Microsoft Vista / Office 2007 Launch

Microsoft hosted a joint launch event for Microsoft Vista, Office 2007 and Exchange Server 2007 at the Toronto Congress Center earlier today. Pretty exciting stuff! The keynote was a little cheesy and could have used a little more inspiration - this is, after all, the biggest Microsoft launch event ever. Vista and Office 2007 are the bread and butter components of Microsoft's market, a little marketing and showmanship certainly wouldn't be looked down upon. Instead we received a dry, business oriented, 'how Microsoft software can help your organization' spiel. Not the most exciting way to kick off the day.

The actual event was separated into three different tracks: Business Value, IT Infrastructure and Developer. I signed up for the Dev. Track - where all the exciting stuff happened! We got a bird's eye view of the core components of Vista: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Windows Workflow (WF) and Cardspace.

The designer/HCI guy that I am, I was primarily interested in WPF. They demoed some of the functionality and did a quick how-to on XAML and creating widgets for the new Vista sidebar. Nothing outrageous, but neat nonetheless. Now, to my surprise, it was actually WF and WCF that left me with a much better impression - probably because I haven't read much on either prior to the event.

Windows Workflow (WF) looked very interesting - it reminded me of my Soft. Eng. / Specification courses. Essentially, its a Visual Studio add-on that allows you to create sequential (think SDL), or state machine diagrams. But here is the catch, they are not diagrams, it's actual code - except in a visual format. The motivation for this is a little fuzzy to me ('to model business processes') but the implementation is interesting. I wonder if you could translate this capability to visualize your normal C# code. It would be neat to see an SDL decomposition of your standard function/program.

Windows Communicaton Foundation (WCF), formally known as 'Indigo', also sports neat functionality. The framework unifies Vista's remoting capabilities in a single package (Distributed Transaction, Queuing, .NET Remoting, etc). From the code demos, it's nothing unusual - standard interface and stub generators, just like you would expect. However, the unified framework is neat. The communications protocols are abstracted and offer out of the box support for standard UDP/TCP models, and check this out, p2p! Very cool stuff. P2P uses a mesh protocol and powers Windows Meeting Spaces in Vista. I am definitely looking forward to playing with p2p meshes in the future.

It was a worthwhile event with some great demonstrations. A few technical mishaps along the way (one of the speakers couldn't run the demo due to read-only problems on his disk), but nothing unusual for a Microsoft launch (if you know what I mean). Great speakers, great software. I'm looking forward to getting my hands on Vista once 2007 rolls around.