Jelle Druyts

Introduction

The keynote for this year's PDC traditionally started off with a roadmap of the Microsoft platform from the times of yore. In waves of 10 years, we received new foundations to build upon:

• In 1975, the software industry really took off as a consumer-oriented market.
• In 1985, there was MS-DOS and the PC that we could take for granted.
• In 1995, Windows '95 established the new GUI capabilities that we still use today.
• In 2005, we can really depend on the internet, .NET, XML and WebServices to build connected applications.

Windows Vista

The keynote went on to talk about the three C's of Windows Vista: Clear, Confident and Connect. Things that caught my attention in those areas were:

Clear

• The ALT-TAB window looks much nicer, with live previews of the windows in a sort of carroussel mode.
• You can also get a very nice 3D view of the open windows.
• If you hover over a taskbar item, you get a nice little live preview of the associated window (a bit like the little inline Windows Media Player toolbar).
• Search is embedded everywhere, also in the Start Menu, where you can quickly filter all items collected from your start menu, your applications, your favorites, ...
• A virtual folder in Windows Explorer is actually just a persisted query stored in an XML file, so you can actually open the virtual folder in notepad and see the XML.
• The sidebar is back! I heard some rumors that it would disappear but it's there and still looking as nice as before. The individual panels on it are now called "gadgets" (I don't think that was how they were called before.)
• There's also a little something called "Sideshow", which looked kind of like a PDA built into the case of a laptop where you get quick access to your email, calendar, ... without booting your laptop.

Confident

• There's built-in support for Parental Control, so you can define which games can be played by who for example.
• A lot of work has been put into anti-phishing. For example, there's a new Dynamic Protection Service, which blocks websites which have been marked as phishing sites. You can easily mark sites as phishing, so they will be blocked for everyone automatically; you can also request to unblock sites you believe are falsely blocked. A team is actively maintaining the list, so if they can keep this up-to-date, it could be a viable solution to the problem.

Connect

• IE7 supports tabbed browsing, as we already knew. The pretty cool extra feature is that you can get a PowerPoint-like slide overview of all your open windows and manage them through there.
• IE7 has built-in support for discovering RSS feeds and subscribing to them. The only problem I have with it, is that it heavily uses the orange XML icon we all know now, but I wouldn't want this to become too mainstream. XML does so much more than RSS that it's just stupid to use it as a "marketing icon" for it. Why not just use an orange RSS icon?
• Microsoft is also anticipating RSS to be used for much more than just subscribing to feeds: businesses will depend on a syndication format more and more as they connect to their partners and suppliers. One example was the new version of their CRM solution, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, which uses RSS to let a user subscribe to changes in the backend CRM system.

Office 12

After touring Windows Vista, Office 12 was next up. The target of Office has always been to "Get Better Results Faster" and there sure seem to be a lot of productivity enhancements. As a fun fact, Word 1.0 had 100 commands (in the menu bars and toolbars), Word 2003 has over 1500! So with that in mind, we basically got a quick tour of Word, Excel and PowerPoint running under Vista and it truly looks wonderful.

Windows Vista and Office 12 are both scheduled for release the second half of 2006, so that's getting pretty close already. I'm actually very much looking forward to getting all this power, so I might start really using Windows Vista as my main OS. I'll keep you posted if it works out

Pillars Of Longhorn

In the second part of the keynote, Jim Allchin came out to revisit the four pillars of Longhorn as they were originally set out at the PDC two years ago (Indigo, Avalon and WinFS on top of a common Core). They still seem to be in the current version of Vista although, for a long time, I thought they were gone: Indigo and Avalon were backported to Windows XP SP2 and Windows 2003, and WinFS seemed to be postponed to Longhorn Server. Here's how they look today:

Core

• The security system has been adapted so that users can more easily run in least-privilege accounts.
• SuperFetch is a service that monitors your application usage over time (seconds, hours, days, ...) to see which applications you use most and pre-loads them so they start up much faster.
• If you stick in a USB drive, the system will notice this and start using it as extra RAM. Funky!
• Another attempt has been made to reduce the number of reboots by 50%. In fact, it seems they can now shut down part of the system to replace dll's while the rest of the system keeps running.

Presentation (formerly Avalon)

• They've officially announced the Atlas technology, which is basically an AJAX framework integrated into ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005.
• The Windows Presentation Foundation consists of both the engine (allowing applications to run on screen real estate varying from devices to laptops to 21" screens to wall-sized video screens) and the framework (the managed classes you can use to build your application).
• Newly announced is WPF/E, which stands for Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere. This is a lightweight stripped subset of the WPF runtime for use on devices, and is based on XAML and JScript (so no support for C# or other managed languages to code your application in).

Communication (formerly Indigo)

• Relatively new to the Windows Communication Foundation (for me anyway) is InfoCards, which is a federated claims-based identity system. Important to note is that the OS manages all your identities and use one type of window and thus one user experience to log you on to different remote systems.
• Another feature shown is People Near Me (PNM), which seems to have locality-based information about the people you know.

If you think both these features seam a little vague, I can't blame you: they weren't really explained very much yet and I'm not sure what they do exactly or how to use them (but there will be plenty of sessions to explain later this week).

WinFS

Actually, this part wasn't covered today, so I'm assuming the "Windows Storage Foundation" (wild guess on the future official name) will still only appear in the Longhorn Server timeframe.

Lap Around Vista

By far the coolest new feature that was announced today is LINQ, or .NET Language Integrated Query. This means you can write SQL-like selects with filtering and sorting as first-class citizens in the C# language. I'll definitely be spending time exploring this feature but in short, it means that you can query any object that implements IEnumerable<T>. Look at Dan Fernandez's blog for more info on LINQ and a code sample. Really, really cool!

Another surprise was the return of ObjectSpaces (once again). This time, using this long-awaited Object/Relational Mapping framework looked very similar to XML serialization in some way: you can decorate your types with attributes that define their mapping onto the database and you're pretty much done.

To conclude, Don Box, Anders Hejlsberg, Chris Anderson and Scott Guthrie came out to run a lap around Vista. The demo started with Anders Hejlsberg building a LINQ query doing a cross select of the currently running processes with an ObjectSpaces-fronted database containing process description. So that was one query, in native C#, that did an in-memory join between objects and the database in a very easy and recognizable format.

After that, Don Box exposed this information as an RSS stream through an Indigo service. A custom PoxBinding stripped off the SoapEnvelope at the top and as such, just doing an HTTP/GET on the service returnd a valid RSS stream, which was consumeable from IE7 out of the box.

To go even further, Scott Guthrie made ASP.NET consume this feed through an Atlas client, which means that it was queried asynchronously and with a pretty slick UI.

Chris Anderson concluded by showing the new Avalon rendering in action to show the items in the feed through fancy 2D and 3D views with minimal amounts of code and XAML.

All in all, this was a very impressive demo, although some parts were obscure and highly customized (the PoxBinding, the special plumbing to consume the Indigo service from JScript, some of the XAML formatting, ...).

Wrap-up

At the very end, Hillel Cooperman showed us a demo application called Project Max that was built to showcase all these different components: it's a photo-sharing app that you can actually use and download at the Project Max Homepage. Looks good!

As a sidenote, the live transcript that was running while the speakers were talking was pretty cool, especially the fact that the person typing the transcript was pretty fast but apparently not very technical. While trying to keep up with the speaker, things like WinFS were consistently transcribed as WinFX (understandeable but critical mistake in this case), RSS became RSF and lots of other small mistakes. But the funniest one was where "things like RSS" was transcribed as "things like our asses"

Anyway, that pretty much concludes the keynote. A great start for a promising conference!