Today had been an amazing day at PDC, and a very long one at that.
I think this morning's keynote was four hours long. I have 16 pages of handrwitten (Tablet PC Journal) notes of this and as so much has happened since, need to digest it again before I can do a justice to those four hours. Most memorable were Bill Gate's hilarious video with Napolean Dynamite, an incredible and indepth demo of Vista and some of the great new UI features in Office 12 (which are going to be a real boon for Tablet PC users), fantastic demos by Don Box, Anders Hejlsberg, Chris Anderson and Scott Guthrie where we watched them code Indigo, Avalon, Atlas and LINQ.
Now that I have been working with WSE 3.0, Indigo (yeah yeah - I know, Windows Communication Foundation) is starting to look familiar.
LINQ was, for me, the most surprising technology that we saw. I was told by Alan Griver that I haven't paid attention to the teasers that have been in some of his blog posts or I wouldn't have been so surprised. This is going to be my new favorite thing to explore I think. LINQ is a magical querying API that allows you to query across XML, objects, relational data and other data types within the CLR.
Gates ended his portion of the keynote by saying that "we are all in the best industry in the world at the most exciting time. Jim Allchin started off his part of the keynote with a memorable note: to think of the internet, not as a destination, but as a pipe.
I was also thrilled to see the auxiliary display . Imagine a little window into your laptop without having to open up or even power up your laptop to quickly check your emails or RSS feeds on the fly. Oh and with Vista's SideShow, it is extensible for developers to write tools for as well.
The rest of the day was a blur of fun , the Women in I.T. luncheon and panel, getting to see all of the awesome innovations for the Tablet PC end users in Vista and for the developers in Avalon (more tomorrow with Shawn van Ness's presentation. Again, pages of notes which I will digest and share. On the user end, mostly we are seeing much more predictability with the UI, from getting visual clues in response to tings like clicking with the stylus, to enabling the tablet to learn your handwriting. There have been some great things done to the Tablet Input Panel - standing out for me is the fact that autocomplete can interact directly with the TIP without the user having to “insert“ what they wrote in the TIP first.
After that: dinner, a party and then the Tablet PC BOF, which started at 10:15. Now I find myself at 1:45 am finally getting a chance to check emails from the day and share a glimpse of this now almost 20 hour day which is now a bit of a blur.
I have some tough choices ahead of me tomorrow - I wish that there was just one session at a time! There are indigo talks, LINQ talks, IIS7, Aux Display (and those are all at the exact same time slot - oh boo hoo hoo). And then I have to pick between the Tablet/Avalon talk, ADO.NET w/WinFS, ATLAS and more more more. It's torture.
Looking ahead to Thursday, it gets no better. In one timeslot there is Raymond Chen talking about 5 things every windows developer should know, new VB language directions, ADO.NET, and indigo indigo indigo.
And I still haven't gotten one piece of swag for my user group yet!