Code names
There are lots of open wireless nodes everywhere, the COMMNET at the PDC and the roomlink at my hotel, but connectivity is still a problem :-(
It looks like this is the biggest PDC ever, with over 7,000 attendees. What that means is that the network is running out of IP addresses quite frequently. I was finally able to connect now after trying the whole day. At the hotel, it's even worse. Haven't been able to connect for two days now. Tech support says that this is the biggest load on their wireless network ever.
The Keynote: Bill and others walked us through the next generation of computing. In one word, it is 'Longhorn'. Some more code names that you should be familiar with are Widbey, WinFS, WinFX, Avalon and Indigo. Overall the demos were great.
Widbey is the next release of the development tools, Visual Studio. More controls more API-s and more automatically generated code.
Avalon is exciting. It kind of replaces GDI and is a vector based representation of the UI. It runs on top of DirectX so all applications can take advantage of hardware acceleration.
If you think of doing ASP.NET programming today as writing server-side HTML controls in an aspx file and wiring up the event code and actions in a code behind file, you have a good idea of the development model. Instead of HTML, the front end is laid out in XAML (eXtended Application Markup Language) and you can write code behind in any .NET language. XAML is very rich and vector based. In addition to the regular windows controls it has all kinds of new controls like video and transforms and alpha blending etc.
In addition to being able to do lots of cool animations, as in Flash, an XAML app can be compiled to be a web app or an win app.
Indigo is the technology to connect distributed apps. The API unifies all kinds of transports, messages and protocols so the code to send an email does not seem much different than sending a message via MSMQ or invoking a web-service.
I'm in the Indigo overview by Don Box right now. More later.