PDC2008 - Day 2...

An improvement over Day 1. The Keynote was much more about the UX today. It kicked off with Windows 7 which was much more incremental versus radical in terms of change - possibly a good thing. The main UI change demonstrated was around the Start/Task bar and how that operates - looks good. Will it be the compelling reason for everyone to upgrade, probably not. They demonstrated the touch capability, first showing how non-touch aware application were able to function and secondly an application designed to take advantage of the platform. Will it be enough to warrant an upgrade, maybe, I think I want it!

The development platform changes look interesting; Visual Studio 2010 is being rewritten in WPF and looks to offer some really cool extensibility. (As an aside the C# compiler is also being rewritten in .NET so that it can be more extensible). Further enhancements to WPF include the Ribbon, DataGrid, Calendar and DateTimePicker (about time). So really impressive WPF applications were demonstrated.

Live Services (which builds on Azure) includes stuff like the Mesh, Contacts, etc. will have an API exposed which looks to offer some interesting possibilities. Some of the Office 14 applications were demonstrated which leverage these services; interesting to note that their also appears to be Web Versions of the Office applications.

The sessions I attended today were:

• PC24 - Windows 7 Desktop: not too bad, a bit more detail than the keynote.
• PC46 - WPF roadmap: absolutely terrible session - the presenters sucked. The content was more looking at the past and current versus future roadmap.
• ES02 - Oslo the language: good presentation skills from Don Box; although I am not sure I fully get Oslo yet?!?