Keyvan Nayyeri

The second day of PDC 2008 has already started, and the second keynote was much better than yesterday’s keynote that I wrote about it! But I still think that both these keynotes were not as well as the keynotes for PDC 2005.

Fortunately today they talked about stuff that were really relevant for a developer conference, and covered more features that would make the future of development for developers with Microsoft technologies.

Just to express my opinions, I give an overview of each section of the keynote with what I found interesting about them.

Keynote started with an introduction by Ray Ozzie but to be honest, he’s not a good speaker at all. In both keynotes he just gave some obvious information that were good for marketing purposes only!

Windows 7

The first part of the keynote was conducted by Steven Sinofsky who showcased new features in Windows 7 with his team members. Windows 7 is built on top of the same core as Windows Vista and Windows 2008 Server. They exhibited the new taskbar that simplifies the management of items in the taskbar, and also showed the new windows management which makes it easier to work with several windows in the surface.

The next part was an overview of improved networking in Windows 7 which allows synchronizing your items between two machines and having access to data on other machines.

Multi-touch systems would be the next generation of hardware and software systems because there was a huge emphasize on them in today’s keynote. As a part of their demos, they introduced the cool features in Windows 7 to work with multi-touch systems and enjoy this vision.

The last part also gave interesting demo of working with multiple projectors and monitors in Windows 7, and it was interesting to see that new Remote Desktop supports multiple displays. There is also a great VHD mounting in Windows 7 that allured many guys. Besides, there are some improvements in UAC as well as the capability to customize the Shut Down button and DPI easily.

A pre-Beta build of Windows 7 is out today but there will be new features to complement it and put it in the path to RTM. They have included new tools to report user experience, feedback and errors to Microsoft with more details, so Microsoft developers can refine the product. Engineering Windows 7 is a new blog that can connect Windows 7 team to clients, and share information between them. Windows Live Essentials Beta is also out which allows integration of applications between Windows and Live services.

I think that there were two main points in this section. First it was obvious that Microsoft has felt the failure of Windows Vista, and is trying to deliver a new build as soon as possible that solves main issues with the preceding version. Second I believed that Microsoft is investing in the area of the vision of multi-touch systems and WPF applications to achieve the dream that we could see in some science-fiction movies before. By the way, for me the most interesting part of the section was the integration of WPF applications with multi-touch systems.

Development Technologies

The next man who came to give his talk was Scott Guthrie, who could change my mind about the keynote to a great extent. Scott knows how to speak for developers, and it was great to finally see somehow who writes code at a conference for developers.

Scott started with the future of development in Windows 7 which is possible both with native C++ and managed .NET codes. He also gave an overview of .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 and what is added to the stack. Then he talked about WPF in Windows 7 which tries to enable the vision for end users, and makes it easy to use Ribbon controls inside WPF applications and integrate them with multi-touch systems. Next he announced a new WPF toolkit that offers some new controls and features.

The next part of the talk was about Visual Studio 2010 which will be built on top of WPF. Yesterday Microsoft dropped a CTP of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0, and I just wrote about it on Twitter, and today Scott gave an overview of their plans for the future of VS 2010. Although current CTP doesn’t use a very WPFish shell, it’s supposed to be very different in the future builds.

The most interesting part of Scott’s talk was when he gave a demo of extending Visual Studio 2010 with MEF to add new features to editor simply by building a single assembly and deploying it to a folder. This has been kept secret to now but now I can say that the future of Visual Studio Extensibility is tied to MEF, and VSX is going to apply MEF to make VS easier to extend.

Scott’s talk followed by a new topic about web development technologies, and he talked about the new features that are added to ASP.NET in the past year or so, and highlighted ASP.NET MVC which will be ready within the next couple of months. He then talked about the integration of jQuery with Visual Studio, and announced that the new version of jQuery with support for Visual Studio intellisense is available today.

This part continued with an overview of Silverlight progress and the recent release of Silverlight 2.0. A new Silverlight toolkit was announced by Scott with new features such as charting, TreeView, and DockPanel. The last interesting point was that Silverlight is capable to run both inside and outside the browser.

Scott’s talk focused on several topics but I think that I can group his discussions into three categories. First Microsoft invests in building WPF applications on Windows 7 specifically for multi-touch devices. Second Visual Studio 2010 is easy to extend and will be built on top of WPF. Third Microsoft wants to add new methods of developing web applications to the ASP.NET but it looked like that this latter one has less importance than others for them.

Live Framework

The next speaker was David Treadwell who talked about Live Framework as a new development framework that allows developers to integrate their desktop and web applications with Windows Live services (especially Live Mesh) efficiently. They demoed some samples of synchronization of data between two contacts on their own systems, and between their desktop and mobile phones, and the way that it has been made easier to work with Windows Live through the API. Now you’re able to integrate Live services (such as Windows Live Messenger) with your websites using development API.

In my opinion this Live Framework is a good step toward a unique online experience for Microsoft that is not done by Google in this field, and it can help them succeed in this area in the future of the web.

Office 14

The last part of today’s keynote was about Office 14 by showcasing the main new features of this version. The emphasis was on the new Office 14 web applications that bring the complete integration between web-based Office instances and local instances, and allows sharing a document between multiple users. They gave demos of this integration with OneNote, Word, and Excel.

I think that Office 14 is very similar to Office 12, and the only difference is where they add web-based Office applications to put things online.

Conclusion

Unlike PDC 2005 where Bill Gates and his employees introduced lots of new features to desktop and web development, in PDC 2008 Ray Ozzie and friends chose a different approach that focused on the goal of integration between desktop, mobile and web, and their demos and talks were trying to highlight this fact.

If Microsoft can succeed to achieve this goal, then it would become a unique software company in the industry that has such a complete and integrated chain, and it can help them attain a huge success. Their success in this field can cover their failure in the field of online search where Google won the game, and in the field of mobile phones where Apple is going to win because it can force more users to use Microsoft services and devices to benefit from this integration. Unlike the initial expectation about their plans for extending current development technologies for desktop or web applications, they’re going to put a huge effort into this integration.

Now the question is about the necessity of this integration and the impact that it can have on end users. How many users may like to keep consistency between their data on multiple devices, and when does it come to become commonplace? I don’t think this integration is as exciting as it was for us for some ordinary users, at least at the moment.