So the show is now underway. Well, for some people it started yesterday already, with some preconference stuff. But today was the keynote speech from Bill Gates and then Jim Allchin, who is vice president for the platform group if I remember correctly. You will have to look it up to be sure. Bill's speeches are not very exciting or energetic. I've posted most of his slides, and you can basically just read these slides to know what he was talking about. After that, Jim Allchin presented more on Longhorn, the next version of Windows.

Actually, they call it the event the 'PDC for Longhorn'. I knew that they were going to talk a lot about this product, but other new stuff, like Yukon and Whidbey, are going to be released sooner, so I figured that it would get an even amount of attention. Not so, at least not in this presenttation. Longhorn is a major shift from the traditional operating systems that we all have either love or have to live with. I'm not sure what to mention when talking about the key features, but especially the UI is getting a big overhaul. Now you might think that we do not need more teletubby-style backgrounds and fancy animated menus, and you're right. But even if these things will still be available in Longhorn, it's more than that.

The new UI is designed around a new interface layer called Avalon. This layer is vector-based, so items on your screen can automatically scale from tiny to huge. It's also supposed to increase performance, but I have yet to see proof of that. Someone from Dell told me that you would need at least a 2.6Ghz machine to run the preview with acceptable performance. Of course, this is all very early in the release cycle. They are not even calling it an alpha release. But it is supposed to ship in 2005. By that time, according to Bill Gates, the average desktop computer has a dual core 5 Ghz processor and more than 2GB of internal memory (RAM that is). It'll probably run just fine on that kind of hardware.

So Avalon is the new way of displaying information to the end user. Be aware, Longhorn is a desktop operating system, not intended for servers. The presentation layer of an application can now be completely declarative. This means that you can write you UI in XAML which is the MS specification based completely on XML. Besides Avalon there's the new WinFS filesystem that actually sits on top of the traditional NTFS. WinFS is a database-centric storage facility in your OS, that allows you to store, organize, search and retrieve information in various ways. You are no longer stuck with a static folder structure that allows only for one type of organization, say by document-subject. This static structure becomes problematic when you are looking to documents all written by the same author, or in a specific date-range. With WinFS you can use the default available attributes or create your own, to organize your data in different structures, depending on the specific demands at that time.

Then there's Indigo, which is the new communication layer within the OS, relying heavily on XML Web Services (of course, since Don Box is the chief architect for this bit). Through so-called 'ports' that are available for developers in the OS framework you can hook your application up to various sources of information and display or process it. Like I said, this is based on Web Services. Beneath all this is the new OS api they call WinFX. It's the successor to DOS, Win16 and the Win32 api. They didn't spend much time on this part of the new software. After the keynote speeches and lunch I tried to get into a session. But it was cancelled, since the host was delayed because of the fires that are surrounding LA and even got to San Diego. Many people got stuck and couldn't be in LA on time.

So I entered another session on Avalon that had already started, but there was not much we didn't already get a glimpse from during the keynote. I had a seperate meeting with the people from the CodeWise community. It was nice to see the people behind popular websites like www.dotnetjunkies.com and www.codeproject.com. I cannot discuss much of this meeting because it's under NDA, but it has something to do with new features for Visual Studio 'Whidbey' and community websites. There was a party afterwards for people in the Visual Studio Integration Program, and I also had an invitation. It was cocktail style, with drinks and snacks and a couple of people making music. Don Box and Carl Franklin were among the bandmembers.

It's been quite and interesting day, and even though I had just formatted the memorycard for my digital camera, I forgot to charge the battery, so at the end of the morning I could not take much pictures anymore. I'll be sure to charge it tonight. The pictures I have taken will show up in the Gallery to the left of this page.