PDC2008 Report, Day 2 (Tuesday)

Day 2 of the PDC began with another keynote. This time the topics covered were Windows 7, .NET, WPF, and Visual Studio. There was also a technical demo by Don Box and Chris Anderson.

Windows 7 highlights (Steve Sinofsky):

• Addresses lessons learned from Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. It has had important work in the areas of ecosystem readiness, standards (CSS in IE), compatibility (UAC "went too far"), and better support for certain scenarios.
• Remote desktop can support multiple monitors.
• Task bar - small icon support, customizable shut down button
• Action Center - you can change (or hide) all messages for all Windows subsystems
• UAC slider (you decide how much you want)
• Developers get ribbon user interface, jump lists, libraries, multi-touch support, Ink/speech support, DirectX improvements
• Fundamentals: work to decrease memory,m disk I/O and power; and increase speed, responsiveness, and scale.
• Memory sticks can be encrypted, so if you lose one no one else can do anything with your files.
• VHDs can now be created from hard drive images easily. You can also boot natively from a Win7 VHD.
• Better DPI controls and multiple monitor controls.
• Improved magnifier. Win+, Win- to zoom.
• Amazing project set up via Win+P keystroke.

Building Great Apps - Scott Guthrie ("ScottGu"):

• Win7 apps - win32/c++: New Win7 APIs. MFC for Win7 - ribbon UI and multi-touch support.
• VS2010 - IDE support for very large code bases. Multi-core app dev.
• Windows apps with .NET - .NET 3.5 SP1 improvements: streamlined setup, start-up performance improvements, graphics improvement, WPF DirectX interop, more controls.
• New WPF toolkit (for all versions off Windows). New data grid, data picker, calendar, ribbon controls.
• Windows apps with .NET 4.0 - WPF improvements (multi-touch, deep zone, visual state manager). Fundamentatls and interop (in-process side-by-side support for multiple CLRs, managed/native code interop, dynamic language support, extensible component model). Improved tooling in VS2010.
• VS2010 - changing over to be WPF based. Very extensible. Multi-monitor support. Refactoring support. Better test/developer workflow.
• IE8 - improved standards support, web slices, visual search, accerlators, built-in tools for Javascript debugging.
• ASP.NET in 2008 - dynamic data, REST, MVC support, Ajax/JQuery. Intellisense + JQuery downloadable now at jquery.com.
• ASP.NET 4 - web forms, MVC, Ajax, distributed caching ("Velocity") in CTP stage now.
• VS22010 for web development - code focused improvements / editor improvements, JS/Ajax tooling, design view, SS2 support, publishing and deployment, possible to maintain a separate config file for each environment.
• Sliverlight 2 - Netflix Instant Watch is live now using Silverlight. Silverlight toolkit (charting, tree view, dock panelo, wrap panel, view box, expander, ....). Silverlight designer in VS2010. Working on Silver in or outside the browser.

In the technical sessions, I concentrated today on Oslo, whicih is about modeling. I'm going to post on that separately.