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So, it was time for Ray Ozzie with the friends "du jour" to talk about the front end tools - the keynote yesterday was all about the back end.

First of all he talked about the evolution of the PC and continued with looking at the differences as well as the similarities between development for the PC, the Web and the Mobile platform.

After that it was time for a quick walk thru of Windows 7. My first impression was that I didn't see anything new but small pieces of eye candy and then they talked about how easy it was to connect your work laptop to your home network and sharing music etc. so the second impression was that it was targeted towards the home and entertainment market.

I guess they planned it that way, that we should be a little bit confused and disappointed, because now they turned the focus on what it's going to be for developers and more tech centric information. It turns out that Windows 7 will help us developers interact more closely with OS, like Ribbon UI, Jump Lists, Multi-touch, Ink, DirectX etc. The goal is thst it should have decreased memory, disk I/O and power consumption and att the same time have increased speed (especially faster boot), responsiveness and scaling possibilities.

There was no time plan for release, but possibly a beta early next year and they hoped for a "three year release cycle experience" and that will place the release somewhere around late 2009 - early 2010 if my memory serves me right at this moment.

And then came ScottGu...

He started out with some talk about improvements for developers, the new WPF Toolkit that will work on all versions of Windows. He continued to talk about as well as demoing Visual Studio 2010. It looks nice with lots of functionality that I both have missed as well as functionality that I didn't know I've missed but as soon as I saw it I immediately knew that I would use it. There was a lot of talk about ASP.NET 4 and the web development experience in VS 2010 in general - WebForms, MVC and AJAX... and of course Silverlight with the Silverlight Tooolkit and the Silverlight Designer in VS 2010.

The keynote continued with demonstration and facts about the Live Mesh platform and the Live Framework, quite interesting actually. No directly impact on what I'm doing today but the potential is huge so as usual this topic goes to the list of "keep an eye on" or perhaps "should play with". The problem is that both those lists already contains quite a few things already...

The first keynote finished with a quick demo of Office 14, at first no big difference. But then they interactively did simultaneous update to the same document from to PC's and as a further bonus one of the word instances was Office Web which completely ran inside the browser - clearly competing with other online office suites.

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After a short break, the second keynote started...

Don Box and Chris Anderson entered the stage and completely blew my mind. The showed how to work with the fluffy stuff from yesterday - Windows Azure. The went through a complete example of how to build services and applications "in the cloud". Short, sharp but deeply enough they took away all the fuzziness about Windows Azure. Brilliant, thank you!

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Keynote

Interesting demos by Eric Lee and Anders Hejlsberg, some sales talk from Eric Rudder and Simon Bank.

Eric Lees's demo was about SharePoint 2007 and AJAX showing the benefit of using these products and how to program them. I felt I knew what AJAX is and how it works but know it's the time to get into details.

On the other hand, I think I'll leave SharePoint for a while. Not because it's not interesting, but rather because a colleague of mine who also is here in Barcelona will look at it, start working with it when we're home and eventually will lead an internal lecture about it.

Hejlsberg, brilliant as usual, showed off Linq. I thought I knew it since visiting PDC last year, but quite a lot has happen to it. I aim for some Linq sessions this week and some playing with in when home - very interesting.

Well, its time for the first break out. It'll be...

Developing Rich Web Applications with ASP.NET AJAX

Five quick minutes with PPT's then all demos...wow!

If we haven't looked at this it's about time. ASP.NET AJAX will be released before the end of the year and if we're aiming on developing web sites in the future we must learn how this works.

It feels like I could be a web developer for real now. All of a sudden can I do what I want without writing tons of untyped, non debuggable, javascript code. 

I look forward to our internal lunch lecture next week on this topic when our java folks will present where they are.

ASP.NET: Developer and Designer AJAX Bliss with Visual Studio and Expression

I thought it would bee more AJAX regarding the title, but the emphasis was on collaboration between designers and developers. Interesting way of working and it is in the direction of what we discussed on our latest internal conference. Just imagine our Art Directors working with Expression and not in Photoshop.

ASP.NET AJAX Tips and Tricks

All demos... I'm in heaven!

This was a session full of examples what you can do with AJAX and how you would do it. More substance to what I've been watching most of the day and I am more convinced that it's time to learn this technology.

Summary of this day

I was overwhelmed that I didn't knew as much AJAX as I thought I did.