In the keynote...

BillG's talking about how Moore's law, and the rapid increase in availability of computing power has helped with the advances in OS (GUI, thanks to x86 processing, etc), and how increases in hardware performance enable more features in the OS.

Now watching the "Behind the Technology" video (a "behind the music" spoof. Featuring the Altair microcomputer as the ultimate daddy of the PC. As usual, the spoof movie is one of the highlights of the keynote.

Gates is also talking about "convergence" (without using the actual word), which I must say is more convincing now that I've seen some of what's in Windows XP Media Center edition. Longhorn is where more of this convergence is supposed to come together.

And Scoble was not kidding about the tech behind the keynote. There are 14 huge projection screens and the room is packed to overflowing, but there's not a bad seat in the house.

Now discussing the Longhorn dev platform. Built on the fundamental platform are:

  • Avalon: Presentation services
  • WinFS - Data services
  • Indigo - Communication services

9:20am - First Longhorn demo...woot!

Longhorn bullets:

  • Demoed running a 20-year old app (Visicalc) as a demonstration of commitment to backwards compatibility (that got a chuckle from the audience).
  • Talked about how the new sidebar provides additional handy functionality such as RSS feeds right on the desktop.
  • Searching WinFS is remarkably fast compared to current windows tech.
  • Tablet adherents should love the fact that Ink is enabled in the shell, including in filenames.
  • Metadata in WinFS allows substantial improvements in the ability to organize files (and other resources) by multiple different categories, in whichever order you prefer, without needing to worry about building folder structures for organization.
  • P2P Communication will be a part of the Longhorn platform. Broadcasting one's desktop to others appears to be a pretty trivial operation in Longhorn, based on the demo. File sharing between peers is likewise much simpler.
  • Indigo allows Web Services to be integrated into the OS platform in a seamless manner, such that Web Services become just another provider of information that can be searched and integrated into your applications. They demonstrated using a web service into Lexis-Nexis to integrate LN into an app, thumbnails with text and video as you page through documents. Good stuff.

Here's the progression, according to Jim Allchin: MSDOS > Win16 > Win32 > WinFX.

Don Box is, of course, doing something silly in his demo. This time, it's using emacs for his demo code. Oddly, Don broke one of Scott Hanselman's cardinal presentation rules, and had to adjust his fonts while the audience waited. I don't think anyone really cared that much. Now they're demoing the new integrated build manager (still using emacs).

10:10am - First demo of XAML, an XML-based markup for creating windows apps on Avalon. XAML provides windows developers with the ability to create applications declaratively, much like ASP.NET developers can do today, including declaratively wiring up event handlers. Code-behind for Windows developers? Because of the vector-based graphics in Avalon, they can very easily declaratively scale, rotate, and otherwise transform the UI of an application. Impressive.

Hosting video within an application also becomes as simple as adding a declarative tag (with, as Chris Anderson pointed out "a lot of attributes"). Apps can be resized on the fly (including video) with no stutters, and no code necessary to allow resizing of app elements.

Aside: The pre-PDC hype was right...this is impressive stuff.

4 Comments

  • Have they said anything about XP SP2 and security? What's in it, what's not?

    Thanks.

  • Wow! This XAML sutff great. Can't wait to see it live. I heard the Longhorn build will be available for MSDN customers but without the Avalon code, is this right?

    Besides, I had to quote that part of your report here at my blog.

  • Andrew, All looks like good stuff, in time do you see ASP.NET being superceeded by Windows Forms development and the funky new features in XAML?



    Sat hello to the other chaps there too! :)

  • The only thing that I saw in the keynote about XP SP2 was that a BETA was promised (can MS really do that?) by the end of the year. No mention of a "release" date for SP2. There was mention that SP2 would turn on the firewall by default.

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