As i mentioned, i'm going to post up all of my notes from the PDC sessions i watch.

Day 1 keynote was about the cloud
Day 2 is all about client technologies

Summary

  • Windows 7 - new UI features, improvements in performance (They demo win7 running on a tiny notepad with 1Gb of ram with ½ the ram still available!)
  • WPF Improvements - RibbonBar control, multitouch. New WPF toolkit released today with visual state manager!
  • Visual studio 2010 will be built on WPF
  • Visual studio - Web.config. Improvement to support set up debug/release/staging config files
  • Live Wave 3 – new “Live Framework” wraps around Live services
  • Live Mesh improvements - Adding support for win mobiles and Macintosh in the next update
  • Office 14 – Is now really integrated into the web with live editing of documents being synced. But now have a fully featured office web, works in IE/firefox and has ribbon bar, looks like same app

Keynote intro video

Keeps showing a new logo of .Net + WPF

Flashing up HEAPS of pretty looking products that are currently using WPF. Roxio, Autocad, blocbuster, etc. nice looking vid clips. Funky music.

Ray Ozzie comes on stage

Talking about what “Personal computing” means. Email, presentation, docs, spreadsheets.

“Without a PC on your desk, what would you do all day?” LOL

As much as we all sit in front of a PC and connect to the net through a web browser. The PC and the web are very separated

How can the web increase the value of our PCs?

We’re all going to have PCs, phones and webs. So how to combine them all to add value.

PC apps are good for: usual rich client reasons. Makes sense to make that app close to the user. By using copy/paste and drag/drop, the users combine all of heir applications. Can manage privacy of files

Web apps are good for: lets us access the world, One common way to access people. The webs sustainable unique value ISN”T the web, it is the ability to enable us all to connect & interact

Phone apps: same advantages as PC apps. Close to users. Always available for spontaneous access, knows your location, time, can quickly take photos/notes

Will advance PC apps in 2 ways: Always have the latest version of windows for us to dev against (Windows 7) & the install base. Will continue to improve the programming model

Advance web: allowing you to create cross browser/platform sites with CSS/ajax. And silverlight. Making web apps installable, offlineable, syncable

Steve Sinofsky comes on stage

Going to show windows 7 and live wave 3 and the integration between the 2

Going to show:

  1. win7 client
  2. Software & services
  3. Transition from windows vista
  4. APIs
  5. Fundamentals
  6. Path to RTM!!!
  7. Call to action

1. Win7

New taskbar

Differnt looking taskbar. Apps are auto grouped into a tiny icon (vista app grouping). But can mouse over to see all the apps like the vista taskbar preview, but it expands out all the apps.

Kind of also gone a bit like OSx. How the apps can sit there not open. But you can click to launch. So combination of taskbar & quicklaunch now.

Can FINALLY reogranise things in the taskbar!

Taking advantage of widescreen, can click and drag & dock a window to be “1/2 full screen” so you can dock 2 apps at once.

“Libraries” the flexibility of folders, the power of search. Looks like a standard folder view. Library locations can be anywhere (USB, other drive, a share on another computer). The search box shows keywords, so you can still search but now has highlighting on the filenames.

Home networking

Connect to the wireless home network. You get a unique PIN. So you can access your other PCs, picture frames, etc. Can share resources on your PC simply (music, etc.)

Media player is now more lightweight (FINALLY) but you can use those same libraries.

Can rightclick on a song, and say “play on a device” to play the song on any device on your network!!! Same with videos, pictures. So you can send media to your picture frames

Device stage. All the device you can access, their capabilities are now all grouped here. (mobile phones, pringers, Zunes, etc.)

When you are at work it auto connects you to the work printer, when you get home it auto connects you back to your home printer

Helps to make your desktop clean, gadgets can now stick onto your desktop.

New customisation with your PCs colour scheme. Colouroful. Combination of background photo with a colour scheme. More customisation options with the glass effect

Has stopped the notification popups “you need new defender updates, etc.” now when you have those mini icons (near the clock), they auto go off into a mini tray to keep it all clean, but then you can say which ones you want to show. All of those notifications are now in an “action frame” so you can read all the messages at once

Showing touch multitouch

HP touchsmart in the market today. How they have “augmented” the experience with touch

Repowered ALL of the mouse commands with touch. So in office 2007, you can now scroll, zoom, etc. just like you can on surface

IE knows about the onscreen keyboard. Can browse around with gestures. Can flick the screen to go forward/back

In win7 folder view, can scroll through.

MSpaint has been upgraded with a new ribbon bar. Can draw in mspaint with multitouch

Official screenshots

http://www.flickr.com/photos/31242879@N00/sets/72157608452379413/

2. Software & Services

Core of windows connects to services. Windows update, etc.

Windows live essentials. Optional/downloadable. Can connect to your own services, or use the live services (e.g. IMAP/POP or hotmail)

Nothing was really said except that more will be shared

3. Transition from vista

They got “LOTS of feedback from people about Vista RTM…………” from blogs and ‘some commercials….’ LOL

Vista SP1 brings it to a level that ppl can use

Readiness of the ecosystem. 95% of computers can now get drivers for vista.

Developers have been asking for “standards”. IE8 implements CSS, acid tests, etc. and released the testing framework they used to help other browsers.

Wordpad can use OpenXML and umm that other one.

UAC……. Yeah. How to help protect people from themselves. Said that they went too far with developers. But despite this, most apps now work well in standard user mode.

Home networking is much nicer. Sharing within a home. Realise that only hardcore people could really setup sharing. When you connect to your home, connect to the PCs, devices. When you are at work, realise you probably don’t want to share your music.

Have been sharing their experiences on the engineering 7 blog (I’ve been enjoying it)

4. APIs

Ribbon UI

Jump lists  (the right click thing on the taskbar)

Libraries (as in the new folder library search thing. To bring in files from multiple computers)

Multi touch, speech

DirectX

Future products with mail, etc. will help bring forward Jumplists and Libraries

They have a massive 42” LCD with multitouch in the conference hall to do collaboration, so that on win7 allows one experience. But there is still the surface

DirectX is been for games. In win7 have extended it to 2D and ‘fine looking text’. It is now the “Modern view of GDI”

Shows a video of Autodesk and how they use touch stuff.

Showing a 3D app (Mud box) which has a lizard in 3D. He is manipulating the model directly through touch. Can still zoom in, pan etc.

Well he says that it is a “more natural and intuitive interface” I don’t agree personally… looks awkward IMHO

5. Fundamentals

Decreased

  • Memory - Decreased the core footprint of a core vista install. Don’t need to turn graphics stuff off to get a bit more performance.
  • Disk I/O  - registry and indexer
  • Power -DVD playback(I/O subsystem rejigged to get longer use), panel, timers(redone to take up less power!)

Increased

  • Speed -faster boot
  • Responsiveness –taskbar. Using less locks and semaphores
  • Scale - now supports up to 256 processors

Shows how a tiny netbook (about the size of an eeepc). Has 1gb of ram. Win win7 boots up, half the ram is still free for use. And this is the current build, plan to drive that down

USB memory sticks. He loses them all the time. Can now use bitlocker on your USB sticks. When you insert a USB stick it will ask for a password. Can use group management to say how ppl can use USB sticks

VHDs. Can now natively mount VHDs. Can create & create a VHD directly in the drive manager

Can boot directly from a windows 7 VHD natively! So when you are developing you can keep on mounting and booting from a VHD and have it rollback for you if you like.

High DPI monitor. Much easier to set/work with it.

Managing multiple monitors. Can now set landscape, orientation, etc.

Improved magnifier…. Can press the start button and ‘+’. Is like a native built in zoomit. Ok it is kind of cool

New ways to connect to external projectors. Hold window key. And hit P. and you can now quickly change to do “Clone”, “display diff on each screen”, etc.

Enhanced remote desktop. If you remote into a computer with dual monitors, it will now support multi monitor and display it on both PCs

LOL can now customise the shutdown buttons default option

Can turn messages off for firewall, UAC, etc.

New UAC control panel. Can now slide to set what level of UAC prompts you want to see.

6. Path to RTM

Prebeta released to PDC attendees.

Beta will be released early next year through MSDN

Beta will have a feedback tool. Whenever you get frustrated win win7, double click and it will take the context of where you are and you can comment on. “Focus isn’t working, etc”

Customer experience improvement program. They look at all the data, resource consumption, do things crash etc. (and they talk about it on the Engineering 7 blog if you haven’t read that yet)

If you just use win7 with the experience improvement collection turned on. That is helping them heaps

“3 years from the general availability of Vista”

7. Call to action

  • Install and use win7 pre-beta
  • Develop for 64-bit
  • Integrate with win desktop (jumplists/libraries)
  • Eval the new APIs
  • Code to standards with IE8
  • Download win live beta from download.live.com (windows live essentials)

Scott Guthrie comes on stage

How can developers take advantage of this.

Can access ribbon, multitouch, search etc. in C++/MFC (pffft anyone still uses that)

Multi core helpers.

.Net .5 SP1 is built into Win7 (40% cold start time improvement on most .net apps)

Streamlining the processs of getting .net onto PCs that don’t have it (is this really relevant anymore? What winPC doesn’t have it)

He jumps into some code

Showing a WPF app which is a photo viewer (he will release the source code in a few weeks)

It is just a standard WPF app, so he now wants to add win7 features

Mainpage.xaml wants to add ribbon by using the new WPFRibbon. Does this by changes <Window> to <WPF:PageRibbon> or something like that

Then adds a <WPF:RibbonGroup> section.

Now has a basic ribbon, with back/forward buttons. Hmm that was easy

Can get the ribbon contextualisation. So get extra tabs to show up when doing something

The ribbonbar is affected by system customisation settings (colour scheme, etc.)

Can add jumplists. So now when he rightclicks the app in the taskbar, gets options to “start a slideshow, etc.”

Can get multitouch stuff into your WPF app. Gestures, etc.

Can do pixel effects on everything easily, so when you click can get an effect like you touch water happening.

Releasing a new WPF toolkit today

  • Datagrid
  • Datepicker
  • Calendar
  • Ribbon
  • And VISUAL STATE MANAGER!!!

.Net 4.0

WPF impreovements in multitouch, deepzoom

Can have clr 2.0 and 4.0 in the same address space

New component model. Managed extensibility framework?

Can dynamically add extensions. Like silverlight apps in clients. (huh I missed this)

Better databinding improvements

VS2010

Visual studio 2010 will be built on WPF

Multi monitor support

Better Test Driven Development experience

Can use the extensibility stuff to add extra functionality into VS2010

He is now going to demo how to build one of these extensibilities.

Can now add new features into the editior.

Going to show how to visualise comments better (showing a standard source file with XML comments everywhere)

The code will go and look over the sourcecode and look for comments. Can now visualise it differently

To register with VS, need to add a new export attribute (text is too small for me to read it)

Then you just drag the .dll into the VS2010 plugin folder

Then no need to restart VS2010, it is now showing the source code in a much nicer way!

OOOH nice, another extensibility thing. He clicks on the bug ID in the source code, and a popup connects to his bug tracker and brings up the details for that bug

Managed extensibility framework will be part of .Net so you can let people extend your own apps this easily.

Some guy from tesco.com on stage

Tesco is the worlds LARGEST grocery shop

Need to make shopping experience better.

They start with a gadget. Gadget shows how many days until your delivery arrives.

Click gadget to launch it. It is now a family calendar and message board

With the calendar they are going to do “meal planning”. Add some meals, then auto adds the ingredients required into the shopping basket

Can browse through recipes, videos of how to cook it. List of ingredients, can click and drag the ingredients you require into basket.

Products you can buy have the nutritional values on it

Hah, he grabs a product that he wants some more of, uses the webcan to screencap the barcode and auto searches and finds it.

Scott back on stage

Going to update web stuff with IE8

Shipped better ASP.Net stuff in SP1 (dynamic data, REST, etc.)

MVC going to be released in a few months

Adding jquery support in Visual studio 2008. With intellisense can download it today from jquery website http://weblogs.asp.net/mikaelsoderstrom/archive/2008/10/27/intellisense-f-246-r-jquery-sl-228-ppt.aspx

ASP.Net 4.0 imprevements

MVC

AJAX

Distributed caching (shipping a new CTP this week)

Javascript, etc.

Web.config. can now setup debug/release/staging etc. and have rightclick support. And deployment improvements

Silverlight 2

Lots of ppl are using it… yay usual marketing stuff

Silverlight toolkit is being released today

Charting is being included. oooh

VS2010 will have a fully improved Silverlight designer. WYSIWYG editor

Just teased they are going to show how to use silverlight OUTSIDE the browser

Graphic and data support improvements coming

David Treadwell comes on stage (about 1hour 40mins in)

He is going to talk about live services. And that they wit in top of Azure

Live services allow identity management

Allows 3rd parties to use the login

Customisation of thee LiveID login screen

Active directory integration

LiveID as an OpenID provider

Hook into the ‘social graph’ of each person. You can now leverage this

Can integrate windows live messenger features into your own website

Geospatial features can be integrated

Uses interoperable standard protocols

11% of total internet minutes are spent on live services

Talking about connectivity between devices.

Want to make it easy to integrate client apps with what happens on the web.

Want to make it easy to connect with people

Anywhere/anytime access to data.

This is why we have live mesh

Live mesh is: Users, devices, applications, data sync

Can be used to help support S+S applications

He is now announcing the “Live Framework” wraps around Live services

Works on PC/Phone/Web

Ori Amiga comes on stage

Showing how to connect into Live framework into a windows app.

Going to add 3 new functionalities.

Going to let it easily access all of his data

Then allow it to synchronise the user settings across mesh

Then tap into the social graph

First he just enumerates his folders in his live mesh by using a foreach(var m in livefx.Mesh.Meshobjects.Folders)

Now all his foldrs are being shown.

Can do a foreah to get all devices Foreach( in  livefx.mesh.devices.entries)

Is now using LINQ to get stuff out of live services

Gee that was REALLY easy

Now he has the app running on 2 PCs. And using mesh synch, is sharing data with the user on the other PC

He updated a photo and saw it get updated automatically on the other PC.

He took a photo on his mobile phone, the phone synced it back to his mesh. Which then went and updated his friend’s pc and was auto displayed in the application live

Ori leaves and Anthony Rose comes on stage

How to enable Live framework in a web app.

Going to update the BBC iPlayer

Shows a silverlight app running locally

WTF He just glossed over it. Just double clicked on a desktop icon to launch it.

Can use the app to sync media from the BBC mesh into your folder that you want across which devices you want.

Since it hooks into your social graph. He is on the website, can see that all of his friends have been watching a certain show. Kind of like facebook what have ppl been doing. But just auto there because they are in your social graph (msn contact list)

Seamless connectivity. He was watching a show on the PC, he walked off and started using his phone, but since it was automatically synced to his device, he was able to continue playing from where he left off.

Live framework ctp released (should be on www.azure.com )

Adding support for win mobiles and macintosh in the next update

Takeshi Numoto on stage to talk about office 14

http://www.winsupersite.com/office/office14_web_preview.asp

people want to share and collaborate on documents

announcing office web applications. Works in IE/firefox. If silverlight is installed has a nice rich UI

people can now view edit and collaborate directly in the browser for: word, excel, powerpoint, onenote

Onenote 14 demo

Notebook sharing, he has it open in office 14. The other guy has it open in a web browser. Like a live wiki update. That was very cool

One note mobile now syncs to office live.

Word 14 demo

2 people are editing a document independently. You are getting presence info about where the other person is updating the document, can click to IM them.

Can click to accept their changes and sync it in as you are editing.

Can open and edit fully online

Excel 14 demo

Using the web stuff. Opens it in IE and firefox and looks the same

Have the ribbons, etc. looks the same as the desktop app

2 people are looking at excel and as they are editing, is updating the other guys straight away.

Clicks publish, to publish the graph straight into windows live spaces

The graph is on windows live spaces, but still linked to the excel doc. So he updates the excel doc, clicks save. And the graph is updated next time it is loaded. nice

Ray Ozzie back on stage and closes the keynote

By David Burela