Great Keynote Overall

Today's keynote just worked. Hard to be a developer and not be inspired by what was shown including Windows 7 hardware, Silverlight 4, and the new Office programming options. For me, the greatest stuff is on SL4 ... it just rocks; finally going mainstream. This was the promise of combining the Web and the desktop, delivered. Nice job! ... and the free touch-enabled tablet is a nice addition to PDC09!

Windows 7 Telemetry

The use of Windows automatic feedback to change the product was very cool. In fact, it was indicated that 80% of Windows 7 users opt-in to send Microsoft telemetry about what happens on their system. That is just an awesome sample size and shaping which features get built based on usage; it also serves to solve driver issues, etc. Loved seeing the actual customers using the new features and their reaction! Will update this post later with a link.

One very interesting point from the telemetry data: 55% of all Windows users have their monitors set at 1024 x 768 … unreal.

Free Windows 7 Laptop

PDC09 attendees are all getting a new touch-enabled tablet! Built by Microsoft and Acer, touch aware, tablet, looks like a lovely little machine … will get mine after the mad rush at lunch time (will post a picture later). Great way to get developers writing touch-enabled applications! Nice work Microsoft!

IE 9

The new IE has great support for HTML / CSS 5.0. The coolest thing though is that is will use DirectX to take advantage of the hardware. That means acceleration for text and graphics. videos on channel9: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Charles/IE-9-Surfing-on-the-GPU-with-D2D/

Sketchflow

Wow. Some highlights: Sketchflow’s ability to create a UI, allow a user to walk through it in an interactive manner, automatically generate documentation, annotate the UI with comments, unreal … (will link to the video when posted).

Silverlight 4 (beta)

So many new announcements around SL4. SL is becoming the platform to connect Web and devices.

• 45% of all internet-connected devices have SL3 today (number is up 10% in less than a year)
• IIS now has streaming capability for the iPhone. There is an actual iPhone tab in the UI to enable smooth streaming in from IIS to the iPhone.

http://silverlight.net/getstarted/silverlight-4-beta/