There are so many things coming out of the Microsoft PDC that I am finding it hard to keep up so this is my first post listing some of the things that have come out so far:

Office 14 New online version of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. These will be cross platform cross browser lightweight versions of the core Office components that will be available in the “cloud” or in a hosted/on Site SharePoint environment as well as being available on a phone (I am assuming a Windows Mobile device) Channel 9 video here (9 min for the demo) There is lots of talk about collaboration and the mobile options that are raised are very powerful especially for us at Aspective where our Vodafone links really count.

The next great feature is that they have included the ability to have multiple concurrent users of a document. I cannot say how much pain this will take away.

One thing I am disappointed at is that InfoPath is not included in the scenarios. I have encountered a number of real world scenarios where people want and need a form solution that InfoPath could clearly fulfill but it is ruled out because of the cost and complexity of deploying a SharePoint Forms server solution to a public/semi private facing site.

Windows 7. Lots of talk about the UI PC Pro has lots of coverage here and there is a screen shot slide show here. if you want the news from the source this post from the Windows Team covers a lot of the key points

On a more technical level Channel 9 has an interview with Mark Russinovich here. Most of Mark’s interview goes over my head but still interesting. It seems that a lot of deep down tweaking is going on in the kernel to improve multi core performance (Over 8 CPUs and up to 256. Now that’s forward thinking!)  and even got Dave Cutler involved. There is also a discussion on User mode scheduling which highlighted a key advantage the likes of SQL Server has in being part of the same global company. Namely that the Windows kernel team clearly work with the SQL team to drive performance. Not, I suspect, something Oracle can do. Also mentioned is a parallel plug and play boot process and yet more pre-fetch/ready boost, better battery life by letting processor cores sleep in preference to just ticking over. T

The final 15 mins goes into how deeply complex Windows has become and how the work is going on the concept of minWin is going. minWin is the code name for the work on developing a core version of Windows that can be isolated from the “nice to have” bits and allow Microsoft to really get to work on a component based version of Windows. That’s a 25Mb on disk core. When they get all of this sorted out then we will see the fastest evolution of Widows ever as it will mean that individual sub systems can be upgraded without having to spend ages worrying about inter-dependencies.

Finally in the last 6 mins there is announcements that you will be able to mount and create Virtual Hard disks (VHD) natively in Windows. VHDs become first class items in Windows. You can even boot windows from a VHD. This has potentially  huge implications for me in the pre-sales arena where we run virtual machines all the time as well as for setting up development and test environments.

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