PDC 2003 Longhorn 'Aero' Keynote Photo Gallery

"First, there's a new look. And, as excited as we are about that, and we hope you think it's exciting and beautiful and professional, but it's still early.""Things like the transparency that we...

Paul Thurrott

October 6, 2010

4 Min Read
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"First, there's a new look. And, as excited as we are about that, and we hope you think it's exciting and beautiful and professional, but it's still early."
"Things like the transparency that we have here on the windows ... this is using things that are part of 'Avalon' ... including things like pixel shaders, the desktop composition -- all this advanced graphics functionality that to date has been typically the domain of game developers, now available to ... you on the desktop and ... in your applications."
"This is essentially the evolution of My Documents, but a couple of things are different. First of all, we are showing almost 1,100 items in this view ... these items are not sitting in one folder. They're located across the system. And this view is actually a dynamic view that is generated for you right in the system, and of course available as part of the platform." 

"We could actually filter the 1,100 [files] based on who the author is, or we can do this new thing called a Stack. And when I click on "Stack," it actually draws a new view that shows all these items in these stacks by who wrote them. And in fact, if you look carefully at the stacks, they have different heights, depending on how many items are represented in them. And because they are not physical locations, one item can show up in more than one stack"

"And the best part about this is not just that you can do this in the system, but all this is available to you as developers as part of the platform whether you want to use the common controls or talk directly to WinFS, and render any way you want."

"And I could do something called Show Communication History ... Right here I can actually generate a view [of the faxes, all the files that Bill shared with me, all the notifications or e-mails I received] dynamically right in the system ... because all these items--faxes, RTC conversations, e-mails--are all part of the basic schema and we can generate this view on the fly, and again this is part of what is available to you in the platform."

"It's OE, the built-in Windows mail app. Notice as I type I get this little choice here to find more names. What this brings up is a common file dialog, but for people. It's not files after all; they're people sitting in WinFS and it lets me actually look at this entire list in this big corporation of all the people I can choose from or even search my corporate directory."

"Now, as cool as that [peer-to-peer desktop sharing session] may be, let's actually resize that [window] ... You may think that actually resizing [it] would mean all sorts of unmanageable scrollbars and having to go and move around to try and see everything at once. In fact, I'm just going to hit Restore and watch what happens to the window automatically because of our 'Avalon' presentation services. Automatic resize on the fly; even as I resize it, it moves around and Craig is doing it live right on my desktop."

"And, if I want to bring this information right into my application and my network, or this document rather, I can click on it, drag and then drop it and go create a relationship on the fly straight from the Web services. Let's drop it on Jeff and then notice as I hover over Jeff, here's the document, when I hover over the document, there's the relationship with Jeff. I click on Jeff. Let's click on Jeff. Here it is."

"Now, here's another example with a document with text and video integrated. I can go do that same little thumbnail preview on the scroll bar. I click, navigate to page three and here's the big question. If I hover over the area of the scroll bar for the second page, will I get live video in the thumbnail? Yes, yes, let's do it. Click, there it is, live video, right there you can see it."

About the Author

Paul Thurrott

Paul Thurrott is senior technical analyst for Windows IT Pro. He writes the SuperSite for Windows, a weekly editorial for Windows IT Pro UPDATE, and a daily Windows news and information newsletter called WinInfo Daily UPDATE.

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