I've just got back from Microsoft's PDC 2008. Most of my time was spent preparing for the Tesco/Conchango Day 2 keynote demonstration that I have been working on for the last month or so. Conchango are a great company - really forward thinking in terms of their focus on User Experience, and a great understanding of how to realize business value for their clients. This was a very interesting opportunity to work outside our usual space in healthcare and pharma, albeit under a hectic schedule! No secrets of the sausage factory here, but it was also good to see this kind of event from backstage. I will say that the AV setup was astounding. I don't think I've ever seen so many blinking LEDs, outside of a TV studio.
The Tesco grocery system was a standard WPF application - we took the classic View, View Model approach, talking to a backend WCF service (not dissimilar to the approach outlined in our whitepaper last month). And because this was a real client app, we've also got a great offline story - caching in a local SQL database, and making use of peripherals attached to the system (e.g. the webcam). I think it showed how effectively you can aggregate other services (e.g. the calendaring, facebook messaging) into an application to deliver something that is more than the sum of the parts. Obviously, it isn't a finished product - exactly what services should be aggregated, and how they are surfaced is still be determined with customer testing, but I think it shows how far you can go with this kind of thing. We also had the challenge of the broad range of machines we were targetting - from Windows XP all the way through to Windows 7 (on which we ran the demo). Working out interactions that are good with touch, stylus AND mouse is surprisingly tricky, and a new skill we're going to have to learn as this kind of hardware becomes ubiquitous.
Even more interesting than the app itself (to me at least) was the development process. This was the first time I'd had the opportunity to pair with a designer (Xamlist? Blender?) during the sprint (in this case the very talented Felix Corke, Conchango's lead Blendmeister). I've always been an advocate of meshing development and design as closely as possible. Developers have a good understanding of the structural decomposition of the application, and the designer understands the best way to surface that structure, in terms of both static and dynamic interactions. However, if you just "throw the app over the wall" from one to the other, the structure can become blurred (interactive components are not drawings), or the interactions become clumsy (combobox is really a compromise, not a first-class design element). A shout out here to David and Rich, without whom it wouldn't have been possible to complete the development so effectively.
Anyway - the rest of PDC. Obviously, Microsoft's Windows Azure announcement is very significant for the industry as a whole. Developing from the kinds of cloud offerings currently provided by Amazon, we have a broadly horizontal platform and fabric that offers an almost impossibly simple provisioning and deployment model. If they have the business model and privacy/security SLAs to back it up, then it will offer compelling value - not necessarily to large enterprise customers who already have this kind of thing on- or near-premises, but to the vast majority of SMEs who represent millions of developers out there. It might even change some of the dynamics in the investment community. If you don't need billions of dollars of hardware investment to scale up, maybe entrepreneurs will retain a little more equity and control in their businesses? [But, "Azure" really shouldn't rhyme with "Badger"]
The Oslo family is also important - if more low-key (so low-key, it didn't even get a mention in a keynote; pace a sidebar in the Don'n'Chris show). I think everyone was a little surprised that there wasn't more meat on the bones at this stage. In a peculiar way I can feel the ghost of that vanished pillar of PDC 2003 - WinFS. Modelling our information in a way that can be queried and analyzed by tooling, and providing models of existing technologies (WF-XAML, WPF-XAML etc) is clearly a step forward in application design, but there's a lot still to be worked out, finished or polished (versioning being a key element). That's fair enough; as the team pointed out, these are very, very early bits.
Finally, Windows 7. Windows Vista R2, and all the better for that. I have no real criticisms of Windows 7. The new start bar is extremely productive, and - something close to my heart - the drive for proper support for High DPI (finally replacing a whole bunch of those applications and control panel applets that have steadfastly refused to behave at 120DPI+). They're also pushing a new High Color Model (wide gamut/high precision) that will benefit visualization apps in science and medicine.
And there will be another one next year - VS2010 and Windows 7 will likely have shipped by then; start speculating now on what that will all be about...