I was really excited and pleased with the announcements at the build conference today. I didn’t have any previous knowledge about what would be announced but I had some things that I though would make the conference a success. They were:

• A really good Windows 8 OS with a polished look and feel
• Good tooling in Visual Studio to make it easy to create applications for Windows 8
• Clarification on the story about HTML5, CSS, Silverlight, and WPF
• A timeline on when all this goodness will be available

I didn’t get everything I wanted but I am very pleased with what I did get from today.

I was excited by the keynote. I can’t remember being this excited by a Microsoft product announcement in a long time. There were some glitches and I have seen some interesting things on the slate that I have as far as performance goes but nothing that was repeatable so I am not sure what is causing it. For the record most of the problems I am seeing are related to networking but the network on my laptop is dropping its connection a lot so it might not be related to Windows 8. Overall I think that for a developer preview this is a very polished build.

I saw some things I really liked in the next version of Visual Studio. I like what I saw of the tools and controls. What I was hoping for but didn’t see was a way to make CSS easier. Since I am not a good designer I wanted to see templates like those in PowerPoint that would get me most of the way to a good design. I am told that this is possible now but IO haven’t really seen any demos of this feature.

With the architecture slides and the discussion around the different languages it seems that Silverlight and WPF as separate technologies will be subsumed into the Windows Runtime (RT) and that the technology will live on but the branding will go away. I am planning on attending more sessions to make sure that this is the case.

We were told that Windows 8 will be released when it meets quality bars and not on some timeline.

I am very excited about Windows 8 and I am sure that through the rest of the week I will learn more about how Windows 8, Windows Phone, and Azure will work together to create a vision of the future of computing.