Watching the PDC live webcast

Okay, my manager didn't allow me to go to the PDC, but the fun (the keynote by Bill Gates and Jim Allchin) was live on the internet and I watched it front to back. Of course a whole lot is blogged about it, but here are my highlights.

I must say I was both disappointed and pleasantly suprised.

Disappointmoints first:

I had expected news around how you build and design an Avalon application (sorry, I mean WPF-based application ;-). Clemens Vasters is very right when he notes that the current developer experience is not exactly 'super easy'. I'd rather say it is very non-intuitive and a big burden to get started playing around with it if you only have a few evening hours to spare. That needs to be improved quickly.

One thing I saw in a WPF-demo particularly interested me. A demo was given about how you can completely do the redesign of your application, without changing any code. That goal was reached by completely relying on the databinding facilities of WPF. That is a major thing. Every time I try to build a Forms-application that has a richer interface than the standard grid control, I always get to a point where I need to write code to generate a control hierarchy. That code is very hard to maintain. I think WPF makes this extremely easy.

The second little disappointment was in the Office 12 space. I had hoped to see a demo of the great possibilities the new file formats give you. I can imagine a word document that goes through a certain workflow scenario in which it gets enriched automatically with content and metadata. The only thing that was shown in this space was the fact that SharePoint vNext does store PowerPoint presentations as individual slides. Which makes it incredibly ease to create a new presentation by mixing and matching existing slides. That is cool. However, nothing was mentioned about the enabling technology and whether you can use the same trick elsewhere. I can imagine you build a contract word document by mixing and matching paragraphs the same way.

There was a lot on RSS. I hoped to hear a vision on personalized RSS feeds. I would love to have a RSS feed on my email inbox, but I want that to be secure. I think the identity work in the InfoCards space will enable that and hoped that this step was announced. But I can understand InfoCards need to be a step further to enable those scenarios.

The last disappointment was how IE7 tabs were shown as a unique innovation. They can't be serious! He really said, look if I control-click a new tab is opened. DUH. The interesting innovation was the screen where you could see thumbnails of all opened webpages and you could close the ones you no longer needed from there. And IE finally is able to print a webpage on paper correctly. Finally.

The hot news for me:

I was suprised by the amount of Vista exposure during the keynote. I hadn't expected that since I thought most of it was known already. What I found cool in this space?

• The sidebar in which you can plug gadgets that inform you on 'real-time' data. What was particularly interesting is that they showed the SideShow, a mini-screen on a laptop (but I guess it could also be on something else that is connected) that gives you easy access to your gadgets. The cool thing is that most gadgets don't need the laptop to be turned to be active. Very handy.
• IE7 RSS Support. I know, it was out in the open for a while, but to me it was the first time I saw it work. Looked very handy to me.
• BillG and JimA gave a little inside view on the roadmap where I thought two vision statement where particurarly interesting
• The next big step for WinFS after the upcoming version is integrating the desktop and server file system. I think this is key to get real information integration in an organization.
• Server computing should work towards the same integrated experience that we already know on the desktop. Workflow, Content Management and Search (among others) should be able integrate much more easily than it does today. Connected Systems are about how to Analyse, Access, Share, Find, Automate and Publish Information
• Searching and thumbnails of opened applications are available everywhere in Vista. If you Alt-Tab you see thumbnails of the selected program, same counts when hovering over program icons on the taskbar. Very handy.
• Vista can auto-optimize you workspace. One very interesting innovation was Superfetch. Superfetch starts preloading often-used DLL's based on your usage patterns. This means the DLL's are in memory which greatly improves startup time of those application.
• Document metadata is part of the Explorer experience. You can set metadata by dragging documents in the explorer. Documents can also be grouped by metadata, even across folders. Very nice.

The Office 12 demo was very interesting:

• The new UI is very cool. A lot on that is written elsewhere, I won't redo that here.
• PowerPoint allows for rich bullet templates. Like, putting all you bullets on a arrow or in a circle. Nice.
• SharePoint vNext has a recycle bin. Finally.
• A new todo bar in Outlook that shows unread mail, tasks among other info
• Interesting innovation but the next one is very cool. SharePoint and Outlook will both support RSS out-of-the-box. SharePoint publishes RSS, Outlook has a reader. What you can do is subscribe to a documents library RSS feed from Outlook and that way take the documents offline on the road. I think that the RSS-enablement of both tools opens up a whole lot of possibilities on information integration.
• Microsoft CRM will be RSS-enabled to allow information subscription
• Outlook allows for attachment previewing within the preview pane. What is nice is that this also works for Infopath documents. Which allows for forms that are directly shown inside Outlook, which makes it very easy for users to respond to those forms.

LINQ/WCF/Atlas/WPF/InfoCards/RSS demo

• This was the coolest demo I have seen in a long time. Four key architects wrote an application on stage that queried the processes on the machine, enhanced with database data, all strong-typed with LINQ (Language Integrated Query). LINQ was also used to write out RSS (via it's XML capabilities). This RSS was made available via a couple of WCF endpoints (added when necessary). Firstly, this endpoint was consumed via Atlas over JASON (didn't know that protocol). Same thing with WPF, in which the communication was secured via InfoCards. The strong point in the whole demo was how quickly they integrated all these technologies together. Sure, it was pre-thought of, but still, most of the key code was written on stage and it worked like a charm. It really gave me the feeling that application development is taken to the next level with these technologies.