First day at the PDC05 then:

It all started off when we were waiting for the bus to the conference centre when a smart but wierd looking bloke with a suit and briefcase asked us for some money to feed his daughter. I must say these beggars have cleaned their act up since the last Hollywood movie I saw.

Got in and was glad we registered the night before as there were crowds of people. Bill Gates gave the keynote and we watched a video of him dancing....yes that's right.

Then we were bombarded with soundbites of the direction that Microsoft were going in and by lunch time my head was spinning. I needed some food and I needed it fast. The food wasn't fact it was very nice chicken and beef with a ricey something and I hadn't got time for a big cake as we had to rush off to the first of the afternoon sessions.

This was then an anti climax as I made a mistake as sat through an indigo presentation that didn't go over my head, more like under my backside as it was just so dull. I decided to join Mike for an Office based one next and the speaker was very clear although he didn't need to show us his basic message box samples then change to message so we belived that the code was running. We skipped the next session then to go and have fact to faces with the some of the MS guys and then did some hands on labs around the new Office product which raised as many questions as it answered. sigh...

So here is my techie overview of the day and I may have got some of this mixed up because I'm still suffering from lack of sleep and getting very hungry.

Avalon is now called Windows Presentation services.

Indigo is now called Windows Data Services.

Windows Vista is starting to look really cool from the UI perspective the way you can tab between windows looks awesome.

New IE has tabbed browing and a great thumbnail style feature to enable you to pick a window and some cool anti Phishing stuff built in to the address bar (it glows red). We knew the printing was being fixed but it will also remove headers.

There is a new sidebar in Vista that developers can write Gadjets for.

Parental controls for the whole system based on the games ratings. Not sure if this spreads to browing.

RSS subscriptions is built into the core so can be used by other applications and this includes Outlook 12.

We saw a game demo from Cry-Tech who did Far Cry. I'm a big fan of Far Cry and if this is the next game from them I'm buying a new PC.

Standard user will be the default in Vista to improve security.

We saw a preview of something called the Link Project and it was awesome so I'm going to mention this at another time when I've found out exactly what it is.

North face demoed an catalogue style app which looked great and apparently only took them 6 weeks. Which may have been true as it was the graphics that stood out.

One thing I did find out from the labs was about a new System.Packaging namespace within WinFX which will allow you to work with the new Office 12 file formats.

I also found out that a tablet PC is near useless without One-Note.

Well thats about it for day 1 I need to rest my brain now.

Ta Ta.