PDC 2008: Day 2

The second day keynote switched focus from Windows Azure and the cloud to the desktop releases. There were two separate keynotes:

• Keynote 1: Ray Ozzie, Steve Sinofsky, Scott Guthrie, David Treadwell – on Windows 7, WPF, .NET 4.0, VS2010, Live Framework, Mesh, Office 14
• Keynote 2: Chris Anderson and Don Box – A lap around Azure Services platform

Windows 7

• Both Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 will have the ability to boot from a VHD and also mount a VHD like a normal hard drive. All this will be available from the disk manager.
• Multi touch support in Windows 7 changes everything in the user experience. The new capabilities and APIs shown will change the way developers design their application interface.
• Multi monitor support was enhanced and special support to toggle between displays and projectors was added.
• Remote Desktop allows you now to remote to a machine that has multiple monitors and see all monitors on your multi monitors.
• Windows 7 provides many new APIs but one that caught my eyes was the sensors API. This is a sensor and location platform that provides similar capabilities to what you got on iPhones now on your PC. We even got the SDK along with a cool accelerometer that looks like a board and plugs through USB to start developing and playing with this technology.
• Combined start bar, taskbar and quick launch.
• Live thumbnails on the taskbar.
• “Jump lists” which provide great functionality to launch your application in a specific mode or with a specific file you worked on.

.NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010

• The IDE was rewritten in WPF. This allows very nice UI capabilities and also provides out of the box support for multi monitor.
• Integrated support for jQuery which can also be added today for VS 2008
• VS 2010 and .NET 4 CTP is available for download today.

Office

Office added light-weight versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote that are accessible through the Web. They provide less functionality but the same UI as the thick client applications so you get the same user experience across platforms.

After lunch we received “The Goods”. This is the 160 GB USB drive that has all the new bits that developers can play with. It has Windows 7, Windows 2008 R2, VS2010 and more. A lot of installs and VPC images to play with for the next month

Last night we also had the attendee party in Universal Studios. As usual, Microsoft closed the park exclusively for the conference attendees and across the park you could get free food and drinks. The special thing this time was that Universal transformed the park to a huge Halloween party. Universal’s “Scream Team” designed haunted houses, scare zones and across the park there were hundreds of street performers disguised as monsters, zombies etc to scare everyone . It was a lot of fun!