PDC2005 Keynote - Search, RSS and Pretty UIs

I’m sitting in the overflow room at PDC with Chuck watching the keynote (well, most of it at least). We’ve just seen some very nice (if not very developer-focused) demos of Windows Vista and Office 12. Highlights so far for me are the pervasive search (across both Vista and Office 12) and the ability to drop slides into a PPT presentation from a Sharepoint slide gallery and have the presentation kept up to date when the slide changes in the gallery. The other really neat thing is the tight integration of RSS throughout both Vista and Office 12.

Jim Alchin’s just showed Window 1.0 on an old IBM XT! It booted very quickly, and the graphics are pretty much as I remember.

Jim’s “very confident” of Vista broad availability by end of 2006

Vista Superfetch  is pretty cool – remembering what the machine has opened in the past to anticipate what you’re going to open in the future and speed things up. The other really neat thing Jim showed was plugging in a USB key and adding 512 MB  “Ram” to the box. I’ll be interested to see how that USB key’s memory access performs as compared to, say, DDR2.

AJAX implementation called “Atlas”.

Nice Windows Presentation Foundation demo of an app (NetFlix) running on desktop, tablet, MCE and SmartPhone.

More to follow …

I’ve got a bunch of great sessions lined up for today and I’ll report on those as I go.

Last night we caught up with a lot of the MS RDs at a great middle-eastern restaurant.

Tonight I’ll be at the Aussie get together at PDC underground.

PDC2005