Today's General Session

 The general session today was given by Eric Rudder and Steven Sinofsky. I’ve already blogged about the Expressions announcement, so I’ll just hit some of the other highlights.

 

• Eric announced the Windows Workflow Foundation.
• VSTA, Visual Studio Tools for Applications allows you to embed .Net language code hooks into your application to allow for extensibility. Think like VBA in the current office package. They showed a version of AutoCad - AutoDesk, that was using this already.
• They have provided the mechanism to embed the VSTA IDE directly into the application if you want so your end users can write their custom code in your tool and not require VS.Net.
• Dave Mitchell from UGS demonstrated the ability for CAD type applications to share their actual mathematical representations of objects via XAML and a zip like package. This data could then be easily rendered in business applications to get feedback from people outside the engineering department. The key being the actual object from CAD is shared, and not just a graphical representation of it.
• All PDC attendees will get a free copy of SQL Server 2005 when it ships (I think I already mentioned that).

 

Steven Sinofsky was the second speaker and was the VP over Office. As most of my work doesn’t revolve around office and automation of office I took the chance to head out to my first session of the day and take a walk around the expo hall when it opened.