The most intriguing thing Alchin said? After displaying a long fan of Microsoft DVD-ROMS given to show attendees, he quipped "and there will be other bits at the end of day three". Mysterious. I wonder what other goodies are being held off.
I was disappointed that there was no public mention of this rumor. I expected some kind of demo. I'm impatient for this story to break, one way or the other. Anyone who thinks this rumor all started when Microsoft acquired CreatureHouse Expression needs to check their rumor mill for clogging.
The keynote features some impressive demos (apologies, I didn't write down all the demoer's names, perhaps someone can post them in a comment?)
Cool and Noteworthy:
Both BillG and Alchin made it clear that Vista will be the biggest Microsoft marketing push ever. Alchin said in 24 months after ship, they anticipate 475 millions new PCs shipped, all able to run Vista. They also see the 200 million upgradeable machines as an important base of Vista users.This is the "biggest ship since 95", and they will back it with the largest demand-generation they have ever done, including giving away $100 million in a dedicated partner marketing program for apps that showcase Vista. "500 million people a year buy windows related devices". Wow.
The Gadgets (oh so X11 sounding!) in the Vista sidebar look more useful to me than the Mac dashboard. So far, on my Mac, I've never used the dashboard. Out of sight, out of mind. The sidebar, on the other hand, appears to have some more task-oriented features e.g. an RSS watcher, which are more likely be integrated with daily use than the Mac dashboard.
Learning from the Passport failure, Microsoft was bold enough to wipe the slate clean and try again, this time with a new initiative branded InfoCards. InfoCards uses a "federated ID model", open standards blah blah etc. The key is, rather than a single-vendor model, InfoCards only goes as far as trying to normalize the UX, not the back-end. In my opinion, this approach is much more likely to succeed than Passport. Although it was slightly fishy that ChrisAn turned off the InfoCards so quickly in his demo...
BillG said the vision now is "Connecting people to the information they care about." Remarkably similar to Google's "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," but I like it much more than the awful "potential" stuff.
BillG also said the next frontier is to look at server - to shift the standard way of representing data so that the file server becomes more of an information server - with lot's of innovation in services. "The 90's dreams and hype reshaped into reality". This is a great enterprise move that I think they will pull off. I do wonder about servers for the home market, though. Not too many of us are running Sharepoint at home yet! There's a gap for home servers/services, especially for us geeks with multiple computers. Hmm...
I will definately check out Atlas, Microsoft's new ASP.Net AJAX framework, if for no other reason than to get inspirations and ideas about how far you can push a web browser. Now, when that get's ported to Mono... (only kidding).
Apparently we can expect 50% fewer reboots after software installs in Vista - a new reboot manager means that many more apps can install and update dlls without reboot. Fingers crossed for 50% fewer bluescreens...
The trick of using a USB memory sticks to expand laptop memory is the kind of cool hardware integration that MS does best. Using encryption was an added bonus.
Office 12 looked worth the upgrade, if for no other reason than to learn what the 1500 commands and 35 toolbars in Word 2003 actually did. I liked the live preview of fonts, I can't wait to try it with the 2000 fonts in Adobe Font Folio...
3D graphics, 2D cleartype text, animation, controls... the new windows UI framework is finally cooking with gas!
The LINQ Query language integrated into C# was great. I always felt C# should have a var type, though from what I could see the query language didn't have intellisense for it yet.
ChrisAn can type really fast!
Less than:
How the bleep are you supposed to pronounce WPF? ChrisAn let his marketing veneer slip for a second as he struggled with that issue, then he gave us all the answer: its pronounced A-V-A-L-O-N (the WPF is silent).
Laptops in the near future will have a freakish sideshow - a cellphone-like display on their lid, giving a window into the inside state of the computer even when it is asleep. I couldn't help thinking that if Windows woke up in half a second (like my PowerBook does) you wouldn't need a sideshow. Alternatively, make the laptop talk bluetooth to my cell when its asleep!
Now we have to choose between Atlas, WinForms, or WPF: Three modern and totally different ways for application data to hit pixels. MS continues to push all three. I can only imagine that inside MS there is some friction over that situation. Shouldn't the story be WPF all the way (with Mono for non-MS platforms)? To some extent, Atlas is an admission that WPF is slow to the game, and MS needs a rich web story now.
The WPF/E demo looked cooked to me [apparently it wasn't - see below]. WPF/E will be a cross-device subset of Avalon linked to Javascript. Today they showed a NetFlicks/Resonate sample app running on desktop, media center, tablet and handheld. But from what I could see the UIs on each device looked quite different. Alchin even (I think) admitted that the PocketPC version was running on the Compact .Net framework, i.e. WinForms, not WPF/E. Apparently it took 3 developers a month to build the demo, and I can only assume that they essentially wrote three different versions of the app. The "accordian" widget they featured was flashy and cool, but it also looked crazy to control, especially with a pen.
Video in WPF still has rough spots. For example, there was a demo of streaming video onto 3D textures by some folks from NorthFace/Fluid. To me it seemed the audio and video were out of sync, and the lip movements were off frame. Also, I was surprised that none of the WPF demos showed a standard Windows Media play/pause/rewind video controller, which made me wonder how users control that stuff. The NorthFace folks suggested that their demo was great for the web, but nobody mentioned web-streaming WPF. That stuff looked way fat for web delivery, even broadband. I wonder what the story there is.
Watching all that coding going on live was impressive. However, even after drinking as much coffee as these presenters evidently do, no amount of coding will convince me that people should be typing XAML syntax into a text editor. Let's have some kind of design tool for XAML:-) [See my post on Expression Sparkle]
All in all, I came away impressed by the show. For a moment there, I even had some regrets about leaving Microsoft. Then a New York fire truck drove by and the siren drowned out that thought.
Comments
Anagram4Wander | September 14, 2005 07:51 PM
[re. WPF/E] Nope. It was the same exe on two foot, ten foot, tablet. Only the mobile was different (but common code).
JoeW | September 16, 2005 02:37 PM
I was left wondering how much Avalon Office 12 uses. It certainly looked faster, espectially the zooming in Excel - but there was a severe lack of animation and 'sparkle'.
Also, I wouldn't say that C# has a 'var' type - it is not a variant. Var is a way of telling the compiler to work out the type.
Daniel Chait | September 20, 2005 10:16 PM
Quote:
The LINQ Query language integrated into C# was great. I always felt C# should have a var type, though from what I could see the query language didn't have intellisense for it yet.
Just to clarify - 'var' is not a type, but rather a way to indicate that the compiler should infer the (strong, actual) type based on the value from which the variable is initialized.
[[JM - yes, that's what I assumed, I should have said "var" keyword"]]John Wilson | October 14, 2005 07:43 PM
Post Conference Thoughts: Once again, so many tools/OS's so beloved by the Microsoft haters of the world have been marginalized by true.. massive innovation. Linux,etc. have all FTE.
(Failed To Evolve).
Like the Dinosaur who received a fatal blow, the message will take a couple of years to reach their brain.. by then, they will all be just raw materials for our gas tank.
Expression/VS2005/Vista, un-equaled on any level.