PDC09 – L.A. Day 2 Coverage

Welcome back! Day 2 of Microsoft’s PDC 2009 has begun! Today the event kicked off with a keynote session by a very special guest, Steven Sinosky, president of the Windows and Windows Live divisions.

Steven hit the stage and immediately started sharing details on what the Windows 7 development experience was like and what Microsoft learned from it. Some key points made in the talk:

Steven Sinosky talking about Windows 7 development experiences

• Steven’s goal was to have a balance between improving upon the old stuff and looking forward.
• He wanted for all of the partners to have all of the information about the new operating system before it was ready for final release—thus not repeating some of the tough challenges encountered with Vista.
• He was very happy to receive such positive feedback via the Engineering 7 Blog and the (anonymous) telemetry data Microsoft collected via Windows Error Reporting (WER), or still internally known as Dr. Watson. Take a look at some incredible numbers from the telemetry data:

Windows 7 Beta and Release Candidate Test Telemetry Examples

I was actually blown away by the fact that, according to Microsoft’s telemetry, more than 55% of Windows 7 users still ran at a resolution of 1024×768.

Besides true telemetry, Microsoft also performs many studies, like the so-called Living with… program, where Microsoft actually went to users’ homes and installed a survey tool that monitors how Windows 7 is being used.

Steven then dove into the next generation of Internet Explorer (IE)—version 9 is on! The IE team has taken the power of today’s hardware and made it available within the browser. Here are some more details:

• Direct2D (part of DirectX) is now integrated directly into IE9. All graphic and text rendering will no longer be performed by the CPU using an old graphics model (GDI), but instead, they will now be rendered by the graphics card using Direct2D. This means that all fonts will appear much smoother, and visual effects and animations will look more fluid on the screen.
  

  Direct2D now integrated into IE9

  IE Blog: An Early Look At IE9 for Developers
  

• According to Steven, IE9 will be much faster and on par with browsers, such as Google Chrome 4 or Firefox 3.6.

We recommend heading to the Internet Explorer Blog for more information.

Following Steven’s presentation, Kurt DelBene, senior vice president of Microsoft Office, shared information about the upcoming launch of Office 2010. He stated that the company wants to deliver a seamless Office experience for all sorts of devices, including mobile ones.

The latest Office product version is now available as a public beta. Also check out Mary Jo Foley’s All About Microsoft Blog for more details on what’s included in Office 2010 and how to get it. A quick rundown of the key features:

• When you click on File in each Office application, a full-screen view comes up and provides users with frequently used features, such as Print, recently used documents and file permissions.
• You can customize the ribbon interface the way you want. Users need to simply check or uncheck all kinds of options, buttons, and ribbon interface entries.
• You can paste pictures more easily, do some photo editing (e.g. crop and enhance colors) and even add some nice effects (e.g. black and white).
• Outlook 2010 finally comes with the ribbon interface that was introduced with Office 2007 programs, such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
  

  Outlook Social Connector

• Outlook Social Connector is a new program that is capable of displaying all of the activities of people that you’re interacting with. It will even directly integrate with social networks like LinkedIn. Microsoft will make a software development kit (SDK) available, so that third parties can build their social networks (including Facebook and Twitter) into Outlook 2010.

Lots of exciting announcements coming out of today’s keynote. Stay tuned for more posts from the PDC!