PDC05: Day 1 Keynote

The keynote for PDC05 today was great.  It started out with Bill Gates (this is the first time I’ve heard him speak in person).  He was followed by Jim Alchin.  Between the two of them, we saw some great demos and heard some really encouraging things.  The following is a list of key points that I came away with from the session:

• Bill G gave a “state of the industry” type talk explaining that he felt this is the most exciting time to be in the software industry, and that software is the most significant change agent around today.
• Demo’d Windows Vista… very impressive UI – not just the graphics… little things like alt-tab improvements, previewing docs, previewing task bar items, side bar items, integrated RSS, etc.
• Office 12 is going to rock.  I am disappointed that they didn’t give us a pre-release version on “The Goods” kit.  Most notably is the new menuing/toolbar structure with the goal of making the programs and their features more discover-able to the general populous.
• Excel 12 has some great new features allowing for tremendous data visualization without really knowing what you are doing… very nice improvements
• Powerpoint 12 has some great enhancements, such as automatically taking text bullets/flow items and converting them into a diagram for you with a few clicks of a wizard.
• Powerpoint and Sharepoint have some great improvements with respect to “slide galleries.”  Picture if you will, a company assembles a great deck for sales teams to use.  obviously, many presentations may not need all of the slides.  The content developer could post them to a slide gallery, where each slide would be individually available for inclusion in a given sales person’s deck.  Further, the salesperson would be notified each time he/she opened the deck if any changes had been made to the master copy and would be able to update the local copy with just a few clicks.
• Outlook 12 has some great improvements with respect to handling tasks and RSS… incidentally, I’m now convinced that NewsGator for Outlook has a short life span (at least how I use it)
• switching topics a bit now… “Workflow” is moving high on the priority and will be “baked in” to the OS… it will be interesting to learn more about what this means.
• LUA will be the default running mode for Windows Vista
• USB Memory Sticks can sometimes be used to instantly add additional memory to a machine… they can be made availalbe to the virtual memory runtime
• You have the ability to sandbox certain processes to isolate potential security risks
• Atlas is going to be cool
• WPF (Avalon) is really cool
• WPF/E (WPF Everywhere) is amazing… ability to run Avalon on any device… including things such as mobile devices, Linux, Mac OS/X, etc.
• Infocard is a federated identity system but is open this time… more to come on this
• There was a great demo of the various key development components… of most interest to me was the integrated query framework that allowed for the object exposure of db tables, and then the dynamic joining of data from said db tables with data pulled on the fly from in-memory repositories using SQL-like syntax… very cool

Oh yeah… and I scored an i-mate JASJAR… I’m so pumped… more on the other sessions I attended in a few minutes