Keynote today - Bill G -- excellent. First sightings of Longhorn, Avalon, Indigo, etc. Interesting infrastructure change - we've had wireless network connectivity pretty much anywhere in the conference grounds, but not this morning...not in the big keynote hall. We're all assuming this is by design - I guess they don't want people (A) taping into their wireless network on which they're running the demos (although it's running whimpy-WEP), or (B) blogging, posting, or otherwise leaking the info about Longhorn before *they* want it out.
So there are plenty of blogs out there describing the new techs, but my quick take on the best pieces:
- Avalon - a colleague described this last week as “Flash meets GDI“. I guess that's a decent description. The runtime now supports markup (XAML) based descriptions of controls, colors, SCALING (really cool), rotation, animations, etc.
- Indigo - (still don't have my hands wrapped around what all is included in this) set of services that provide connectivity for apps. more later I guess...
We all ran to the “materials distribution center” after the keynote to get our PDC bits. (ok, well I didn't go there until after lunch) They were holding out on the Longhorn, et. al CDs and a Longhorn book by Brent Rector until after these announcements.
Hadn't heard of Virtual PC before this conference. Yes, I guess I've been living under a rock for a bit. For those 1% of you who haven't heard of it either, it's a product that allows you to run virtual isolated environments on the PC that can run a different OS, etc. So the big push here is to run Virtual PC and throw Longhorn into a virtual environment. A time-bomb copy of VPC is on the bits disc, but I haven't loaded it all yet. Plenty of people are already -- I'm letting Charles and Kral be the guinea pigs.
I know I'm late getting some posts out here...I'm amazed at all the blogs getting posted already. Are you guys still attending any of the sessions, or just blogging the whole week!? :)
Pre-conference day was pretty much re-hash of the last couple years of technology. Not a lot new, just getting everyone on a level playing field I guess.
Let's see: xml talk with Don, Tim, and Gudge. Great to hear Don again after a long absence. Didn't get a lot out of the basics of xml that they were going over. Thought they'd dive a little deeper in some of the topics.
Smart client talk with Chris Sells, and Rocky (?). Finally got an answer to the href deploy issue when you are not online. Short answer: it barfs. Only way to make it work as you would expect -- that is, the cached version of a given .NET assembly should be used if you are offline -- only works if you have told IE that you are offline by selecting Work Offline from the file menu. If IE thinks you are online, it will blow chunks when it can't hit the server.
Well, tomorrow's another day...