PDC05: Day 1 - keynote, no more NDA goodnes

so the keynote we’ve all been waiting for has finally happened…this was a great first day in my opinion…

Highlights:

• BillG video with Napolean Dynamite — we saw this at some internal training and despite some parts being cut out, it was still hilarious (unless you have no idea who napolean dynamite is)
• Don Box making fun of the memory space VS2005 is using

What we saw:

• Vista: aero glass effects, sidebar & gadgets, parental controls, peer networking (people near me), stacked documents, virtual folders, etc.
• Office12: i’ve been waiting to say something about this for a while.  what a revolutionary change to some of the core application features in office, i’ll be waiting for this release VERY eagerly.  sharepoint is refined (better UI, secure-aware menus, recycle bin) and has a great new feature of the slide library…
• slide library allows a ppt to be uploaded and is disected to “items”
• you can then create a new ppt, adding items *from* a sharepoint lib and choose to keep them up-to-date: that’s right…they get changed in SharePoint and so does your powerpoint on your desktop! VERY cool
• Outlook12: very cool features for me to help better organize: enhanced “to-do” listing with tasks built in that roll to next days — so you’re always nagged
• InfoPath — surprising they didn’t show some of this stuff in the keynote, and I want to say something about what I like about InfoPath 12, but since I didn’t hear anything, I’ll wait.
• “lap around” — Don Box, Chris Anderson, Anders H, ScottGu collaborated on stage and showed:
• LINQ – integrated query language — query objects in code just like you would SQL in a database — and combine various data across multiple boundaries…very cool (note: some may have known some of this as parts of Zen)
• Atlas: new “ajax-style” web development framework for asp.net — cool VirtualEarth control: go get atlas here
• Microsoft Max — a full featured photo sharing app built using WinFX — very cool application and available for us all to use…

more to come…