PDC 2008 - Day 2

Day 2 brought two more keynotes and more sessions. The first keynote was awesome where we saw the new Windows 7, Visual Studio 2010 and a bit on Office. First off, Windows 7, was quite impressive. I walked away with the impression they are focused on working hard on the core and addressing some pain points with Vista. One of the coolest things I saw that SharePoint developers will like is native VHD creation & attachment. We can attach virtual disks with VMWare Worksation, but we can't create them. Even better though is that you can BOOT DIRECTLY to the VHD! Now THAT is slick! There's also some slick docking where you can move windows to one edge of the screen and doc the app much like it works in Visual Studio. It's "awareness" of other Windows 7 machines in your home/work environment is pretty slick too.

As for Visual Studio, one of the coolest things I heard was the fact that the UI layer was going to be redone using WPF. That's cool because you can have some slick visualizations as Scott Guthrie showed a demo visual of the XML comment on a method. Man, I hope this means that Visual Studio will get the ribbon UI with the new WPF ribbon control they released in CTP today. There are also improvements coming to WPF performance and a full blown WPF & Silverlight designer in Visual studio.

As for the Office news, there's nothing around the clients or SharePoint vNext. There is now a slimmed down version of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote online. The only thing they showed was how two people can work on the same document at the same time and it kept them in sync. Looking at OneNote, now I see a slick wiki with an offline rich client.

As for sessions, I hit more Silverlight stuff today. There are just so many great sessions... I'll be living on Channel9 for the recorded sessions soon!

BTW, I got the Windows 7 install all PDC attendees got on the USB drives we picked up today. It installed without any issues (I installed it in a virtual machine). I'm not going to waste your screen real estate with a ton of pictures that other sites already have (plus, the install process looks identical to Vista)... just two nice shots:

The only install screen that looked different than what you see in Vista. That's an animated progress bar... much nicer than the Vista green bars on boot up.

Technorati Tags: pdc08

posted on Wednesday, October 29, 2008 2:41 AM

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# re: PDC 2008 - Day 2 10/29/2008 3:36 AM Jeff Dalton

Good summary... I wasn't sure how much O 14 would be @ PDC since the TAP program had not even started (supposed to start really soon).

# re: PDC 2008 - Day 2 10/29/2008 7:01 AM Rob Roach

Andrew - just wanted to say thanks! As one of the many SharePoint developers who would love to be there but cannot - I appriciate your summaries!

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