered in WCF Fundamentals.
This article is a must read for every Indigo/WCF developer! For those amongst us still not familar with WCF, Windows Communication Foundation is the official name for what was formerly code-named "Indigo".
Windows Communication Foundation (formerly code-named "Indigo") is a set of .NET technologies for building and running connected systems. It is a new breed of communications infrastructure built around the Web services architecture. Advanced Web services support in Windows Communication Foundation provides secure, reliable, and transacted messaging along with interoperability. The service-oriented programming model of Windows Communication Foundation is built on the Microsoft .NET Framework and simplifies development of connected systems. Windows Communication Foundation unifies a broad array of distributed systems capabilities in a composable and extensible architecture, spanning transports, security systems, messaging patterns, encodings, network topologies, and hosting models. Windows Communication Foundation will be available for Windows Vista™ (formerly code-named "Longhorn") as well as for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.
[Via Steve Dodson & the Anti-Malware team blog] Microsoft Windows Defender is the new name of the Microsoft anti-spyware technology. As one might have expected the good news is that it's going to be part of Windows Vista. The Windows Security Center in Vista will even be redesigned to detect if an Anti-Spyware application such as Windows Defender is running and operating normally.
Signature updates for Microsoft Windows Defender will be available through the automatic updates of Windows Update.
More info can be found on the Anti-Malware Engineering Team Blog.
Last Thursday Microsoft Belux held its annual Partner Conference in Gent. Theme of the conference was "Going Beyond". Most partners I talked to found the conference very successful and interesting.
Bruno Segers, General Manager Microsoft Belux, kicked off the conference with a great keynote on Microsoft history and how Microsoft will evolve in the next years. After some partner testimonials and some video intermezzo the BG's (Business Group Leads) did a great job explaining what partners could expect from the different Microsoft segments. Whether you talk about infrastructure and security solutions (Michael Kögeler), the applications platform (Stefan Lamberigts), information worker or productivity solutions (Carmen Dubois), Microsoft Business Solutions (Philippe Gosseye) or how Windows Vista will bring clarity to your world (Wim Van Winghe), it was all covered in the BG's overview session and more in-depth in the solution tracks afterwards.
The closing keynote was delivered by Vincent Van Quickenborne, State Secretary for Administrative Simplification, covering the Kafka project with some great examples of administrative simplification. After that it was time for a great party!
In the morning - before the official start of the partner conference - Microsoft organized a number of summits (CPLS / ISV / IW). As track owner for the ISV Community Summit I decided to bring some future and current platform and product-related content. The first session was on the future of our platform and how Windows Vista and Office 12 will increase the ISV productivity. Next to that I gave an overview of some of the opportunities that ISV's can benefit from when using Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 as an integrated application platform. To close the ISV summit, an summary was given of the FY06 partner program and how ISVs could handle the changes.
Throughout the day I received a lot of questions on the MSDN Subscriptions and its levels (that are about to change), Visual Basic 6 to VB.NET upgrades, SQL Server 2005 Express and migration from MSDE, ... I'll address these topics in upcoming posts.
Had also a lot of great feedback from the people who attended the IW Community Summit. One of the presentations that were very well appreciated was the BIWUG-session which covered some Office 12 highlights. Good to see that the community was present for the Microsoft partners!
So, overall, great conference, lots of interesting content, a lot of people and a great networking opportunity. Let's go beyond in FY06!
[Via ZDNet] It looks like Microsoft is planning the release of Service Pack 3 for Windows XP.
Windows XP SP3 will be available sometime next year--after the launch of Windows Vista, which "is the priority for the development teams," according to Microsoft France.
Microsoft has yet to reveal details about the contents of the service pack. Laurent Delaporte of Microsoft France said: "Historically, certain functions of new versions of Windows are integrated in the service packs of previous versions."
Does this mean that the Windows Vista pillars - WPF, WCF and WWF- and other features such as IE 7 will be made available through service pack 3 on XP? And what about integrating these features on Windows Server 2003? To be continued ...
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
Microsoft just published a first version of the Windows Vista User Experience Guidelines.
The goals for these official Microsoft Windows Vista User Experience Guidelines (or “UX Guide” for short) are to:
- Establish a high quality and consistency baseline for all Windows Vista applications.
- Answer your specific user experience questions.
- Make your job easier!
This set of html pages cover:
- What's new in Windows Vista. These articles summarize the new Windows Vista core UI features that you should use in your Windows Vista UI designs, and how they differ from Windows XP.
- The Top Rules, which summarizes the rules that the MSX Design team wants you to follow to create a high quality, consistent Windows Vista UI.
- The Top Guidelines Violations, which lists the most common guidelines violations that the MSX Design team is finding during Windows Vista design reviews.
- And finally, Designing with Windows Presentation Foundation, which gives you an overview of how to take advantage of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF, codename “Avalon”).
Looking at the PDC sessions I know there's lots and lots of this stuff to be announced and shown the upcoming days.
The August 2005 CTP of Acrylic is now available for download.
"Acrylic" (code name) is the professional design program that brings together the richness of pixel-based painting and the performance of editable vector graphics for a more fluid and flexible creative workflow. Create sophisticated designs and graphic elements for your on-screen, web, and print projects.
Besides a lot of bug fixes, performance and stability improvements the The August 2005 CTP has a number of great new features like:
- Support for Alpha Transparency in Clipboard: when copying and pasting either vector or pixel images to the clipboard, Acrylic now includes an alpha channel that can be correctly pasted into Microsoft® Office products, greatly simplifying the insertion of semi-transparent elements into PowerPoint and other Microsoft Office applications.
- XAML export: both vector and raster elements can now be exported to the XAML mark-up language used by Windows Vistatm's underlying Windows Presentation Foundation.
- Pixel Painting Performance: many optimizations to the pixel painting toolset greatly improve performance when working on pixel based images.
- Document specifications for new documents: when creating documents a new dialog allows document settings to be defined, including selecting the default layer as either a vector or pixel layer.
- Document Resizing: document settings can now be changed for existing documents, including dimensions and DPI resolution.
- New Content: A variety of new strokes, bushes, gradients, patterns, and image fills have been added.
- Style List presets: the Style List now includes presets for creating effects, color correction, and graphical treatments.
- Improved UI layout: numerous changes have been made to the palette layout mechanism to correct various usability issues reported by users.
- View Info Display: A new display provides dimension, pixel co-ordinate, and color setting feedback while working directly on the document canvas.
- Vertical ToolBox: a preference has been added to select a vertical orientation of the toolbox, in addition to the default horizontal layout.
Find below some good resources on Acrylic:
[Via the IE Blog] The IE team has made Internet Explorer 7 available for beta testing. Check out the technical overview and the anti-phishing white paper. More info can be found in this IE Blog post.
Please note that this first beta is not intended for broad consumer trial and evaluation.
Today, Windows Vista Beta 1 is being delivered to select Beta testers via the Windows Vista Technical Beta Program, MSDN developer program and Microsoft TechNet.
Software developers can start start building applications for Windows Vista with this release. All developer-related information for Windows Vista can be found on the newly launched MSDN Windows Vista homepage.
The focus of Windows Vista Beta 1 is on the “fundamentals”: security, deployment, manageability and reliability & diagnostics. Windows Vista Beta 1 is primarily an infrastructure release and as it's a beta release it does not contain all of the end-user features. These end-user features will be included in Beta 2.
Developers will be able to leverage their Win32 and .NET Framework development skills to build applications using the full beta 1 of the WinFX Runtime Components, formerly code-named the "