Digital Home Thoughts: Windows Vista Lab 2007: Day One

Session 3: Vista Software Demos (Karsten Januszewski)
Vista ships with the .Net 3.0 framework (and the 2.0 version for legacy purposes) and Karsten, as a technical evangelist, was very excited about the possibilities that .Net 3.0 makes available. The .Net framework is essentially a new platform that lives on top of Windows. Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is a graphics engine that uses DirectX for 3D acceleration, and combines rasterized bitmaps with vector-based graphics for maximum flexibility among different monitor and window sizes. He ran through several demos:

The first was from a Yahoo! representative. They requested that we didn't talk about it until the embargo lifts, but what I will say is that it was extremely impressive, light years beyond anything I've seen before in the same category.

The next demo was the North Face demo – apparently it's been shown before, but this is the first I've heard of it. Lots WPF use shows amazing graphics, animation, and interactivity. This isn't even a demo – it's a fully deployed solution that's being used today by North Face. Customers can go into a North Face store, use a kiosk running this software, and access the entire line of products that the company sells. They can compare products with each other, and even watch video clips of athletes that are using the product.


Figure 4: We might spend most of our time in the Web browser, but that doesn't mean the things we look at have to be static. Most of us are used to what Flash can do, but the next demo (I believe the company is called Red) he showed went beyond anything I've ever seen. Full 3D hardware acceleration inside a browser window looks impressive – Flash is massively CPU intensive, and since the DirectX calls use the GPU, you end up with a very smooth experience.

Karsten spoke about the way designers and developers typically work together – the designer creates the design, then hands a print out or screen shot to the developer and says "build this". Developers don't always have the skill, knowledge, or tools to create the user interface that the designers want, and the designers usually lack the developing chops to create that interface in code. The goal moving forward with Vista and .Net 3.0 is to allow designers to create the user interfaces for themselves using tools like Microsoft Expression. I personally feel this is really important, because most applications on the Windows platform lack elegant, effective user interface designs. Anything that makes user interface design easier for developers is a great thing. In the demo he showed how using Expression to create designs outputs XML, making it much simpler to change things by simply changing the variables in the code. There's no compiled code here.

Session 4: Vista User Interface Backstory (Tjeerd Hoek)
Tjreed's presentation was mostly visual – a series of 100+ screenshots, showing us the evolution of Vista, the Start button, and other aspects of the Vista user experience (UX). It's interesting to see how much effort they put into the product, even the small parts like the start button – how it looks, where it's positioned, what colour it is, and how it interacts with other parts of the operating system and third party applications.


Figure 5: Tjeerd, the UX guy.

Session 5: NDA (Beckett Dillard)
The topic of this presentation was completely under NDA, so I can't say anything about it. But I will say that this issue is one that I've felt very strongly about for going on five years now, and Microsoft is finally taking a small step toward making it better.

At the end of the evening we went to a dinner theatre production called "Tony and Tina's Wedding". Here's a short video clip - it was...amusing. ;-)

And that's it for day one of my Vista Lab 2007 coverage – tomorrow is going to be an even busier day.

Jason Dunn owns and operates Thoughts Media Inc., a company dedicated to creating the best in online communities. He enjoys mobile devices, digital media content creation/editing, and pretty much all technology. He lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada with his lovely wife, and his sometimes obedient dog. He likes Vegas...in small doses.