Yesterdays keynote focused on Windows Azure, the new operating system for the cloud, the backend infrastructure.

Windows 7

Today the focus was about making the combination of PC's, phones and the web more valuable together than the simple sum of the three. First out was the first public demoes of Windows 7, where they have tried to unify the experience of the taskbar, start-menu and application switching into one united experience. Other news:

• The library idea that exists in Windows Media Player is now extended to Windows Explorer (sharing the same library), to make it possible to bring different information together, even if that information exists on another computer.
• Make it a lot easier to have home networks, by making a Homegroup. In this group it will be very easy to share and search. One example of making it easier is that the default printer will switch depending on if you connect to your home or work network. One demo showed here was a search for music that resulted in hits available on a second computer. This song was then streamed to the stereo.
• Windows 7 brings the touch experience very much looking like the Surface experience and this was showed on existing HP hardware available for $1500. Some parts was very similar to the iPhone experience, but also extended to be able to be the primary input for the PC, instead of the mouse.
• News for developers:
  • Ribbon User Interface
  • Jump Lists (a menu comming up when click a icon in the taskbar/start menu; for example Word shows the MRU and some other stuff, which will make it faster to get going with what you want to do)
  • Libraries
  • Multi-touch, Ink and speech
  • DirectX family
  • .NET 3.5 SP1 built-in
• There is hard work on decreasing the memory consumption, disk I/O and power consumption and in the same time to increase the speed, scale and responsivness.

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0

Scott Guthrie started by showig a lot of WPF news:

• Support or better support for multi-touch, text Deep Zoom and Visual State Manager (last two available in Silverlight 2)
• Really easy to create Windows 7 jump lists in WPF
• New WPF toolkit released this week with
  • DataGrid
  • DatePicker
  • Calendar
  • Ribbon (really easy to use and declare in XAML)
  • Visual State Manager
• Better design time experience in VS 2010

.NET 4.0 will have in-process side-by-side support, which means that it will be able to run .NET 2.0 and 4.0 in the same process. The managed and native code interop will be inproved and the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) is included. Antoher important new piece is Managed Extensibility Framework that you might already have read or tested out.

A really cool thing is that Visual Studio 2010 is re-written in WPF and also using MEF. The WPF support is important for the visual presentation, but also used to improve multi-monitor support, refactoring tools and the test tools. Thanks to MEF the extensibility story of VS 2010 is extremly simplified and this was clearly demonstrated when Scott created a new visual presentation of code comments in WPF, copied the dll to a special monitored folder which made VS 2010 pick it up and immediately displaying comments in the new way. Very cool!

Of course there are a lot of improvements for web developers to:

• Internet Explorer 8 with much better support for standards and it also includes developer tools.
• jQuery IntelliSense in VS 2008 form today, available at http://jquery.com/.
• Web Forms will have better support for CSS and new controls
• Improvments to MVC, Ajax
• Distributed Caching (Velocity)
• VS 2010 will improve the design and javascript experience
• Great new publishing of web applications
  • For web.config file you can expand and have different config files for deug, staging and release