I know I am late to post this, but the second day of PDC was a whirlwind of activity so while I wrote the post, I only just had a chance to publish it. The keynote for day two featured with Windows 7, then moved on to .NET 4.0, Live Framework (Live Mesh) and wrapped up with the Office team showing Microsoft Office 14. There were a ton of things talked about so I will just hit on a few highlights that I liked.
Windows 7
It sounds like Microsoft is going to take it slow with the next version of Windows. They are providing the pre-beta version to all PDC attendees and expect the Beta version to be out early next year. I have those bits now and expect I will be playing with this some. The interest in early feedback stood out to me, so I expect by the time Windows 7 comes out it will have less issues than other Windows versions. Some of the features included the ability to create a Virtual Hard Drive and you can even boot from them, FINALLY. The operating system has several ways to manage multiple monitors. One feature in particular is if you are setup with multiple monitors and open a remote desktop, the remote screen is now multi-monitor as well, very nice. The desktop looked much cleaner, the sidebar is gone and the gadgets look good sitting on the desktop. A little feature that goes a long way is the ability to reorganize the applications in the taskbar, so you don't have to open applications in a specific order anymore, now I know I am not the only person. Some other features to look at are JumpLists and Libraries which I will skip because I want to get on with the other things covered. Bottom
.NET 4.0
Scott Guthrie shared some upcoming WPF news/features, specifically a WPF toolkit which will be available next week that will include some controls, so keep an eye out for that. He demonstrated the Ribbon control which was very easily implemented with minimal XAML, which is part of that toolkit. The other controls he said would be included:
- Ribbon control (repeat)
- Visual State Manager
- DatePicker
- DataGrid
- Calendar
Outside of the toolkit, I really didn't see anything groundbreaking. The ability to leverage Windows 7 features is nice, but expected so I would have preferred to see what is coming from a development perspective. I am sure that other's will disagree, I just thought something else might have been better. Finally, multi-touch support; while cool, doesn't strike me as a line of business application need, but that is a discussion for another time.
Live Framework
This really excited me because I have been using Live Mesh for a while. I was looking forward to hearing more about what the future held for Live Mesh. The Live Framework was announced and it will allow you to easily add Mesh functionality to your applications. This is pretty powerful since you can store information and share it with others. I cannot do it justice here, but I plan to be looking at this in the near future and will try to post as I proceed.
Office 14
The biggest news here is Office Online. This caught me by surprise, I knew Microsoft would do it eventually, but it really looked good.
I could go on an on, but I think I should cut this off before you get tired of scrolling.
