A smorgasbord of tasty PDC tidbits and photos!
The internet is abuzz with news from the early proceedings here at the PDC in Los Angeles. Keep up with all the announcements at the MSDN PDC site.
I posted my first set of PDC photos up at my MSN Space. Most of the shots are from the 2 keynotes. I thought it may be nice for some of you to put faces to famous names.
The Office 12 Interface caused a splash yesterday; here are some images of Office 12 that have already hit the web [NOTE: External link, not official content]. The server side of Office 12, and its integration with Sharepoint etc., is really where most of the action is.
Max is a demonstration of WinFX (Avalon and Indigo): a photo sharing application that lets you create beautiful online photo albums. For more information, take a look at the Max pages here.
Another great demo application of WinFX I saw on the convention floor was Mitch Walker's Mantis, a game built with Avalon and Indigo. It's currently a tech preview and will eventually turn into a Terrarium-style coding application. See Mitch's blog for more.
Speaking of Avalon, Tim Sneath's very comprehensive guide to Avalonis available at that link.
Windows Workflow Foundation was the pillar of WinFX newly introduced this morning. For anyone developing for human and machine workflows, this is big news.
And after much speculation, the Expression line of designer tools has been announced. Expression will mean that for those of us developers who, like me, have all the artistic ability of a cluster of colour-blind hedgehogs in a bag, we can now very ably empower designers and deeply incorporate them into the development process.
I am delighted that LINQ, the Language Integrated Query project, has been announced, discussed, and distributed in pre-release form on the conference DVDs. I have had a chance to play with LINQ a little internally, and with my developer hat on, I can't say enough how much I think this is going to make data access better. Dare I say "revolutionize?" Yup. I dare.