Highlights

  • Scott Gu Rickrolls the entire PDC audience
  • Silverlight 4 beta is out now!
  • Silverlight can now access local resources on your computer like cameras, filesystem, drag/drop support
  • Silverlight has updated WCF support
  • IE9 is announced
  • Work on IE9 has been going on for 3-4 weeks. Performance and Acid3 results are improving
  • There will be videos on http://channel9.msdn.com/

Steve sinofsky comes on stage
Says win7 has been out for a few weeks now, it has been really humbling.
Will discuss what they learnt from Win7
Some people were saying "just fix these few things", but they knew it wasn't just about solving problem
Their windows 7 blog was useful, there were over 6,000 comments and 10,000 emails with suggestions.
A MASSIVE part of Win7 development was how to handle just the sheer volume suggestions.
The telemetry they built into win7 helped heaps. The hardware reliability, which bits were slow or fast, was the installation of new drivers successful?
The telemetry is like a "black box recorder" of your computer
80% of customers voluntarily opt in to the telemetry feedback.
When applications crash, they send the memory dump via watson back to Microsoft to help sort out issuse.
They showed the "We Share your Pain" video :-) the video where they shock the programmer that wrote the piece of code that is annoying you

  • They had ~1,730,000 feedback reports sent back.
  • ~91,500 uniqe external devices plugged in
  • 14,000 unique PRINTERS plugged in
  • 46,000,000 times that areo shake and snap were used
  • 55% of people were using 1024x768 as the screen resolution

Talks about UAC, shows a video about it (that we can't see via streaming due to Intellectual Property issues)
Goes back to him, he says "and when we are trying out other new features like aero snap, we do the usability testing like this" and it cuts to another video that we aren't allowed to view.
Developing for Windows 7, what are the opportunities?
HD audio/video, new sensors, jump lists

Mike comes up on stage to talk about "new things in the ecosystem" (34 mins)
Shows an eeepc, says it came out 2 years ago. Customers were really interested in the concept.
Netbooks are now the fastest growing category of computers now
Showing a gaming PC that is liquid cooled. Showing off DirectX11
Showing a demo of 10,000 particles doing things, but it is all hardware accelerated. No CPU processing time, it is all being done on the GPU.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/directcompute.html
Showing a "Server replacement laptop". Corei7 raid5 drives, running hyperv with 3 virtual machines.
The ribbon UI feature is built into Win7 so you can use in your apps. Works well with touch
Showing how firefox supports taskbar preview, google chrome supports jump lists (he comments how he changed the default start page to to bing)

Back to just sinofsky (45 mins)
When they were building win7, they wanted to know what is it like to build a new piece of hardware? Trying to understand the flow
They decided to build their own laptop from scratch to test it out. Made a tablet pc with all the cool specs, to see how it all hangs together.
Took them about 3months to put it all together.
They announce it as the "windows 7 PDC laptop", they are giving one to each of the attendees

Internet explorer (48 mins)
I want to talk about four things, show you where we are heading.
They learnt about "responsible engineering, trustworthy experience, real world interop, innovate technologies.
One of the most talked about and liked features is around privacy and trustworthiness
Said that they made a lot of advances around incorporating web standards...
Want to continue to make sure that IE is the best featured web browser on windows.
They are working on IE9.
Standards. Admit that they need to do more around Acid3 test. Want to "be responsible" when looking at new things like HTML5
Talking about the "ACID score", in IE8 they were at 20/100, in IE9 today they are at 32/100
(in comparison, FF is at 70+ and opera is at 100)
Show graphs that there is a lot of work that goes into getting a page on your screen, different sites spend different amout of time in the subsystems (scripts, rendering, etc.)
Show a graph of performance. IE6 was far away. IE8 was still much slower than FF, chrome, etc.
IE9 now is at about the same speed as all the other browsers now.
And these are early builds of IE9 , they have only just started work on IE9 engine for 3-5 weeks
The text rending engine will take advantage of all the clear text technologies, makes it clearer than just straight GDI in IE today
Showing a demo of bing maps. Using GDI rendering they were getting ~13fps. They made the rendering engine now hardware accelerated (as in the screen rendering) and it sped up heaps.
No roadmap for IE9 yet
There will be videos on Channl9 today on IE9

Scott Guthrie comes on stage to talk about Silverlight (1:03)
In silverlight 3 then enabled hardware accelerated video rendering
They shipped blend 3 with sketchflow
Shows a video about rapid prototyping with sketchflow
A bunch of sites have used steaming (mostly sporting websites) in HD
Lots of big name companies are using it to create scientific apps, line of business apps.
Last year they were at 33% penetration, today there are on 45% of internet connected desktops.

Announcing Silverlight 4

  • Focusing on 3 things
  • Media
  • Business apps
  • Beyond the browser
  • Can access webcam & microphone now
  • Supporting DRM now... For some reason that feature didn't get any applause

Demoing the new webcam stuff.
Can apply pixel shaders over the webcam feed. All the usual distortion effects. They are super fast!
Scott Gu took a random photo and then updated his twitter profile pic as it.
You can get the raw feed of the webcam feed, so they show barcode reading. He scans a copy of the barcode of his ASP.Net MVC book, then it looked it up on Amazon.
Demoing smooth streaming
Demoing other video effects, you can do slow motion, and a few others
Announcing Silverlight media (pack?) that you can use to do those effects
Smooth steaming is available on browsers that don't have plugins (like iPhone), they enable HTTP streaming and they pick it up
http://www.iis.net/iphone

New Silverlight4 features

  • Programmatic printing support
  • Clipboard access
  • Right click
  • Mouse wheel
  • Implicit styling
  • Drag/drop files into silverlight
  • Bidi & RightToLeft text
  • Can host HTML as a control inside your app
  • Commanding and MVVM!

Shows an app that has English test, arabic, japanese.
Can right click in the app to bring up a context menu.
Copies the text
Pastes in a datagrid control from excel into the silverlight textbox
He drags a word doc from the desktop onto the silverlight app, the app put all the text from the document into the textbox.
He clicks print and the print dialog comes up.
Shows a Silverlight app that has a HTML control, so he has his app with bing.com in a control.
Because it is still a normal control, you can do all the normal crazy things you can do with controls, he makes the control go all about the place, he makes the bing page split up into a jigsaw puzzle and the pieces scatter around the screen.
All the usual plugins work
So he brings up youtube.com and rickrolls everyone
While the video is playing, he makes it into a puzzle again, the video is still playing in all the scattered pieces

  • Share assemblies across SL & .net 4.0!!!!
  • Data binding improvements
  • UDP multicast support
  • Peer to peer networking.
  • REST enhancements
  • WCF improvements (different streaming, up to 400% faster)
  • WCF RIA services
  • VS2010 support
  • WYSIWYG desigin
  • XAML intellisense improvements
  • Databinding enhancements
  • WCF RIA services integration

Scott Hanselman comes on stage to demo how do develop in it (1:30)
His demo is here http://jeffhandley.com/archive/2009/11/18/contososales.aspx
Buliding a RIA services silverlight app inside VS2010
He is using an EDMX data model
Data model has many Stores have many Contacts (so has a join table)
Creates a new Contact Service
All the WCF methods are returning Iqueryable
New xaml page
The data sources window shows his service
He drags it onto his silverlight window and it auto creates a datagrid and binds it.
The Datasources window works as usual, can see all the fields, can set the control type, drag out. Can make them a ListBox
He is using implicit styling so the ListBoxes look good by default.
He can right click controls and tell them to dock fill
He clicks his control, in the properties window there is a new "styles browser"
Dragging on data pagers
The service is saying that one of the data properties is a URL, so scott changes the control to image, drags it onto the page.
Camel case intellisense support (like resharper)
Brings up the data model, shows annotations. Can now enforce rules on the data which are client side and server side validated automatically (like age must be >18)

Rep from Snapflow comes on stage (1:38)
Wants people to be able to create applications without "writing a line of code"
Well actually no, this is a "business logic" mapper.
Workflow foundation on steroids?
Yep it isn't anywhere near as sophisticated as he claims it is, just a silverlight based workflow creator.

Just scott on stage (1:42)

New Silverlight 4 Out Of Browser features

  • Windowing APIs
  • Notification popups
  • HTML support
  • Drop target

You can say that this application MUST run in elevated mode, if the user grants it then you get

  • Custom window chrome
  • Can access local file system
  • Cross site network
  • Keyboard in full screen mode
  • Hardware device access
  • COM automation support

If you had office installed, you could now query outlook for your calendar from silverlight

Access the Win7 sensor information

  • Silverlight 4 is twice as fast
  • 30% faster startup
  • New profiling support! I'm looking forward to this one

 

Brial Goldfarb on stage (1:47)
Showing a Silverlight 4 trusted application for accessing Facebook
So he has a custom chrome
Can programmatically move the window around the screen because of this, can make it go into "mini mode"
He uses COM automation, brings in his outlook calendar into silverlight.
Reads his friends feeds, can see the embedded videos in his feeds, can play the youtube vids in his app.
Wants to upload new photos, so he drag and drops a bunch of photos on, he can see them in silverlight and starts tagging them
Takes a photo, plugs the camera in. The app pops up a notification that camera was plugged in, and brings in the new photo.
Will be shipped as a reference sample

Just scott (1:56)
You can vote on the next silverlight features using their website.
When is silverlight4 coming out?
Beta: SL4 beta is now available for download
Final release: first half 2010

By David Burela