Wow. The Day 2 keynote was pretty amazing and I am sure that I am going to forget something in my mental recap. Here goes.

1st, Steven Sinofsky unveiled Windows 7. There is a lot of new stuff and there was a great reaction from the audience to this. Here is the big things that I remember from the demos - yes I am sure I forget something

  1. Device orientation based on location - For example, if your machine is connected to your office network, your default printer will be different from the default printer, if you are connecting to your home office.
  2. Data synchronization
  3. Pretty cool windows management - docking and undocking windows
  4. New task bar which contains a lot more information about the applications running - together with a great dev story. There is a lot a pick list which can be enhanced by the application.
  5. Libraries - Allows you to integrate directories from different locations into one Library which is far easier to work with for the user. There is a developer API which allows you to integrate to this.
  6. Enhanced ( Steve said ever 15 years ) applications such as Wordpad and Paint which now include the Windows Ribbon Bar. Lots of applause for this. Also Wordpad supports OpenXML and ODF!!!
  7. New connected experience with Live Applications. Applications such as Hotmail, Movie Maker, Photo gallery will not be installed on Windows 7 out of the box, but will be installable through Live to extend the experience to the web. These apps will also support the ribbon bar!!!
  8. Touch - Showed how normal apps can take advantage of Touch and how developer can extend for touch.
  9. Dramatic improvements in projecting through a simple Windows Key. Also there is a new UI to help with Dual Monitor Support.
  10. Remote Access now supports Dual Monitors. Huge applause.
  11. Showed how they have optimized for the NetBook device ( showed this )
  12. Great new support for DirectX
  13. UAC now has different levels of control
  14. Lots of work in the kernel to improve bootup time and index performance.
  15. I am sure I missed something.....

 

Next was Scott Gu. Again lots of new news about Silverlight and VS 2010. So here is what I saw ( in no order ).

 

  1. Talked about WPF and the new features in the .NET 3.5 SP1 release, specifically how you can integrate the power of WPF with DirectX.
  2. Showed new controls for WPF such as a Ribbon Bar.
  3. Announced a new extention to IIS which provide highly efficient media streaming based on the learning from the NBC Olympics project.
  4. Introduced the Silverlight Toolkit that is a collection of Silverlight controls, components and utilities made available outside the normal Silverlight release cycle.
  5. Showed off some of the new extensibility in the VS2010 developer environment which will be written in WPF. Showed a demo of a module which enhanced the comments sections of the source code in the editor and how easy it was to config ( drag and go ).
  6. Talk about the Silverlight editor which will be in VS2010

 

Next was David Treadwell. He talked about Live Mesh and show you can Meshify your applications using the Live Framework.  There was a cool demo which showed how the details of your Mesh experience could be easily integrated into your applications.

 

It finally finished with a view of Office Live and how they are working to improve the collaboration between people working on a document together in the next release of Office. Lots of great sync demos and updates.

 

Overall this was an awesome keynote.....