Brandon Fuller

PDC 2003: Day 1

Today was the first day of the Microsoft PDC here in Los Angeles. Its basically all the big Microsoft geeks in the same building at the same time. So this morning, Bill Gates ran through lots of cool demos of Longhorn, the next Microsoft O/S. A lot of the stuff was snazzy stuff that kinda made things more Mac-like if that makes sense. They had a hilarious video where they did a “Behind the Music”-like spoof on the PC. They had all these famous people interviewed in it like Bill Clinton, Puffy, and others.

One of the cooler, yet scary, things for me was when they showed was the way they improved ad-hoc conferencing. They had this new feature that allowed you to easily publish a meeting over a network and people could join. It was literally one or two clicks and people were seeing your desktop. It was very seemless and quick. They also built some of the file sharing stuff right into the O/S so you could right-click on a doc and instantly transfer it to other online contacts through replication. Makes conferencing very easy…if you have all the same tools.

I just finished up a session on ASP.NET Whidbey. This stuff is awesome! Now that they have the fundamentals of the framework done, it seems they are just cranking on the controls that people actually need and use. They showed controls that deal with all the login activities, more advanced data grids, navigation breadcrumbs, and the coolest — personalization. They have all the controls you need to make your site work just like My Yahoo! — with the content modules and everything. You can drag and drop modules and while you do it, it shows a shadow of the content. Its really neat. And they wrote about 10 lines of code to make it all happen. Man, if you wait long enough, they might just write a control that does everything you need — oh, wait…what will I do then?