Will “The EvCC Strict Coder Guru”

The Washington State Convention Center in downtown Seattle was the location of this regions Launch Tour for the new Microsoft Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007. A co-worker (Tim) and I headed down early… early in the morning.. in a sleep comatose. When we arrived, there was already a line of IT and Microsoft enthusiasts waiting to go up to check-in and then into the main auditorium. We first headed into the sponsor and partners room where people lined up to get the goodies that were being given out. We received everything from pens, blinking emblems, a Sudoku handheld, logo plastered squish balls and T-shirts.

When the time approached nine, we headed into the main room. Everyone sitting down in place ready to start the launch, feel the excitement and see Bill Gates. Microsoft’s own Bill Gates came out and gave a speach on the launch and the improvements back from the late 70’s team to now. The company has grown enormous and many products are now in most computers around the world, one being Microsoft Office products. Back when the release of Windows 95 and then Office 97, these products have been introduced as a normal part of life and computing. These two products, Windows and Office are the backbone of Microsoft and has allowed them to drive and spread there wings to all areas of life.

We broke up and I went through the IT Developers track where introduction and demos proceeded on Vista and Office 2007. Vista seemed to be a glorified interface and added the “Sidebar” (very similar to the Yahoo! Konfabulator that I have ben using for a few years), plus I just noticed the Vista busy cursor is almost identical to the Mac busy cursor.

Using simple tools and Visual Studio 2005 with .Net 3.0, they demonstrated ease of use and compatibility across multiple programs. Two neat tools that I learned from the conference was one, in Office 2007, they are using XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language) programming which allows for easy integration and configuration to create Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) applications (the GUI or interface of the application). Two, they discussed about how designers and developers were always fighting to create the same idea together. On an application the design from the designer would take the developer hours to hand slice the graphics and use within any application. To create uniform design, Microsoft came out with Expression. With the use now of Microsoft Expression and Visual Studio 2005, the designer can hand over a Expression file which can be used as the skin within the application being developed. This skin still maintains the same quality and design, but is universally used within any product or suite of applications.

At one point with the introduction of new products, they showed some examples of DirectX 10. Yes, DirectX 10 is not supported in any graphics cards yet, that it is only for Windows Vista, and I bet the game companies (besides Microsoft) are not rushing yet to push games out until the video cards are ready. However, at the demonstration, the graphics and pushing of pipelines created some awesome graphics and shading rendors. I would like to see some in game video though to really see the difference.

One product that I was not very thrilled or overly excited to see demonstrated was SharePoint 2007. Even the speaker said, “I know many of you may think it is only for housing and cataloging files and media, but look at this new version.” The only extended use for this new 2007 version that I saw was the meta tags and filtering. It looked like a glorified file directory and given meta tags and a better looking interface.

On the way out after giving the evaluations and my critique, I received a copy of Windows Office 2007 Pro and Windows Grove 2007. It was a great event to see what was new within Vista and the new Office products.

In conclusion, I am more open to start developing and testing some of this functionality in Windows Vista, Office 2007 and Visual Studio 2005. It will be interesting when at EvCC we may start deployment of these products. With the integration, I have