Whats cool about Longhorn Server?

It has been a week since the PDC!! I guess I still have a little of a hang over after spending what seemed like the last three months driving to that week.

Life for me was all about day 3 and Bob's keynote and helping prep the deck and the demos to ensure that they resonated well with the professional developer audeince. I have to say it went really well and I felt he really wanted to be there, stayed on stage when the people came on to do the demos and was really engaged with the audience. It seems that the applause came from a number of areas; these were all the demos around the system definition model (SDM ) which automatically created a MOM Management Pack and installers based on the SDM created in Visual Studio, federated Identity which was a major theme and of course IIS7. People loved the fact that the metabase is dead.....that heavens.... and the compontentization and extensibility is finally there.

So what does life look like now? Well my team has to kick start a new set of programs focused on Windows Server Longhorn adoption, focused on two key areas for now. These are all around the Application Platform ( Windows Communications Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation and Identity - ADFS and Infocard, IIS7 and Management ) which is an amazing combination and secondly the new core fundimentals such as storage, transaction file system,  that are in the base platform.

It is going to be an interesting rest of the year, and I want to provide you with an insight into the areas which we are driving and some of the conflicts along the way.

First stop around the application platform was the creation of a community site for Windows Workflow Foundation. This was created for the launch of the technology last Tuesday in Eric's keynote and provides a place for people to get information on newgroups, whitepapers and more importatntly custom activities which are created by the product team and the community. Traffic has been amazing so far. We just have to make sure that this keeps up. We have great linkage in MSN search, but Google has not picked us up yet.. why are they so slow....

Second ... is HIRING :-) I am hiring a new Technical Evangelist who will lead the early adoption evangelism efforts for Windows Server Longhorn as a whole, specifically around the core platform, but also bringing together all the work we are doing around the application platform too. This is going to be a very cool role as this person would have to engage with all the product groups and build a program which can support our key partners in the community. I will send you the post when it is up on the Microsoft site.