PDC 2008 Day 2 Keynote – Windows 7, Live Framework, VS2010, Office 14 and more!

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While in the keynote of day 1 we saw the light of Windows Azure Platform, the Microsoft Software + Services platform, on day 2 we actually had two keynotes: a lot of stuff!

Keynote 1: Ray Ozzie, Steve Sinofsky, Scott Guthrie, David Treadwell – on Windows 7, WPF, .NET 4.0, VS2010, Live Framework, Mesh, Office 14
Keynote 2: Chris Anderson and Don Box – A lap around Azure Services platform

As yesterday, I really appreciated the speech by Ray Ozzie, he started out by pointing us to the importance of client user interfaces and how the web can actually improve the value of the PC. By overlapping from PC / Web / phone, the use of these together is more value than just the sum of their parts.

As there were a lot of announcements and demos, I’m listing things I wrote down during the keynote. A lot of them I will come back to later in a more detailed post but this should give an overview of what we saw.

  • Windows 7 and Windows Live wave 3, presented by Steve Sinofsky. With a first demo of Windows 7 capabilities by Julie Larso-Green Vice President Windows Experience. I liked Homegroup, libraries and of course multi-touch. 
  • Windows Live Essentials with rich client applications in combination with Windows Live Services
  • Scott Guthrie:
    • Silverlight Toolkit CTP (graphs, DockPanel, WrapPanel, Themes, etc)
    • Visual Studio 2010 CTP this week. Did you know Visual Studio is built on WPF? Scott did an nice demo of the extensibility capabilities and taking advantage of WPF to transform the standard display of code comments to something very informative.
  • Dave Treadwel – Live Services part of the Azure Services platform.
    Live Mesh > bridging a user’s devices with synchronization, this is only a tip of the iceberg. This week we start talking about Mesh as a key component of Live Services. Connecting data, devices, people and applications. Integrating client and cloud capabilitties all based on synchronization.
  • Live Operating Environment / Programming Model > consistent environment with a proramming model that consistently works on any device, pc, phone, web.
  • Ori Amiga did a demo of a photo application that uses synchronized data on multiple computers and a phone, using Mesh API.
  • We got a demo by Anthony Rose, Head Online Media BBC. They showed us the BBC iPlayer that is coming in the near future where the application can run the Silverlight client offline (by synchronizing the data using Mesh I assume), and on the device.
  • Get the Live Framework CTP at www.azure.com
  • Office 14 Preview – we got an amazing demo of OneNote, Word and Excel running both on the client as well as online (Office Web apps), and synchronizing all that information by sharing and collaborating with several users through Office Live Workspace.
    The amazing thing here for me is that you get a fully working Word/OneNote/Excel on the browser using the power of Silverlight.

And now I would like to get a few of the CTPs. Will do that after taking the chance to follow a few sessions still today.