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The Press Room was jammed from 7:30 AM on. Bill Gates was on at 8:30, and people who know and care little about software development are still interested in what he has to say.

As usual with major Microsoft events, there's far too much good food. In the Press Room there were omelets, scalloped potatoes, and as much bacon as you could want, along with soy milk, yogurt, carrot sticks, and celery. I doubt the general attendees got the omelets and bacon, but the other stuff was out there, free, along with the coffee and crullers. You can't say Microsoft doesn't give programmers and developers the chance to eat healthy. Of course there's also a plethora of chocolate, Snickers and Hershey bars, potato chips, and other junk food. Microsoft offers you the chance to eat healthy, but they don't force you to. I don't have to say what I took.

Bill Gates opened with some filmed humor. It has become traditional for Gates to open with jokes on himself. At one time the films showed him using a Gates mannequin to pretend to be at his desk--a modest office, which may even have been his, Microsoft being rather egalitarian in office quarters--while he and Steve Balmer went out to play. This year's film showed Gates trying to recruit on college campuses, and was mixed: All slapstick, but in some of it there may have been a serious message to potential employees. You bet that Bill Gates knows....

The news was about what you'd expect. Vista is a really major overhaul of Windows. You're going to love it. The buzz words this year, in addition to the traditional "incredible", included "beautiful," and nearly every speaker including Gates used it. "Compelling user experience" crept in a few times, but it wasn't in every paragraph as it sometimes has been.

The most significant new announcement was that Office has been completely revised, and Office 12 will be as big a change from Office 2003 as Office 2000 was from Office 95. The surprise was that the beta of Office 12 will be released Real Soon Now, but it isn't in the 8-disk package distributed to the PDC attendees. We will get Build 5219 of Vista, which says in small print on screen that it's Beta 2, but the official designation by Gates is that it's "almost beta 2." Whatever 5219 is, that's the one they were using for the demos during the keynotes by Gates and Allchin. The opening session started on time, at 8:30 AM, but it went on until about 12:30 PM, without pause, glitch, or for that matter, a dull moment.

Gates seemed a bit less enthusiastic than he often is at these early morning events. Possibly he, like me, isn't getting any younger, and being on duty at 8:30 is getting to be less fun than it used to be. He certainly hasn't lost his enthusiasm for the industry, and when he gets on a roll about the joys of the new technology, that comes through. Maybe it's just the details.

As always, Gates runs scared. That's perhaps an oversimplification, but just as Gates is one of the few people to really understand and take advantage of the deeper implications of Moore's Law, he's also one of the few to understand that if the hardware capability doubles every 18 months or so, in three years any company can be obsolete and in five can be out of business--and it gets harder to keep up with the hardware advances every cycle.

A long time ago Bill Gates wrote about the potential for stitching the country together with high speed communications devices. This year for the first time there are more broad band connections than dial-up, and that proportion is increasing. Developers have long since given up dialup, and the .NET concept can be implemented in nearly every enterprise establishment. Visual Studio, .NET framework, and XML are reaching the potentials Gates foresaw. My guess is that broadband connectivity expanded more slowly than he thought it would, and now that it's catching up he's well past it, which explains why he seems a bit impatient when talking about such things; but I may be reading the wrong tea leaves. In any event, Vista, XML, Visual Studio, and .NET are all coming together now, and it's none too soon.

His main theme was that this is the greatest time ever for building software. Rich information sharing and visualization will be the big coming themes, and everything is in place for developing software to implement those.

Group Vice President and code guru James Allchin has never been less than an enthusiast, but he seemed more excited about Vista and Office 12 than Gates. Some of this was the sheer potential for sales: Over 500 million Windows-capable devices are sold every year. There's gold in them there sales.

Allchin spent the next three hours showing off marvels, and I have to say I was impressed. We've been running beta Vista at Chaos Manor--there is a report on that in the upcoming column--but we've hardly had time to look into all the new goodies. Allchin used the word "beautiful" a number of times, and while I think that may be too strong a word, perhaps it's not in this age of hype. Some of the visual effects built into Vista are very cool.

The visual component is formally known as Windows Presentation Foundation, although both Allchin and his subordinates continued to refer to this by its former name "Avalon". Windows Presentation Foundation is far enough advanced to allow Microsoft programmers to construct a useful "demo application," an album organizer called "Max". This is included in the software package PDC attendees received, and is available on line at http://windowsvista.microsoft.com/max . It's pretty cool, with extensive abilities to organize your albums in various ways.

North Face expedition clothing then showed a "real" application (as opposed to a demo application; the difference wasn't explained) created in six weeks by a five people. It included a lot of 3D media footage, 3D images of expedition equipment that you can examine in detail before buying, and lots of testimonials of adventurers using North Face equipment in extreme situations.

Allchin's crew showed off the new Office 12. I started by writing "Making Office suck less," but I have to confess that despite all the hype about "beautiful, incredible, richer, compelling," I ended up very much impressed. They've reorganized the tool bars and help files after finding out that 90 percent of the features people ask for in Office are already in there, only no one can find them. They've added other features, particularly organizational means, to PowerPoint and Excel. There will be the ability to bring in RSS feeds to Outlook.

There were other Office 12 demonstrations. During one I remarked "It's sure fast. They must be indexing," to which Peter Glaskowsky replied, "Of course it's fast. It's a demo." At another point there were some obvious glitches, and someone in the audience brought down the house in laughter by shouting "Ship it!" But when it was all done, I was impressed, and I'm rather eager to get the beta copy of Office 12. I'm pretty sure I will like it.

During Allchin's demonstration they showed off an i-mate combination telephone, PDA, and pocket computer. See http://www.clubimate.com/ and look for JASJAR for details. This sells for $1048, but Allchin was able to get a "limited supply" to be sold for a total of $161 including tax. Auri Rahimzadeh, President of the Indiana Computing Society and one of the editors of Richard Doherty's Imagineering group, decided this would be a good time to make a phone call, and while he was out, reserved phones for me, Dan Spisak, Peter Glaskowsky, and of course Richard and himself. It's as well that he did. Well before Allchin's presentation was done the limited supply of those phones was exhausted. They sell retail for $1048, and on eBay for even more. It works. We put the function card from my Nokia phone into it and made telephone calls. More another time.

There was a lot more in the opening session. There were presentations on servers and the new need to both put more in the server and make it all simpler to use. There's a real need to rethink how servers are used and how they fit into a establishments including SOHO. This got me thinking about the subject: My servers are all old and a bit clunky and it's time I built a modern new one. While I am at it I can run a mail server, and set up a conference server for use by some of the groups including the Heinlein Society that I seem to be involved with lately.

Possibly the most applause came when Allchin demonstrated that you could take a 512MB Vista system, plug a 1-GB thumb drive memory stick into the USB 2.0 Port, and Vista sees the new memory and makes use of it as if you had added system memory. I am not sure precisely how this works and what happens if you remove that memory, but Allchin assured us all those problems had been thought. It sure looked cool.

After the keynote speeches came the detail sessions, far too much detail to put into a show report; long discussions in the press room; discussions with Microsoft experts on such matters as WinFS filesystem, which was stripped out of Vista. I now have a beta copy of WinFS: it runs fine in Windows XP. It doesn't run on Vista, yet, although the Microsoft people have WinFS running on Vista in the labs, so the rest of us should have beta Real Soon Now.

The bottom line was summarized in the Press Room over lunch. I said I was impressed. Dan Spisak, Mac enthusiast, said "And how much of the Mac OS did they include?" Peter Glaskowsky replied "All of it." And while that isn't strictly true, there's a lot of truth in it.

Robert McLaws of http://www.longhornblogs.com summed it up this way: "Up to now the only emotional connection Microsoft Windows has with its users is to generate a deep seated desire to see how far they can throw it out the window." But, he added, Vista may well change that. Microsoft is clearly trying to get its users excited, to be as cool as Apple; to generate the kind of love for Microsoft that Apple users have for their systems.

I need to think about that, but on first thoughts he may be right.

And it's very late. I realize I haven't covered even all of the first day of this conference, but perhaps I've given enough to show why. Even more than WinHEC, PDC generates the feeling that you're drinking from a fire hose, and I find myself on information overload well before the day is over.

And there are three more days. Stay tuned.

Jerry Pournelle is science-fiction writer and DDJ columnist. Jerry can be contacted at jerry@jerrypournelle.com.

PDC 2005: Day 1 Notes

by Dan Spisak

This year's PDC opened to Bill Gates talking about the history of Microsoft's software platform development as well as the industry's own growth over the years. According to Gates, we are living during the time of the greatest opportunity for building software. In the coming years rich information sharing and visualization for businesses are the next big challenges that Gates sees the company working to provide better solutions for in the future. Furthermore, the one thing that Gates and Jim Allchin and other developers were stressing was that Windows Vista and Office "12" and other new components would be "beautiful".

Also demoed during the keynote were the rich content capabilities of the Windows Presentation Foundation formerly known as Avalon. Allchin showed off a demo photo album organizer called Max, that was enabled to easily share content between users. Max can be downloaded today at http://www.microsoft.com/max/ by anyone looking to learn more and try it out. The North Face was also part of the WPF demo showcase showing how their three web designers could go from zero Windows application programming experience and in 6 weeks create a 3D media rich user experience giving the customer a better view of both the companies products but the customer testimonials for their products.

Later on in the technical breakout near the end of the keynote Jim Allchin introduced some of the core architects to show the code features. Don Box, who works on Windows Communications Foundation then introduced Anders Hejlsberg who is involved with C# and talked about project Link. Hejlsberg showed how in C# it is now going to be possible to query and enumerate any objects that are iterateable. With the new C# capabilities programmers will be able to manipulate datasets much more easily than before, while hiding much of the logic and SQL query statements. C# will give users the ability to work with data to easily merge, sort, or otherwise manipulate programmatic data.

Other parts of the code demonstrations showed how easy it would be to extend C# programs to easily output RSS feeds using XLink which enables functional construction of XML quickly. Don Box later then showed how WCF (a.k.a. Indigo) can be used to make a C# program act as a web HTTP service as well as new deep HTTP protocol modification capabilities in WCF to have greater control of output.

Afterwards at some of the breakout sessions further information about Windows Vista's networking support started to surface. Vista will come out of the box with IPv6 as the default transport with support for Teredo (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/maintain/teredo.mspx) and 6to4 technology to allow IPv6 to work within IPv4 networks. Furthermore Microsoft says that advantages of their IPv6 support is that network auto-configuration will be near instantaneous compared to current scenarios in Windows XP w/SP2 as well as detection of ARP failure is down from 2 minutes to less than 30 seconds. Additionally, Microsoft says that over of 50 percent of NAT scenarios break current peer-to-peer network applications. Thanks to Teredo and IPv6 support in Vista Microsoft claims that NAT traversal will be automatic and will be able to successfully connect in 95 percent of NAT scenarios.

Looking beyond Vista/Longhorn networking capabilities, Microsoft said that they were looking towards exploring secure neighbor discovery for use in ARP. This along with mobility support for retaining an IP address across subnet moves and making peer-to-peer applications more addressable across firewalls are where they expect future release to look to expand functionality.

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