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.