My day started off by having a quick bite with Doug Seven of DotNetJunkies and SqlJunkies fame. Amazingly enough we work in the same building @ ms, but have never met - it’s cool b/c we both started community projects for developers (him: DotNetJunkies and me: DotNetConnect) before coming to ms and we are both now in the developer focused group. We have plans to collab on some stuff coming up - mostly internal process stuff (unit test checkin policies w/ VSTS and SCM), but it could eventually turn into some new cool dev outreach project.
The keynote was great this morning.
O’Reilly asked Bill how he was going to manage to compete when products ms ships are on a few year ship cycle. Bill’s response was great. To sum up, it depends on the product type being shipped. Sql and Windows take much longer b/c of the testing and stabilization that needs to happen. Where as IE and Messenger can ship more frequently because they are not a huge product and agile processes can be used to dev them. My group is looking at smaller quarterly releases which work well because of the nature of the product (platform). Bottom line, is it depends, which gets into the whole “which dev process do I use conversation”…agile/scrum work for a lot of projects, but with a project like Sql or Windows it would be extremely risky b/c of size of the product.
The WPF demo was great…although I would have like to of seen more code. I’m sure they’ll be more later.
For IE7 the features that stuck out for me are the Open Search discovery stuff, tab preview, tab grouping, easy homepage setting, printing (fixed!), print preview (including easy way to change margins) and zooming. Beta 2 Preview was released today, definitely install and check these features out…
Security wise InfoCard looks very interesting. It’s a new identity management system that will eventually replace username/password login sites.
Client experience wise we dug into Simple List Extensions and how amazon, yahoo and ebay are using to provide a rich feed service for searches, baskets, etc.
Lastly Scottgu demo’d his Atlas todo list site from scratch using the newly released build of Atlas. It took him only about 10 mins to create the whole site from scratch. It included inline editing, progress updater and lots of other cool stuff. You can see the full video here.
I’ll post more info tonight…I’ve got to go do some xbox’in.