PDC Top of the Pops...

As a PDC voyeur here are my favourites, ordered by my excitement level whilst also tempering this with their availability:

• WPF – The promise of really rich interfaces heralds a new era of the good, the bad, and the extremely ugly applications – let’s just hope it is all good. I look forward to applications that provide an immersive user experience where the 2D and 3D worlds meld (where they make sense) that can be leveraged by all developers regardless of whether they live in the managed or unmanaged worlds.
• Sparkle – The designer tool for building WPF applications, built using WPF and WinFX – proof that Microsoft really believes managed code can be used for building complex rich applications. Have I mentioned how impressed I am by this application? And, will we finally see the convergence of designers and developers as a single development unit? Let’s hope so.
• WWF – Workflow has been desperately missing as a core foundation of the operating system and I believe that with WWF we will finally see the rise of a single integrated workflow system within the Microsoft environment. The promise of complex application integration driven by business process will be finally realised – I just hope it effectively hooks into the workflow systems from the likes of SAP.
• WCF – The communications foundation is important as it becomes the one shop stop for communication and inter-application/system integrations. It combines Remoting, Web Services, WSE, Sockets, etc. providing a simple, consistent and configurable interface so more time can once again be spent on building the applications themselves.
• WPF/E – This is taking WPF and making it available “Everywhere” – well a subset at least – across multiple browsers and devices. Sounds exciting but I have seen little detail as to what exactly this means. It would be fantastic to be able to write similar code, use the same tools, and target generic browsers and rich Windows style applications.
• VS2005 Team Systems – Finally Visual Studio will be fully integrated with a decent source control system, manage work tasks, enforce unit testing, FxCop, etc. This will be very welcomed in larger team and/or complex software developments. I am really looking forward to this and enforcing appropriate disciplines within the software development process versus expounding its virtues ;-)
• Windows Vista – Obviously I am excited by a new operating system coming along, that will improve Security and add most of the above features natively. It is further down the list only because I lust the individual components and they are worth of lusting in their own right; plus importantly they are back-ported to Windows XP as well.
• Office 12 – Fantastic UI, I think many will upgrade when released for this feature alone. Unfortunately not much else was really detailed so it will be interesting to see what comes out over the next few months – looking very promising.
• WinFS – The new File System is back and we welcome it with open arms. An extensible schema, meta-data and file storage system – supported by a database-like query capability – cool. This will provide for some fantastic search style capability in the future as well that far exceeds what is available today.
• C# 3.0 – The new features of implicitly typed local variables, extension methods, lambda expressions and anonymous types, etc. all sound wonderful. The problem is that we have not had C# 2.0 officially released so I can’t help but feel that we are getting a little ahead of ourselves.
• LINQ – This will provide a means to perform data style queries within .NET that utilises the new features being introduced in C# 3.0; again, it is great that this solves a real world problem it just sounds too far off – we need this stuff now!
• Atlas – For building whizzier browser based applications, this probably sounds exciting to the browser folks – ew ah! This is basically a Microsoft framework encapsulating existing technologies within the browser, specifically DHTML/AJAX. To me this sounds like an alternative to WPF/E previously mentioned, so why two? Wouldn’t it make more sense to focus on a single standard being WPF/E?

Robert Scoble promised a week of Shock and Awe – I think Microsoft delivered. I feel like a little kid in a candy store ;-)