This morning at Microsoft's Professional Developer's Conference (PDC) Microsoft began to lift the veil on many of the goodies it's been working on for the past few years.
To industry insiders, much of this isn't new. But during the keynotes, buzzwords like Avalon, Indigo, WinFX, and so forth began to take on greater weight as the real-world applications and advantages started to take shape.
For instance, one Microsoft technology "People Near Me" was demoed and is highly useful and yet so obvious that one wonders why this wasn't in there before. In the demo, two Microsoft employees were able to work together quickly without having to set up a bunch of shares. Instead, person A invites Person B who is "near them" into the People Near me applet. Then Person A drags and drops the Power Point app onto the share window and the other user can instantly see what that app is displaying. Then he dragged and dropped the actual PowerPoint file to enable the other user to be able to edit it. Edits on the file were instantly synchronized.
For developers, Indigo may be the "big thing". Anyone who's done network code in Windows XP knows how much of a pain it can be. Indigo seems to make this a much more streamlined experience. One Microsoft keynote speaker said "Developers on longer need to feel like plumbers."
Stay tuned.
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