The second PDC keynote start with new announcements by Eric Rudder:
- Windows Workflow Foundation
- Microsoft Expression: Acrylic, Sparkle, Quartz
- Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA)
Very cool the first demo with many 3D effects realized with WinFX and deployed with ClickOnce.
The new Windows Workflow Foundation is really exciting. You can build arbitrary state machines and manage them visually attaching events to pieces of code. When I was at the C++ dinner a couple of days ago I was just asking about the best solution for solving complex state machines logic. In fact I was thinking about ASML, a Microsoft Research project for state machines. Now WWF seems to solve this recurrent problem in a very simple way.
The level of iontegration is also wonderful, not only with Visual Studio but also with Office 12 and Sharepoint.
In the demo, the speaker shows how is simple, thank to VS2005 integration, linking states to events and putting breakpoints visually on the diagram. Really fantastic.
It's now time of the new set of artistic tools called Expression.
The level of integration between Visual Studio and the graphic designers is what we ever hoped in these years. Integration made with asp.net, css, master pages, etc. Until now, nobody was able to reach this result and so Microsoft solved itself the problem with products exciting for graphics and quality.
It's then the moment for Sparkle, a 3D editor for XAML that let you define animation along a timeline and handling events like the classic mouse onmousexxx. Certainly this is only the first steps but it's a very good start for the next generations of web and rich client applications. And again the level of integration with Visual Studio is really amazing and productive.
Talking about VSTA there was a nice demo with AutoCAD that integrates VSTA and Visual Studio 2005 to extend it like VBA did. In the demo Autocad get some costs for a model part via Web Services and show it in the drawing.
Finally it's time for a long demo about Office 12 presented by VP Sinofsky.
