PDC Day One Keynote

June 14, 2008 (Last Modified: June 15, 2008)

Wow, what a long day. Rushed through breakfast and hiked the quarter mile stretch to the keynote room (or at least it felt that far away). Found a decent seat for the keynote. The talks were primarily by Bill Gates and Jim Allchin. While listening to Gates was interesting, it wasn’t as good as the Vista/Office 12 demo that another Microsoft employee gave during the keynote (his name was Chris something, but I didn’t write that down).

They asked that no laptops be used during the keynotes, so I had to scramble for some paper I was carrying and even ended up using the back of my name badge for notes.

Here are some things from Bill’s talk and the demo that Chris gave:

Bill talked about the Windows Server System, which is part of the Connected Systems initiative. This is linking the database, BI, Portal data and such all through an interconnected server system. The analogy was given that when the office products started interoperating productivity was improved and a strong platform was created. The Server System is the same idea, but it is interoperability between your server products.
In the Vista demo we saw something called the SideBar and the SideShow. The Sidebar was pretty much Konfabulator baked into the OS. Instead of Widgets they called them Gadgets. Check out http://www.microsoftgadgets.com for more info on this. SideShow was a smaller view into data on the PC; for example they showed a laptop that had a small external screen on the top of the machine (the lid if you will, much like the external screens on flip phones). This provided some quick access to calendar, contact and third party information such as Expedia. Some of the features required the machine to be on, such as listening to music, but others could be used with the machine powered down, like the calendar stuff.
Vista will support Parental Control of desktop applications directly from the OS. This used ESRB ratings to help set controls up on an application level to keep your kids safe.
They have added several anti-phishing mechanisms into IE7 to help be alerted to when some site is suspicious or a known malicious site. It even provides a mechanism to report suspicious sites.
The tabbed browsing added in IE7 is nice, and is a step up from the preview of it you can get if you install the MSN Search Toolbar. For one thing, there is a view to see a thumbnail of all your open tabs.
The UI in Vista is very “pretty”….that’s all I can say about it. It is very whizbang, but it may be a while before I find I really like it…..maybe if I didn’t actually use the command window as much as I do.
Vista has its own RSS store in which third party applications can pull from to have a centralized store of someone’s subscription list and feeds.
The Office 12 products have an all new menu system. While it still has a lot of the same feel as the original menu system, there is a wealth of new information and options on it. The metaphor is more like tabs where you select what you want to work with and more graphical representations of the operations related to what you select are provided. Again, not sure I like this, but I would have to say that my Mom will probably love it. It makes doing a lot of the really nice layouts and “pretty” work on documents easy. Oh, and you can add your own tabs and options into existing tabs through the extensibility APIs.
Fun fact…the speaker indicated that when talking with people about features for version 12 of office, nine out of ten people gave suggestions for features that already existed, but were buried in the menu system.
Of course, they hyped the fact that the documents are all stored in XML and you have access to getting at these without the giant office object model.
They have a built in document inspector so that you can review a document before “releasing it” and make sure you have removed all the comments, hidden text, etc. Basically the work the “remove data” tool does now.
They have more integration with Sharepoint now. One thing that caught my eye was a new type of document library on Sharepoint that is basically a PowerPoint slide library. You can take specific slides, say of the 3rd quarter sales for your department and post it to your Slide library. Then other people can add that slide from the slide library into their own presentations. Then, if that slide gets updated they will get notified the next time they open their presentation and they can get the newest version of the slide. Pretty slick.
Outlook has had a pretty good working over as well. It has a To Do bar which converges all the tasks you have from OneNote, Outlook, Project Server, etc. into one location. You can flag items to take care of “next week” as they come in and it keeps it all straight for you.
Outlook 12 will also have full RSS support, reading from the central Vista RSS store. Sign up for feeds in IE7 that are auto-discovered for you (nice) and then get the content in Outlook. It can even take the content offline and fetch full articles content from that annoying “excerpt” blog clips you get.

Then Jim Allchin came up and started talking about improvements in the platform. From that I have the following:

Crytek demonstrated a short video of an upcoming game showing some of the graphics capabilities of Vista. All I can say is only a hair away from the Final Fantasy movie. Very nice.
The default in Vista is for users to run as a “Standard User”. The OS is supposed to be optimized to run the majority of the time as a Non-administrator instead of how XP defaults to administrator. They highly recommend you design your apps to do the same.
While they were showing off a new tool called “Superfetch”, which is basically a tool that remembers what applications you work on most and starts pulling them into memory the minute you boot, they showed something that was just truly amazing. He had a graph of the virtual memory being used as Superfetch was pulling things into it after a “cold boot” scenario. He then took a regular USB Flash drive and plugged it in. Vista recognized the drive and automatically added the memory from the drive to the available virtual memory! He then pulled the drive and the OS continued without a hick-up and dropped back down to it’s original memory level. The data on the drive was pass through and encoded for security. Very impressive.
There is more security around processes to protect data. IE7 has a ton of new security features that help keep users from affecting their own data adversely.
Oh, and for Nino, there is a sub-set of the Windows Presentation Framework that will be released for mobile and other devices (based mainly in Javascript I think) called the WPF/E or Windows Presentation Framework Everywhere.
They introduced LINQ, or Language Integrated Query. This was querying across objects, relational data and other sources from your code. This was quite interesting. They were able to write a query that looked somewhat like SQL against the running processed on the box and then “join” that with data from a SQL Table all in one query from C#.
They also talked about DLINQ, which is the basis for some ORM features for the framework.
They also showed how to use LINQ to get the results in XML and very easily created an RSS feed of their results.
They talked about InfoCards, which from what I can tell is the next incarnation of Passport. However, unlike Passport, this is more open to allow for the inclusion of third party authentication providers and much more.
Vista has this idea of “People Near Me” for sharing data peer-to-peer on machines that don’t share the same infrastructure. This seemed similar to the OneNote shared session to me. You start up a session, invite some people who may be near you on a peer-to-peer connection of some sort. Then you can share documents. Note that once the document is shared the other user can make direct changes to it and Vista synchronization services will update all those in the session with the changes.
They then showed some news tuff with Atlas, or the “AJAX” from Microsoft. This was interesting as well, but apparently I ran out of room on my name card to take any more notes.
Don Box, Scott Gutherie and clan came up to give a on stage demo of WPF, WCF, LINQ and some of the new stuff in ASP.Net 2.0.
Jim Allchin also talked about the new HTC Universal device running mobile 5, and stated they were selling them for $149, instead of the $1000+ it will retail for. This was a limited quantity deal and even by the time I snuck out of the keynote to check they were already sold out. Sorry Nino.

I left before the end, about twenty minutes from the end. Three hours in there was more than enough. So much new stuff and that was just the first three hours of the day!