DevBlog

Jim Allchin, VP of Platforms (he's the guy in charge of Windows) was up after Bill. He's one of my favorite speakers. He started off showing some amazing clips for a game coming out that's targeting Windows Vista. The graphics were just amazing. VERY realistic.

There are four architectural principles in Vista
- Presentation
- Data
- Communications
- Base OS Services

Jim talked about how each of these priniciples makes things better.

For the Base OS Services:
- Reboot manager decreases the number of reboots required when updating. For example, if you install an application that needs to replace a DLL that is running, Windows may be able to shutdown that DLL, install the new one, then start it again.
- There will be transacted storage in a number of areas, including the registry
- A level of standard user is new and is what out applications should target
- Superfetch is an upgrade to prefetch. It will cache applications that are frequently used and make them faster to load. Another cool feature is if you plug in a USB RAM disk, Superfetch can use that and treat the device like regular RAM
- "Atlas" will be big for web apps

Presentation
- UI is separated into a framework and an engine. This makes it possible to separate the UI from how the UI works. Think if it as moving all the guts of how the UI works out of what the user sees.
- A lite version of Windows Presentation Framework (WPF) called WPF/E (WPF Everywhere) was announced.

Data
- There will be multiple data stores
- LINQ is the uniform programming model for data. This is the Fox stuff that we've been hearing about. More coming in another blog. It's VERY cool

Communication
- Support for federated identification called InfoCards. It won't matter how you authenticate a user.

Jim also announced "Digital Locker". This is a way to buy and download software from the Internet. It keeps track of what you buy and the software keys needed to make them work. It keeps all this for you. If you upgrade your PC, just go to Digital Locker and download everything thing from there. It's integrated into Vista and Windows Updates. Digital River and Ecellerate are participating.