Scott Hanselman

Update: Here's a single aggregate post with the summary of my running commentary that was BlackBerried from the Keynote.

Well...we're sardined into the keynote.  There's no wireless (802.11) so mobloggers only.  The lights dim...

Keynote - Bill Gates

They showed the Red vs. Blue Halo video
* "Working Smarter AND Harder"
* BillG out on stage.
* Record signup and turnout for PDC
* '92 32-bit PDC
* '96 Internet PDC
* '00 .NET PDC
* This is the decade where digital devices will play a deep role in our lives.  This next wave is being driven forward.
* Microsoft R&D budget $6.8B
* People are more concerned about the number of moving parts in a system
* Trustworthy Computing - password over time will NOT be adequate
* WindowsXP SP2 - firewall on by default..."Enhanced memory protection"

Keynote - Bill Gates - continued

* Dr. Watson matters.  We've changed our relationship witht the video driver people...many drivers were lousy, we used crash data to improve drivers
* Hardware in 2006
  4-6 Ghz - 2 cores
  2 GB RAM
  1 TB disk
  GPU 3x today
  1Gb network, 54Mb wireless
* NGSCB - Next Generation Secure Computing Base
* Always on...both your PC and your 'net connection
* Software is the limitation now, not the hardwarw, not the network, not the processor

Keynote - Bill Gates - continued

* Fantastic Video "Behind the Technology" ala VH1's Behind the Music.  Destined to become a classic.  Hopefully it will get posted soon!  They appear to have gotten the ACTUAL VH1 announcer.  Also, it included Puff Daddy, Anthony Michael Hall, Bill Clinton, Warren Buffet, the Meet the Press guy, the Pets.com puppet, and John Sculley (Apple Newton launcher).
* "Peer to Peer is very important."
* Informtation has been stored in binary streams - in hierarchical silos. "We haven't gone beyond the clipboard to structure information."
* Information Agents - needs to be built into the platform.  "Every application tries to be on top and put up its toast.". (A reference to the "little blue toast" popup that Messenger uses to inform the user of presence chnages.)
* "A 26" LCD will cost only $500 in 3-5 years."
* Longhorn: It's all about Avalon (new GDI), WinFS (Metadata/Unified Storage), Indigo (Communication system)

Keynote - Bill Gates - continued

* Hillell Cooperman - Group Program Manager talking about Avalon.
* He ran Visicalc under Longhorn - "a 20 year commitment to compatibility!"
* "Any one here blogging? Who will be first to blog this?" Uh, me?
 
Keynote - Bill Gates - continued

* Dynamic folder views ala "Office 2003 Search Folders" - built into explorer.  He's viewing 1100 items with no slow down.
* Showing "stacks" that are views of data that are spread all over the system.  Smacks of HyperCard.  These stacks are dynamic based on WinFS metadata.
* Aero - click on a person and "view communication history" and query the metadata within WinFS to get all files related to communicating with that person.
* Aero - Common Dialogs for PEOPLE.  The system knows that people are unique.
* Presence info built into the Aero experience.
* Lots of Transparency on all nonclient areas of windows.
* My opinion: The UI look really IS distinct and different than Mac's Jaguar.  I honestly wouldn't have thought it possible.  It's an extraordinarily clean look.  I wonder how hard it is to do the gratuitous animations.

Keynote - Bill Gates - continued

* BillG back on stage
* 3 waves of Software
  1. .NET Today
  2. SQL "Yukon" and Visual Studio "Whidbey"
  3. Longhorn Client and Server
* "Exploiting the client" - that means Smart Clients moving XML around.  Gotta give those 6Gz Pentiums something to do!

No break...
 
Keynote - Jim Alchin

* Jim Alchin here to do "a lap around Longhorn"
* WinFX (yes, that's FX)
- Next API beyond Win32
- DOS->Win16->Win32->WinFX
- Fewer lines of code is the point (Calling back to the "fewer moving parts" concept from BillG)
* Starting the "Lap"
* Longhorn is as much about fundamentals as anything else.  It's to easy today for drivers and apps to piss off other drivers and apps. We're building in Sandboxing and Protection at every level.
* Performance Degradation over time - (Windows Arthritis, why doesn't it get Faster over time?)
* NO REBOOTS - Jim is on a campaign to stop reboots.
* "Click Once" - taking XCOPY deployment to the next level
* A "flight data recorder" built into the OS to diagnosis problems
* "SuperFetch" - the idea thatwe can look at what's going on in a system and determine what you will need in the future.
* Exploit the GPU
* (if such a thing is possible, Jim isn't as dynamic a speaker as BillG.  Perhaps he's nervous.  He seems "off." His voice is quavering.)

Keynote - Jim Alchin - continued

* Being able to add a "non-execute flag" to pages in memory and working with the Hardware Vendors to prevent executing code in a data page. (This would help against buffer overflows from a hardware level.)
* Avalon - There is just ONE driver model in Longhorn (no difference between 2D and 3D.)
* The compositing engine is VECTOR based. (Opinion: the importance of this can't be overestimated.  I would have supported a move to Vectors 10 years ago.  It's a WAY better model for UI, especially considering that the DPI of the output devices are variable. Sceens are either 96dpi or 120dpi, printers at 1200+dpi.  Remeber the Prodigy online service? They pushed vectors around.  Apparently they were ahead of their time!)

Keynote - Jim Alchin

* Don Box and Chris Anderson come out...they are going to develop an Avalon app. Clever banter.
* Don is writing code in Emacs on Longhorn.  The fonts were WAY to small. (No one reads my presentaion tips)
* Everyone yells out to make the fonts bigger.  Don ups the fonts, but turns off syntax highlighting because apparent the contrast of syntax highlighting offends.
* Showing MSBuild. Holy crap it smells like NAnt.  Wow, writing these build files is xml and is 90% the same concept as Nant.  Learn and use Nant now (I say) and use MSBuild soon.
* Chris and Don play very well of each other.  It's good the MS has folks like them to present at keynotes like these.  They are scrupted, but still quipping.  It's very comfortable.
* Showing XAML to write an XML declarative document to describe the Window and it's properties.  The XAML file is codegen'ed into C#.  The XAML is just another input file, like a resource.
 
Keynote - Don Box and Chris Anderson, Jim Alchin

* They've built a Winforms app and rotated the whole UI 10 degrees to the right with a single XML attribute.
* They've added Opacity to all color reference, like FF66FF could become 44FF66FF and 44 is the level of opacity  (or inversely, transparancy).  The rendering is done on the GPU directly, using minimal CPU.
* Storage is a challenge and limited by the folder heirarchy.
* There is no Logical vs. Physical on disk.  You have to physically rearrange your files to get a different view.
* Don has asked Jim why VP's don't write code, and would Jim be his "code monkey"
* Jim is writing the code in VI.  Apparently noone remembers EDLIN.
* They are bantering and commented that Don called a variable "Bob".  Jim prefrrs Hungarian, but says now that Charles (the Hungarian) doesn't work for the company, maybe now we can choose our own variable names.
* Jim is a hunt and peck typist, but is a great sport and not doing a bad job at all.
* They are calling the Avalon command dialog and querying WinFS to search for documents that relate to the selected contact.
* They are really spending some serious time writing code.  Very cool.  Developers, developers, developers isn't just a catch phrase.
 
Keynote - Jim Alchin

* Whew!  They finished the Winforms app and queried the WinFS data store and retrieved all the documents that involved Chris Anderson.
* Indigo - Now Jim is talking about Indigo, the Windows Communication System.  This includes Secure, Reliable and Transacted Web Services
* Collaboration - There's now single API for peer to peer Real Time Communication (RTC), and partitioned networks (NAT, etc.) make RTC a hassle.
* Windows will provide not just a single source/platform/api for contacts, but also for Presence!

Don Box and Chris Anderson again:

* Now they are going to add blogging capabilities to the app!

Keynote - Don Box and Chris Anderson

* using System.MessageBus - the namespace for Indigo, interesante.
* Now, Don is going to use the Indigo system to post directly to his blog (http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/dbox) from the stage.
* They are checking out his blog, and they see that he hasn't blogged since last night.
* BOOM.  Posted.  Check it out.
* Now, they've switched to VB.NET (apparently Chris has been in the closet, and has been attracted to VB.NET since he was 5, but could never explain his feelings.  Don wonders if he could do both languages...)
* Now they've added a component to the sidebar that will receive an Indigo message from their client.  So they'll be talking "Indigo Messaging" for Interprocess Communication.  They added a TextPanel to the SideBar and pushed text out to it.

Keynote - Greg Gilley with Adobe

* They've brought out the folks from Adobe.
* They've got an image editing program (Adobe After Effects) that can export images/vectors/ui as XAML declarative UI directly!
* They imported the XAML file directly into VS.NET and get a form.  Its a VERY dynamic, sexy UI with annimations, charts, gradients.  The kind of stuff you'd have to do in Flash.
* They just called a Web Service and populated the metadata.  The designer created the UI and the WS programmer didn't have to sweat the UI at all.
* Now, Jim Karkanias from Merck
* Awesome, they are going to show how they are using Indigo to support a Health Clinical Trial.  An app after my own heart.
* Cool, real time wireless health data from a health monitor attached to Jim.  Jim has a resting heart rate of 87bpm.
* Now they've created a health anomaly iin Jim and identified a pattern with other people in the study, then they pulled map data in and found out if the patients have location in common.  They they alpha-blend a map of the current pollen count (another WS call) to discover that the anomalous event was an unusual pollen count.

Keynote - Amazon.com and conclusion

* Next, Alan Vermeulen, the CTO from Amazon.com is here to talk about what Amazon is working on around Web Services.
* He's showing a Smart Client that interfaces with Amazon WS.  I've taken video clips of the interface in action, I'll put them up soon.
* There's a calendar of product releases, and you can then overlay your calendar.
* They'll have the demos available at their booth...I'm all over this.  The Amazon guys did a great job at the XMLDevCon and its good to see that they are still cutting edge.

Jim Alchin is wrapping up now...that's all for the FOUR HOUR KEYNOTE.

Time to rest my thumbs.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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