The atmosphere was electric, charged by the thumping of rock/rap and dance music. The audience sat with anticipation as they waited for the Keynote to start. The lights dimmed and a hushed silence swepted across the audience, as we where now only seconds away from the entrance of the man himself.
Bill Gates entered with a thunderous applause from the awaiting audience, the PDC had now official started. Check out the KeyNote online at PDC 2005 KeyNote
Bill gave a quick history lesson, where we were 30 years ago, when Microsoft first started, and now where we are today. When you compare it is amazing the progress that has been made in such a relatively short period of time, about half a developer’s career. Very impressive. He thanked the audience for their continued support of the .Net platform, and even went as far to say that the .Net framework is the most popular development environment today, (this I will take with a pitch of salt). A key comment in his speech was ‘Software is an Enabler’, to make the best usage of improvements in hardware and telecommunications infrastructure, software is a key element, as this enables users to make the most out of these improvements, better ways to communicate, richer user interfaces.
We got to see a quick demo of Vista, nothing blow away here, we have seen this all before, but still impressive when the 3d Task List was demonstrated. We also got to See a demo of the new Office 12 offering, the changes are manly user interface related, there is currently 1500 functions in the current Office product, most of which users never knew exist, so the new interface concentrates on making those functions more readily available.
Jim Allchin was the second speaker; he introduced some interesting things, AJAX, ATLAS and LINQ. AJAX and ATLAS are aiming squarely at providing much richer user experiences via the browser, some cool demos here. The more interesting topic is LINQ; the idea here is to provide tighter binding between the database and .Net, so ultimately you would no longer need to write SQL to access the database, and that this will all be done via your favorite .Net Language.
So what do we have to look forward to, Longhorn has been renamed to Vista, Avalon to Windows Presentation Framework, Indigo to Windows Communication Framework, so this is so far somewhat of a rehash from the last PDC in 2003, with a couple of juicy toolkits thrown in, but I will defer final comment until the end of the conference, as many of the session look very interesting. Tomorrows Keynote will be interesting.
A couple of additional items, it was good to see that subtitles where provided, in real-time. The audience is still very male dominated, whilst there are women in the audience, it is a small fraction of the overall attendee population, and this I hope in future PDC’s will change.