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Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Microsoft is conducting a series of events for launching Windows Vista and Office 2007 for Developers. The launch is being conducted in five cities, viz. New Delhi, Hyderabad, Chennai, Bangalore and Mumbai. Today, the launch was conducted at Hotel Park Royal Intercontinental, New Delhi.
The day started-off with an introduction to the marvellous new features of Windows Vista and Office 2007, specifically its fresh security features and the fantastic aero user interface. The security features in the new Windows Vista is widely enhanced compared to its predecessor, Windows XP. Aero is the new whimsical user interface that is incorporated in Windows Vista. Aero is an acronym for Authentic, Energetic, Reflective and Open. You would be astonished viewing the complete features of the Aero interface here.
This introduction was followed by 5 demonstration sessions for developers, which gave them an insight to the new development features supported by these products. Windows Vista stands on three pillars, viz. Content, Confidence and Clarity. All development features in these new products add strength to these basic pillars of Vista.
Session 1:
Building differentiated user experiences with Windows Vista
Windows Vista allows you to build visually stunning applications by using its UI component Aero. This session gave an introduction to UI programming using Aero on the .NET 3.0 platforms. .NET 3.0 ships with the new O.S. and is an enhancement for the older .NET 2.0, the major change being the inclusion of Aero element programming.
Windows Vista also incorporates a sidebar on the right-side of the desktop. The sidebar features user-created applications, which can be easily created using JScript, HTML and XML.
Code samples for predictive search and text-to-speech system using SSML were also discussed during the session.
The session was presented by Deepak G.
Session 2:
Building Secure, Reliable and Performant Applications with Windows Vista
This session focused on the security, reliability and performance parameters of the application to be developed on the latest Windows platform. The enhanced Vista features include a better Kernel Transaction Manager(KTM) and User Access Control (UAC).
Windows Vista allows you to extend your RAM with a USB Flash Drive, whose I/O transfer rate is almost 10x faster than the conventional hard disk. It also has a better file system management process which does predictive paging for the most frequently used programs. Overall, this leads to better performance and low battery consumption.
The session was presented by Vineet Gupta.
Session 3:
Building Connected Applications with Windows Vista
.NET 3.0 introduces the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) API, which significantly enhances the Web-Services feature of .NET 2.0 using the SOAP format to communicate between processes. This WCF API provides an excellent platform to easily develop powerful Client-Server applications. For such applications, you need to make one server application and one host application, which requests services from the server using Contracts.
This highly informative session was presented by Pandurang Nayak.
Session 4:
Connecting Users with Data in New Ways with the Office 2007 Systems
This session gave an introduction to the Office 2007 system. One of the most-exciting features of Office 2007 is the use of open-source XML. All office documents stored in *.docx format can be converted into XML files by changing the file extension to *.zip.
Office 2007 also introduces a whole new range of Office Business Applications (OBA), which allows you to create remarkable business applications using the Office Technologies and Visual Studio. SharePoint Server, a part of the Office Package incorporates a powerful data mining tool which can easily mine data through an Excel Worksheet, SQL Database or any other data source and can represent the data in the form of decision trees, workflows and graphs.
This session was demonstrated by Vinod Kumar.
Session 5:
Building Collaboration Solutions using the Office 2007 System
Collaboration tools could be easily build using the Office 2007 System. The SharePoint Server provides an easy method to build basic collaboration solutions without the need for writing any code. Customized workflows and forms can be made to extend the basic services of the SharePoint Server.
This session was also presented by Vinod Kumar.
After these 5 great sessions it was time for some goodies from Microsoft. Microsoft presented the Office 2007 evaluation CDs to all the attendees.