Rob van der Meijden

Bill Gates started the Key note at the PDC 2005 with al little movie where he shows the recruitment procedure at Microsoft. LOL … Bill Gates acting in his younger years with a cool dude besides him, even a dancing part … picture a dancing Mr. Bean … you have it … didn’t work … take a dancing nerd ... LOL

Very fast demo of Microsoft Vista … it’s just too much to write down, you’ll have to see it … one thing though; within our company we need more graphical designers to do this right (probably working with Macromedia right now). Jim Allchin gave a demo of a tool within Windows Vista which monitors the usage off all programs and collects this information. This information is used next times you start Windows and this tools starts loading most used programs, so when you start-up you’re programs there is a performance boost. Another nice feature; you can use use you’re USB memory stick to extend the memory of Widows Vista.

Office 12 with all its new features are based on the fact: “Features that users want are already in the current versions but they cannot find it” So they changed the UI (especially the toolbar and menu part) to let the user find the features much easier. And a lot of predefined set of

They showed us a very nice framework for reading date out of you're database, no more T-SQL, stored procs and creating a datalayer … No, just add some attributes above you're classes and fields which represent a table in the database and query them in C# code. Ready to go … very nice … they also gave is a name LINQ

Microsoft has assigned a team to create a real life demo using all new technologies. In this case Avalon for the UI a WCF for the communication, named Max (like my son, how nice). “Real life” not for my line of business. Anyway it worked pretty well with a very slicky interface. 

One minor issue at de keynote, Jim Allchin showed the i-mate JASJAR which we all could have form only $149 dollar in stead of $1000. Sold out under 2 hours, even before the key-note was ended. What was there stock … 100 … Look at the bright side, I can spend $149 dollar to something else ….