Sydney’s Microsoft Ready Summit 2006
I attended the Sydney’s Microsoft Ready Summit today. It was a nice event in the Darling Harbour convention centre, targeted to developers, IT professionals and IT decision makers. The developer sessions were about the new Windows Vista user experience and Office 2007.
I took a few notes about the things I thought were worth remembering. I hope that I will interest some people that did not make it to the event.
The developer keynote was presented by Andrew Coates who is a Microsoft evangelist and most of the other sessions were presented one of my Readify co worker: Mitch Denny.
We started with the Expression Interactive Designer. This is a lot like the Macromedia Flash editor, but Expression will generate XAML files. This new format (at the heart of WPF) should be the common language talked by both developers and interface designers (i.e. the same XAML file can also be opened in Visual Studio). It will hopefully reduce the number of cases where developers have to integrate a full screen bitmap, tiled into 200 tiny pieces J
A short look at PeerNet was the occasion to try finding legal uses of the P2P technology. Vista provides a new communication stack, what can we do with it ? A few examples were discussed : a collaborative meeting where an ad hoc network can be created using auto discovery features, a data synchronisation scenario where a Readify ultra mobile worker would keep all his devices up to date in an efficient way.
The search API was briefly overviewed by talking about the “New York Times reader” that integrates with the Vista search engine.
A humoristic history of icons (starting with the plain old 255 colours win95 style) introduced the “on the fly” generation of the high resolution Vista icons. It’s possible to write a custom preview handler for your own file format. No doubts that end users will quickly expect to be able to view something relevant about the files they are browsing within the Explorer window.
We had a look at the gadgets that can be added to the vista sidebar. They can be created in either HTML or in WPF. Gadget files are in fact just zip files. Anyone can rename a gadget and have a look at it. If you want to create one, it’ll probably be easier to start by modifying another one that does something similar. That’s a good way to learn how they work.
What would Vista be without the wonderful glass feature? Well first, it seems that whole point of the glass effect, beyond the fact that it’s nice looking, is that you get to focus to the important stuff inside the window. We had a look at how to use glass effect in your own application, using winforms or WPF. In both cases, a reference to an unmanaged API is required. Search for DwmExtendFramIntoClientArea and DwmApi.dll for examples. Warning: don’t misuse that functionality! We do not want to see new application using the glass effect everywhere; it would defeat the whole purpose J
A lot of effort has been put into redesigning the standard dialog windows. They are a lot simpler, with most options hidden from the user. The idea is that the dialogs now focus on what’s important. For example, the new open file dialog has got very few options displayed by default. The basic action performed by the dialog is to give a name to the file. Selecting a folder is not the primary concern anymore because the application would have probably set the current path to some meaningful folder and that anyway with the new search and filtering features of vista, saving all the documents in one single place should not be an issue anymore. All the new standard dialogs can as usal be extended (and it is even supposed to be easier than what it used to be). Search for the following keywords if you are interested: IFileDialog, IFileOpenDialog.
Last but not least, the new xml Office file format. The big change is that xml is now the default format when working with Office 2007 documents. Once again the files are just zip archives. You can rename your .docx to .zip and start to have a look inside by yourself. That’s pretty cool! Pictures are stored in their binary format for efficiency reason (base64 would make it 1.33 times bigger). It’s quite cool to be able to play directly with the list of images inside a PowerPoint document. You can manipulate the xml yourself or you can use a set of new dotnet classes (search for System.IO.Packaging). As far as compatibly is concerned, patches that can open/edit/save the new xml formats are already available for the previous versions (up to office 2000). There was a good question: what about password protected documents? The answer is that it is handled automatically by the zip format which supports encryption on a file by file basis.
I took a few notes about the things I thought were worth remembering. I hope that I will interest some people that did not make it to the event.
The developer keynote was presented by Andrew Coates who is a Microsoft evangelist and most of the other sessions were presented one of my Readify co worker: Mitch Denny.
We started with the Expression Interactive Designer. This is a lot like the Macromedia Flash editor, but Expression will generate XAML files. This new format (at the heart of WPF) should be the common language talked by both developers and interface designers (i.e. the same XAML file can also be opened in Visual Studio). It will hopefully reduce the number of cases where developers have to integrate a full screen bitmap, tiled into 200 tiny pieces J
A short look at PeerNet was the occasion to try finding legal uses of the P2P technology. Vista provides a new communication stack, what can we do with it ? A few examples were discussed : a collaborative meeting where an ad hoc network can be created using auto discovery features, a data synchronisation scenario where a Readify ultra mobile worker would keep all his devices up to date in an efficient way.
The search API was briefly overviewed by talking about the “New York Times reader” that integrates with the Vista search engine.
A humoristic history of icons (starting with the plain old 255 colours win95 style) introduced the “on the fly” generation of the high resolution Vista icons. It’s possible to write a custom preview handler for your own file format. No doubts that end users will quickly expect to be able to view something relevant about the files they are browsing within the Explorer window.
We had a look at the gadgets that can be added to the vista sidebar. They can be created in either HTML or in WPF. Gadget files are in fact just zip files. Anyone can rename a gadget and have a look at it. If you want to create one, it’ll probably be easier to start by modifying another one that does something similar. That’s a good way to learn how they work.
What would Vista be without the wonderful glass feature? Well first, it seems that whole point of the glass effect, beyond the fact that it’s nice looking, is that you get to focus to the important stuff inside the window. We had a look at how to use glass effect in your own application, using winforms or WPF. In both cases, a reference to an unmanaged API is required. Search for DwmExtendFramIntoClientArea and DwmApi.dll for examples. Warning: don’t misuse that functionality! We do not want to see new application using the glass effect everywhere; it would defeat the whole purpose J
A lot of effort has been put into redesigning the standard dialog windows. They are a lot simpler, with most options hidden from the user. The idea is that the dialogs now focus on what’s important. For example, the new open file dialog has got very few options displayed by default. The basic action performed by the dialog is to give a name to the file. Selecting a folder is not the primary concern anymore because the application would have probably set the current path to some meaningful folder and that anyway with the new search and filtering features of vista, saving all the documents in one single place should not be an issue anymore. All the new standard dialogs can as usal be extended (and it is even supposed to be easier than what it used to be). Search for the following keywords if you are interested: IFileDialog, IFileOpenDialog.
Last but not least, the new xml Office file format. The big change is that xml is now the default format when working with Office 2007 documents. Once again the files are just zip archives. You can rename your .docx to .zip and start to have a look inside by yourself. That’s pretty cool! Pictures are stored in their binary format for efficiency reason (base64 would make it 1.33 times bigger). It’s quite cool to be able to play directly with the list of images inside a PowerPoint document. You can manipulate the xml yourself or you can use a set of new dotnet classes (search for System.IO.Packaging). As far as compatibly is concerned, patches that can open/edit/save the new xml formats are already available for the previous versions (up to office 2000). There was a good question: what about password protected documents? The answer is that it is handled automatically by the zip format which supports encryption on a file by file basis.
