Day 1: PDC '05 kicks off with BillG's keynote (Part 1)

I actually arrived a few minutes late to the keynote this morning, thanks to the horrible, but predictable traffic on the I-5 freeway. Luckily, I did manage to get a pretty good seat not too far from the front.

I hope all of you had a chance to watch the live video stream of the keynote! Gates started off the conference with his views of the industry and his vision for the future. An amusing highlight of his talk was the Napolean Dynamite video which was originally created for his college/university visits.

Gates later turned the stage over to Chris Caposella who gave us some great demos of Windows Vista Build 5219 and a build of Office 12.

Highlights of Vista 5219:

- Quick previews when hovering over taskbar tiles for open applications. This is especially handy when you have lots of windows open and all you can see on the taskbar tile is an ellipsis. The "wow-factor" comes from the fact that these previews are live, meaning that if you hover over the taskbar tile of something like a WMP window, the video continues to play in the preview that's displayed.
- The new Alt+Tab UI is pretty slick, and again, displays "live" previews of open windows/apps.
- The 3D card-stack of window previews that we saw in earlier builds but later disappeared is back.
- The Sidebar is back and looks quite a bit cleaner than it used to be. Developers can create their own "gadgets" that pin themselves to the sidebar and can also be dragged off onto the desktop. Chris showed off a custom WMP gadget with some fancy animation effects.
- Sideshow: The concept of gadgets moves beyond the sidebar/desktop and onto auxiliary displays built into Vista-generation laptops that we saw at WinHEC in April. Developers can create custom gadgets for these displays that display useful information when the laptop is off (or on, depending on what the gadget does). One of the custom gadgets we saw was displayed flight information from Expedia.
- IE 7 tabbed browsing: People previously wondered if Microsoft was just playing catch-up with Opera, Firefox and other browsers with regards to the tabbed browsing implementation in IE 7. Turns out there was something we hadn't seen before - tab previews. Clicking a little button on the toolbar opens up a tiled view of all the tabs so that you can quickly see what's open in each tab. This solves the clutter problem when lots of tabs are open simultaneously. You can also close individual tabs from this live preview view. Cool stuff.

I may have missed some stuff since I'm trying to write this post while simultaneously listening in to a breakout session. I'll update this post if I remember anything else later. I'll also post more about the Office 12 demo, and Jim Allchin's keynote (along with the associated demos) soon.

Tags: Vista, Longhorn, PDC05