PDC Day 1
Well I guess the PDC isn’t going to disappoint. I am not sure I am a good enough writer to describe what I just saw demoed and how cool it really was.
I had really good seats for the keynote which was nice. I was 15 rows back on the isle. It was interesting as it dawned on me… the richest man in the world was 15 rows away from me. Nothing too exciting, but not an everyday event.
Bill G. Started things off talking about the history of computing and had a really funny video which I hope becomes available online for everyone to enjoy. It reminded of Chris Pirillo’s birthday video.. not quite as funny, but very good. Then came the demos. They started with a demo of the Longhorn UI and OS. This looked very nice and I liked what they have done with the usability features in the way things are presented. I think the side bar they have added which provided context aware data is a very sweet feature. The really cool stuff came though when they started to show (albeit at a high level) how you can tap into these various features. Don Box and Chris A. Did a number of demos starting with Avalon and moving to WinFS and then on to Indigo (this whole thing is now called WinFX). Avalon was awesome as they showed how easy it is do use XAML to create controls for a windows app… this seemed VERY similar to me to Web forms and code behind the way they did it. They had markup to declare a tag with an ID and and an event pointer and the used some C# to handle the nitty gritty. But of course this was on a windows app, not a we app. Then they showed the WinFS stuff which was also very cool. They showed how you could add meta data to a file by simply dragging it onto a “stack” which you define (which is like a category) and walla.. the file is associated with that category. The cool part was though that you could associate the same file with many stacks and just do multiple-stack filtering from the explorer toolbar to narrow down your result set. It was also awesome when they showed an app that used visual cues to highlight relationships between files in a “folder”. So they 4 vertical panels with “info” in it and when you clicked on a document on the left it highlight the contacts on your system that were related to that document. The basic point is that the whole schema underneath all of this stuff is all accessible as well so you can hook into these same relationships in your apps.
Then came the indigo piece which is the glue that handles all of the communication between the different parts. Don showed how easy it was to build a port and message and send it to his blog. I think ingido is the most crtical part of this whole framework because it has the hardest job of ensuring authorization and security of this communication… AND they have to make it simple to use and configure. I think this is a huge challenge and it will be interesting to see in the coming months what we see them coming up with. But if they get it right, connecting apps with be amazingly easy.
Time to grab lunch before the next session!
