I’ve been asked a few times lately about what’s developers should find cool about Vista besides the .NET Framework 3.0, and I figured I should post my response here too.  I can’t say enough good stuff about the native APIs in Vista – we’ve been pretty busy talking about the .NET Framework 3.0, but the native APIs deserve serious love as well.  You’ve probably already heard that there are 7000 new native APIs in Vista.  Here are my favorite features:

• Sidebar:  The Windows Vista Sidebar Gadgets platform lets you create a variety of customizable mini-applications that offer users information at a glance.  You can use JavaScript and DHTML to create rich gadgets that have access to the entire Vista platform, so you can keep your users in touch with the information they want.
• P2P / People Near Me:  The Vista P2P platform includes powerful native APIs that help you build peer-to-peer applications.  The functionality in the Vista platform takes care of the infrastructure for discovery, connection, and communication between applications, whether we’re talking about two parties or on a multi-party mesh.  The P2P functionality transparently plugs into DNS, so peers can easily find and communicate with each other across the internet.  And the People Near Me feature locates other users on the same Internet access point.  The platform can even create an ad-hoc network directly between users who aren’t connected to the Internet.  (This – provisioning an ad-hoc wireless network between users who aren’t already connected to an access point – is one of the coolest bits of technology I can remember seeing.  It’s so cool that I initially didn’t believe the demos.)
• RSS Platform:  the RSS platform (also available as part of the IE7 download) lets you build RSS-enabled applications without rewriting the basic building blocks of RSS infrastructure.  The Common Feed List, Feed Synchronization Engine, and Feed Store in Windows Vista give you support for all major ATOM and RSS formats, background scheduled updates, and APIs that expose a simple object model for feeds.  Including RSS support in your application has never been easier.
• Integrated Search: On Vista, you can programmatically enable users to set properties on files they save.  Through Integrated Search, a user can then search on those properties using the Vista Common File Dialog. You can also write handlers for your file types that plug into the Live Icons thumbnail viewer in Integrated Search, which give users a look at what’s inside the file they’re looking for – the first screen of a video, the first slide in a deck, etc.
• User Account Control (UAC):  As part of our commitment to security, UAC notifies users when an application is going to take an action which requires administrative privileges, and requires users to elevate their privileges with admin credentials in order to run the application.  This helps protect the user against a host of malware attacks.  You can embed a manifest in your applications that will cause Windows Vista to automatically prompt the user to elevate her credentials.  This helps you keep your users safer, whether they’re at home or in the office.

And that’s just scratching the surface.  There’s more stuff in Parental Controls, Crypto Next Generation Services, etc etc.  It’s really pretty remarkable.

I spent some time a couple weeks ago (my, how time flies) at the Grace Hopper Conference in San Diego.  Rear Admiral Grace Hopper was a pioneering female computer scientist, the woman who popularized the term “bug” – I’ve seen the Mark IV in Cambridge, one of the computers she worked on, and I remember being fascinated by the picture of the moth in the works of the Mark II.  The Grace Hopper Conference is the “Celebration of Women in Computing”, run by the Anita Borg Institute, and I was going on behalf of Microsoft Research’s Gender Equity team to talk about Microsoft and (for my own edification) to take a look at the current state of women in technology.  I filled the same role at the last conference in 2004, and it was amazing to me how much better the conference has gotten.  The sponsorship, the speakers, the attendance – everything just gets better each year.  This year we were up to (I think) 1500 attendees.

It’s always odd for me to go to these women’s events.  The demographics, as you might imagine, look very different from those at the other conferences I go to, and having to wait in a line for the bathroom is almost a novelty.  I hold such a complicated position toward the idea of “women in computing” that I’m sometimes confused by it myself.  When I was young and naïve, I more or less believed that everyone should have access to the single level playing field and no one should need “extra help”;  after a few years in the industry I decided that the playing field is neither single nor level and that underrepresented folks need all the help they can get.  These were difficult points for me to reconcile initially, but I’m now comfortable with the ambiguity.

The really hard problem, afaict, is one of execution.

You know, there was more to follow up that sentence, but in writing this I realized I haven’t recently thought about the problem rigorously.  I’ve been involved in a lot of one-on-one discussions about the issue, and I think the other person has usually walked away agreeing that my position is valid (which may partially be because I’ve been making them swallow lots of alcohol while listening to me), but I haven’t tried to put it down on paper in a while.  I’ll have to think more about this and follow up.

<this is one of those half-written posts I was talking about in my last post.  I figured I'd just post it and give it a somewhat provocative title, and that might replace an argument.> 

(as an aside, while I was in lovely, sunny San Diego, I had dinner with Michele Leroux Bustamante, who’s writing a great book on WCF.  It's always good to see our community, and it's almost surprising how someone from the community turns up just about everywhere I go.  Michele also pointed me to some beautiful beaches, so I managed to fulfill my beachgoing duty.)

Then came Beta2, which was exciting.  I love releases, because we can finally get our latest bits in the hands of customers.  (Of course, “latest” is only in a manner of speaking – given all the stabilization work we do on the bits, there’s a significant delay between when we develop them and when we release them publicly.)  As you can imagine, this leads to all sorts of fun.

At Beta2 release (at WinHEC), when we released the Beta2 of Office, Windows Vista + WinFX, and Longhorn Server, I got to sit down with a bunch of journalists and talk to them about the technology.  It’s always intriguing to see what they’re interested, as a lot of those journalists are looking across a broad span of Microsoft technologies, and the questions they ask often reflect the questions our customers have.  I did a PressPass that captures how I think of the technology – I’d love to hear what you think.

I love this message.  Steve’s been doing rockstar work to make WCF work for the full spectrum of web scenarios – whether you’re using POX or SOAP or WS-* compliant messages, WCF gives you more flexibility and maximum reach for your site and the best experience for your clients.  Awesome.

One of the reasons I like working with the WCF team.    Yes, that’s what every day at the office is like.  Well, many days.

It’s the holiday season at Microsoft now, which is a combination of very productive and utterly frustrating.  It’s a great (quiet, uninterrupted) time to work on things I can accomplish myself, but if I need anyone’s help or feedback or approval for anything, I basically have to just give up.  The hallways are quiet and empty, aside from the occasional Christmas carol emanating from someone’s office (or from the singing Christmas tree outside their office).  We’ll see how much I manage to accomplish.