Tuesday, September 13 was the official first day of PDC. I had been in meetings all day Monday but since they are covered by NDA I decided not to blog them :)

Here are my notes from the sessions that I attended. They are pretty much how I wrote them down. I hope that they will help you out.

Keynote - Bill Gates
The 3 pillars of Vista are confident, clear, connected.
Office 12 will release in the same timeframe as Windows Vista.
Virtual folders in Vista give you a flat view of all the data accross your machine.
The Windows sidebar is for realtime data. You can add gadgets to the sidebar. The sideshow is for auxilliary displays on laptops. You can get more information at microsoftsideshow.com.
Parental controls in Vista. Nice.
Dynamic Protection Service - Opt-in service - block known and suspected phishing sites.
Quicktabs - slide view of open tabs in IE 7.
Print preview in IE 7 lets you shrink to a single page and turn on and off headers and footers.
IE 7 will discover RSS feeds and let you search on them.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM integrates RSS and publishes info to clients/customers.

Office 12 gets a new UI with tabs and no dropdowns menus.
Office 12 has buttons for predefined formatting with live previews.

SharePoint Portal Server 12 will have a new library for PowerPoint slides.

In Outlook 12 the ToDo bar will have date and time on tasks.
Preview attachments in the preview pane.
RSS in Outlook integrated with IE 7 subscriptions. Read in Outlook what you subscribe to in IE 7.
Outlook subscribe to document library and pull down documents for offline viewing.

Server will be a rich point of integration. WSS will replace many department level file servers.

Keynote - Jim Alchin
Vista Beta 2 will be a broad reach beta.
Network Access Protection - machines go into quarantine until they can be verified.
Hardware monitoring built in.
Goal of 50% fewer reboots.
File system is transacted.
Running as a standard user is the default.
Superfetch - enhances memory manager to look over time to optimize the system.
USB memory sticks can become part of the virtual memory. With writethrough you don't have to worry about loosing data. With 2x encryption the page file is safe.
Low integrity mode = apps are sandboxed.

Lap around technologies
ATLAS will support AJAX programming.
WPF runtime can run in browser, windows, etc.
WPF/E = Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere. Strict subset of WPF that uses Javascript.
LINQ = Language Integrated Query
InfoCards - Federated identity providers, common UX dialog. Can integrate using WS-*

If you can foreach something you can use LINQ to query it.
DLINQ - map relational data to classes
XLINQ - modernized DOM

beta.asp.net - download ATLAS.
You can build sidebar components as ATLAS components.

Download Microsoft Max (photo sharing application that showcases WPF and WCF) from http://www.microsoft.com/max

The Northface showed off an application. There will be a whitepaper on MSDN on how they did it.
Windows Vista Partner Showcase - $100 Million program for Vista apps.

Preview of "Digital Locker" for buying software at windowsmarketplacelabs.com

OFF201 - Office "12": Introduction to the Programmable Customization Model for the Office 12 User Experience (Part 1)
New UI prompted by number of menu items, toolbars, and task panes getting out of hand.
"Sense of Mastery" - finite space to search for functionality. Very predictable. Simplify through contextualization.
"Consistency is good but homgeneity is not" so standardize where it makes sens but don't force it. Make everything make sense.
The first tab in Word 12 accounts for 90% of the clicks.
UI replaces menus and toolbars. If it is not in the ribbon it is not in the product.
Show the result of command and not the command itself.
The main means of customization is the quick access tool bar (or quick launch tool bar). It sits between the file menu and the first tab.
Dialog boxes remain in the UI. You use them to set advanced functionality. "Dialog Launchers" from a chunk or dialog let you get to the dialog box.
"Floatie" is an on-object floating toolbar with most commonly used commands so you don't have to move the moue to the top of the screen.
"Super Tooltips" show pictures or other information. Pressing F1 will bring up context help.
Ctrl key shortcuts will stay the same.
"Key Tips" make every tab and command keyboard available. Use Alt + a letter to get to something. It will take about the same number of keyboard strokes as Word 2003.
There is no "classic mode". Toolbars and menus have been removed from the product.
UI extensibility through XML files.
Speaker blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh

OFF302 - Office "12": Introduction to the Programmable Customization Model for the Office 12 User Experience (Part 2)
Developers can change the ribbon but not the quick launch toolbar.
New codeing model code named RibbonX. You can add your own meny or hook into existing menus including context menus.
RibbonX works the same in all office applications!
Things you can't customize with RibbonX - status bar, floatie, inside built-in chunks, right click menus (existing Word 2003 customization continues to work). Global repurposing works regardless of where the command is executed from.
Implement IMsoRibbonExtensibiility - Return markup using GetCustomUI so you can change the UI returned based on who the person is or other factors.
Documentation will be available with Beta 1.