Microsoft News Tracker

Yesterday at the PDC, Microsoft announced a beta of Max, a photo cataloging and sharing application. While that’s nothing new, the point is that it provides a first taste of the graphics and user interface innovations possible with the upcoming Avalon (Windows Presentation Foundation). And for that reason, to use Max you’ll need a Windows Presentation Foundation™ capable 3D Video Card and Max installs the WinFX September Community Technical Preview in order to get the Avalon APIs. Likely not for the faint of heart and not really intended to be. There are some screenshots on Channel 9 so you can get the flavor and it does look slick.

The Max team blog has comments from the team.

Press release:

Sept. 14, 2005 — Today at the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference 2005 (PDC05), Eric Rudder, senior vice president, Servers and Tools at Microsoft Corp., introduced Microsoft® Expression, a family of professional tools for the design and production of enhanced user experiences and rich content for the Web and Windows Vista™ platform. The announced products and their code names are Expression code-named “Acrylic Graphic Designer,” a painting, illustration and effects tool for creating graphic designs; Expression code-named “Sparkle Interactive Designer,” a user-interface design tool for modern application development using the Windows® Presentation Foundation; and Expression code-named “Quartz Web Designer,” a layout and design tool for creating Web sites.

Rudder stressed that the new tools portfolio, paired with the Windows Presentation Foundation, a powerful platform-level presentation and display engine, will help drive down the cost and effort associated with building richer, more compelling and exciting applications with unique differentiated capabilities.

Some details on the products:

“Acrylic Graphic Designer” Key Features and Benefits

• Dynamic visual effects. Designers can explore their creativity with innovative styles and graphic properties such as textures, fringes and dimensionality. New image effects such as blurs, drop shadows, color correction and filters can be accomplished by using nondestructive, editable Live Effects. “Acrylic Graphic Designer” also includes advanced features such as PhotoMontage.

• Flexible hybrid graphics environment. Built-in flexibility enables designers to alternate between vector-based and pixel-based elements within a hybrid graphics environment.

• Easy hand-over from design to development. Users can easily incorporate graphics into a variety of other software tools and industry formats, including Microsoft Office, Microsoft Visual Studio and XAML.

“Sparkle Interactive Designer” Key Benefits and Features

• Rich visual design environment. The design environment of “Sparkle Interactive Designer” enables the combination of multiple media elements such as vectors, pixel images, 3-D content, video, high-quality text, and animation for rich, cinematic user interfaces. Content can be contextualized by applying custom styles and layout to assist end-user interaction and comprehension.

• Custom styles and adaptive layout. With the inclusion of adaptive layout for various screen resolutions and form factors, customers can combine visual styles into compelling new interface elements.

• Easy hand-over from design to development. XAML enables the translation of the graphic user interface into the code environment, fostering seamless collaboration between developers and designers. Prototype, design and development stages within the software development process are optimized through the sharing of a common platform and integration with Visual Studio.

“Quartz Web Designer” Key Benefits and Features

• Advanced Web site design. “Quartz Web Designer” enables the direct manipulation of positioning, sizing and padding with CSS page layouts. The flexible, designer-focused work space provides easy access to task panes, toolbars and features. In addition, the rich design-time experience combined with integrated design and code views helps to deliver differentiated Web sites.

• Standards-based design. Web designers can create accessible, standards-based Web sites by default and configure flexible schema settings to support all combinations of HTML, XHTML and CSS standards as well as browser schemas. Built-in compatibility and accessibility checkers ensure that Web sites render properly in any browser.

• Easy hand-over from design to development. Support for XML, ASP.NET and XHTML offers easy integration between Web design and development teams with “Quartz Web Designer” and Visual Studio.

The Expression family web site is http://www.microsoft.com/expression.

Press release:

Sept. 14, 2005 — Today at the Professional Developers Conference2005 (PDC05), Microsoft Corp. introduced Windows® Workflow Foundation, a workflow engine, programming model and set of tools for developers to rapidly build workflow-enabled applications. Windows Workflow Foundation is a set of activities that coordinate people and software. With it, Microsoft is redefining workflow by incorporating it into a mainstream development platform and supporting both human and system workflow across client and server scenarios. Workflow capabilities will be available to developers via WinFX™, the new programming model for Windows Vista™. Developers can workflow-enable applications using the familiar and popular Visual Studio® development tools. Microsoft also announced plans to use Windows Workflow Foundation to workflow-enable the next version of Microsoft® Office products, code-named Office “12,” BizTalk® Server and Microsoft Dynamics™.

The company previewed significant enhancements to Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies including integrated workflow capabilities built upon Windows Workflow Foundation directly inside familiar Office system applications, bringing together document management, records management and Web content management for unified, integrated, scalable enterprise content management (ECM). The goal is to provide every information worker in an organization with a simple way to create, share, manage, archive and find a diverse spectrum of content, and to do that in a way that is extensible for developers.

More on the Windows Workflow Foundation at the Windows Vista Developers Center.

In addition to the Q&A I mentioned yesterday when it was unveiled at PDC05, Barry Gervin has a long list of resources for Language Integrated Query (LINQ). Amongst the wealth of material is an overview paper by Don Box and Anders Hejlsberg:

After two decades, the industry has reached a stable point in the evolution of object oriented programming technologies. Programmers now take for granted features like classes, objects, and methods. In looking at the current and next generation of technologies, it has become apparent that the next big challenge in programming technology is to reduce the complexity of accessing and integrating information that is not natively defined using OO technology. The two most common sources of non-OO information are relational databases and XML.

Rather than add relational or XML-specific features to our programming languages and runtime, with the LINQ project we have taken a more general approach and are adding general purpose query facilities to the .NET Framework that apply to all sources of information, not just relational or XML data. This facility is called .NET Language Integrated Query (LINQ).

We use the term language integrated query to indicate that query is an integrated feature of the developer’s primary programming languages (e.g., C#, Visual Basic). Language integrated query allows query expressions to benefit from the rich metadata, compile-time syntax checking, static typing and IntelliSense that was previously available only to imperative code. Language integrated query also allows a single general purpose declarative query facility to be applied to all in-memory information, not just information from external sources.

There’s also a video interview with Anders Hejlsberg and Dan Fernandez on Channel 9.

Note that while there are tech previews for release candidate versions of Visual Studio 2005 and the Visual Basic and Visual C# 2005 Express Editions, LINQ is avowedly a feature of Visual Basic 9.0 and Visual C# 3.0 which means Orcas, the next generation of Visual Studio beyond VS 2005.

A random comment:

The Language Integrated Query (LINQ) demo during the PDC demo was exciting. There was applause all around whenever different products were shown and different speakers were introduced, yet when the LINQ demo was shown there was a lot of talk within the crowd, oohs and aahs, and a bunch of OMG-this-is-cool’s. The attendee sitting next to me pulled out his notepad and started writing down everything he saw. After two hours of keynote before it, it was the only thing worthy to write down.

Finally, if you want to dig into the code, Jomo Fisher illustrates the Evolution of a C# Query—Step by step from C# 1.1 to LINQ.

Check it out at http://blogsearch.google.com/. (Also http://google.com/blogsearch.) Details here.