With more than 30 gigabytes of beta and preview software in their luggage, including Windows Vista and the next release of Office, developers left the 2005 Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) with plenty of work ahead. Not only was Microsoft pushing its new products, but the company also emphasized concepts such as service-oriented architectures, interactive graphics design, and the value of building on higher-level software foundations that often eliminate the need for low-level coding.

All of these products and technologies will be covered in more depth in future Directions articles.

Vista Client

This was the first PDC at which attendees got a close-up view and real code for Windows Vista, the long-awaited refresh of the Windows desktop OS that is scheduled to ship at the end of 2006.

Most Vista demos focused on the product's user interface (UI), which is based on the new Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF, formerly code-named Avalon). Consisting of a run-time engine and an accompanying development framework, the WPF will add substantial dazzle not only to the Windows UI but also to applications that tap the WPF engine to deliver their own UI features. Most visible will be "gadgets," small applications that can be attached to a "Sidebar" on the Windows desktop.

Vista will also incorporate technologies that are new or have assumed greater importance since the release of Windows XP, such as Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds and desktop search.

Security, a major concern, will be helped with a new standard user mode that better isolates the file system and the OS itself from malicious threats aimed at users. Parental controls, a common feature for Web browsing, will be built into the OS, giving parents control over which games can be played on a computer, for example. A much improved Internet Explorer (IE) will not only catch up with the competition in UI areas such as tabbed browsing but also introduce better security isolation and a technology aimed at blunting phishing, an attack typically conducted by Web sites or e-mails purporting to be from a trusted source, such as a bank, but that aim to collect critical user data, such as bank account numbers, or to plant spyware on the user's machine. IE will offer a Dynamic Protection Service, in which the browser checks a site against a blacklist of known phishing sites identified by other users or by security vendors and blocks visitors from entering, and the service will also warn users about possible phishing sites when they visit sites that exhibit phishing characteristics.

Developers left the PDC with a community technology preview (build 5219) of Vista, now between Beta 1 and Beta 2 in its development cycle. Among other features, this build includes the new WinFX APIs (which currently implement WPF, and the Windows Communication Foundation, formerly code-named Indigo). These APIs will run on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 in addition to Vista itself.

Office 12 Preview

New UI features were also prominent in demonstrations of Office 12, the code name for a version of Office expected to be released about the same time as Vista, although it will not take advantage of most Vista features. Office 12 substantially revises the Office menu system, replacing menus with tabs and with context-sensitive icons and previews intended to help users get to their intended results faster.

However, the company continues to emphasize that many new Office functions will be delivered by integration of desktop applications with server applications, notably Microsoft's SharePoint line of applications. Tools that will enable automation of many tasks include new workflow features in SharePoint (with FrontPage as the tool for designing work flows); forms designed with InfoPath, Microsoft's XML forms designer; and integration between Access and other applications that will enable scenarios such as populating a database from e-mails returned in response to a survey.

(For more information about Office 12, see "Office 12: New User Interface, Content Management".)

Longhorn Servers

Although the next version of Windows Server, code-named Longhorn Server, is not expected until 2007, PDC attendees got their hands on a community technology preview that updates the Beta 1 version released in July 2005.

This version of the server includes a new version of Internet Information Services (IIS) that drops the server-oriented "metabase" for managing IIS Web sites in favor of a XML Web.config file stored in each hosted Web site, which lets Web developers configure specific IIS parameters for that site, such as the name of the default home page. This could simplify the tasks of moving Web site settings among servers and maintaining farms of identical servers.

Microsoft says Longhorn Server will be highly modular—a stripped-down core will lack even a graphical UI—which will reduce the server OS footprint, improve security, and make it easier to configure the server for specific roles.

Other security and reliability enhancements will include the following:

• Transactional NTFS (TxF), a file-system feature that ensures disk integrity in the event of a hardware failure and can be used for multifile updates (such as an operation that changes the names of HTML pages on a Web server and simultaneously modifies the paths of any links in those Web pages to reflect the changes)
• A "secure-at-install" feature that automatically checks for appropriate security updates when a new server is installed
• A "self-healing" file system that can step around hardware failures, such as bad disk sectors
• A Security Token Service that will be part of Active Directory (AD), improving security for organizations that want to federate their ADs and enabling new features such as InfoCard, which will store user identity information that the user can share with online services and other users.

Microsoft also released a beta of its Windows Server edition for engineering and scientific applications that harness multiple servers, Compute Cluster Edition. Built on Windows Server 2003, it is expected to be released in 2006.

Visual Studio Beyond 2005

With Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 about to be released, Microsoft had no major developments to show for these products, but it did show off some capabilities of future versions of the developer tools.

Developers got an eyeful of graphical design tools such as Sparkle, for designing interactive graphics (similar to Macromedia's Flash), the Expression suite of developer-oriented graphic design products, and the Quartz Web site design tool. Sparkle and Quartz are both designed to showcase Windows Vista's new graphics features and enable graphics and Web site designers to take advantage of them.

Microsoft also demonstrated the Language Integrated Query (LINQ) Project, a set of extensions to the C# and Visual Basic .NET languages for querying objects, databases, and XML. LINQ promises less coding for database applications compared to standard database APIs and query languages such as Structured Query Language (SQL) or XQuery.

Resources

Resources related to the PDC, such as links to announcements and DVD sets, can be found at msdn.microsoft.com/events/pdc.

Keynote transcripts, announcements, and fact sheets can be found at www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/pdc/materials.mspx.

A Web site devoted to gadgets and the Sidebar is at microsoftgadgets.com.