I. Introduction
II. New Features for Vista
III. Something New in IE Besides Tabbed Browsing
IV. A Short Peek at Office 2007
V. XAML: Khuzamel
VI. Surprised?

I. Introduction

I grew up to be a Windows baby. In fact, I’ve been into open source for at least a year and a half. Yesterday was the Vista Technical Session and I should say it was fun at a certain level.

I didn’t know that MS moved to a new office. They’ve been at 6750 since last month. Pretty roomy too. Too roomy actually. I was like a lost tourist taking shots of everything.

Julie’s back, Manong Guard and Tanya on the phone

The facilitators:

Stanley Tan, Software Development Lead, Microsoft Philippines

Jojo Ayson, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft Philippines

Matthew Hardman, ISV Development Evangelist, Microsoft APAC

This is the fourth time that Microsoft showed me Vista. I wanted to see it this time because of the Gadgets (more later).

II. New Features for Vista

The new login screen.

The new cool switch (Alt+Tab). By the way, if you haven’t noticed, they’re using a different wallpaper from the swaying grass. Jojo said that the idea was scrapped.

Gadgets, the counter-strike for Google Desktop and Konfabulator. They’re HTML based and supports JavaScript, JScript and VBScript. Watch out for a Gadget Design/Making contest when Vista comes out. Gadgets are not directly supported by Avalon. Stanley said that they had to remove the line of dependencies otherwise Vista would come out by 2007. I think they missed a couple of milestones.

The improved MMC.

Vista now utilizes metadata and you could also search through them. They’re beating Google to it. I forgot to ask them if this utilization of metadata is expandable (through updates or something; not just with files like JPEGs, MP3s and such).

Live Icons in Vista. Puts real pictures in the folders.

More icons in the Control Panel for more options [and to further confuse the user].

Icons now use scalable vector graphics (SVG) which allows the icon to occupy the whole screen!! Wow!

The “Network Center” or Network Connections in XP. It now does a traceroute for you and creates a cute tree with bunnies (shows how you’re connected to the Internet).

Windows Collaboration, NetMeeting’s predecessor.

Windows Defender. According to Stanley, it will stay in beta phase until Vista comes out.

Media Center. Where’s the remote? Change the channel!

III. Something New in IE Besides Tabbed Browsing

“Quick Preview” of bookmarks for your morning routines (and yes, an RSS aggregator is built-in too).

Phishing detection.

 
New “Shrink to Fit” option when printing (before and after).

IV. A Short Peek at Office 2007

Office 2007 [or Office 12 or Office Wave or Office Whatever], will be released the same time as Vista. If I’m not mistaken, I posted a link to a video with a preview demo of the new UI codenamed the Ribbon. Microsoft says [again], this will be a very big launch because Vista will be launched with Office 2007.

A glance at PowerPoint 2007 while waiting for everything to load up.

Word 2007. I hope this thing will load as fast as Word 2000.

Office 2007 will now use document formats based on XML. The new filetypes are PPTX,DOCX and XLSX and you’ll be able to open your files with Notepad and still have it [at least] readable.

I asked about encryption and security but Matt didn’t have a concrete answer for me. In fact, my question was also asked before and he’s been looking for that option where you could set a password for the file.

V. XAML: Khuzamel

XAML looks like a cool thing. Specially that XML is the next new thing (or is it now?) and one of the hands of Web 2.0. Lots of fancy things that you could do.

XAMLPad, it’s free and it looks lightweight.

They always showed this demo of XAML. There’s a video clip over here.

Matt demonstrated how to build a XAML-based media player from scratch.

VI. Surprised?

Another feature that I should mention is that you could add a USB thumb/flash drive to the RAM. IE7, according to Stanley, will not support CSS 2.1. There you go, good and bad news (or is it both good news?).

I enjoyed it but saw nothing very special. I’ve seen those demos before except that I paid more attention to XAML this time because I didn’t have that much knowledge on XML before.

I also got goodies, Visual Studio Express, an MSDN Connection notebook and an MSDN magazine.

The following are snapshots of slides to Matt’s technical session. We didn’t get to finish everything though.

• Making Applications “Light Up” on Vista
• Enrich the User Experience
• Windows Presentation Foundation Architecture
• WCF: one solution for all connectivity
• Build for Connected Systems (WCF)
• Build for Connected Systems (WWF)
• Make Document Data More Accessible

I was looking for a[n] RSS feed for the latest release/builds of Firefox, Gecko and Thunderbird. I remember subscribing on one feed but it had lots of other Firefox advocacy related stuff that I didn’t want to recieve with the feed and I couldn’t find it anymore. I ended up finding something else.

Here’s a short FAQ for frustrated web designers with problems on cross-browser compatibility for Firefox; link. Ang-Ang and Karlo, this is for you. Way back when I was coding HTML and JavaScript in high school, I disciplined myself to make every page readable and functional on IE5 and Netscape 4. I had to do this to the pixel. I guess I only had discipline for coding. Haha.

I like the way Firefox emphasized on the standards and discouraging malpractice of the tags and their attributes. For example, the alt in <img> where proprietary browsers decided to use it for tooltips. Way back in the Lynx days, it really stood [and still stands] for alternative text for browsers that couldn’t display images. No matter how you’d try to scramble the letters of alt, it wouldn’t go anywhere near tooltip. It sucks that they had to tolerate the iframe tag but its elements are not accessible via Javascript.

I didn’t notice that Mozilla really runs a tight ship with development. The deer park versions are quite disappointing though. Here’s the guideline to getting your code included.

I. Surprise Me
II. Funky or Smashing
III. Bad News?

I. Surprise Me

I’ll be attending an exclusive Windows Vista Technical Preview Session with Mr. Stanley Tan, software development lead at Microsoft PH, this coming Thursday. This should be interesting. I’ll see what I can share.

I hope there’ll be more stuff to be awed than laughed at. It’s been four years [of R&D].

II. Funky or Smashing?

Next Thursday night is the graduation at FSAP. Then on that night, Makopa, Radioactive Sago Project and Kapatid will be playing at Saguijo. On Friday, there’ll be a Razorback tribute (plus Razorback jamming along later) at Chakiks’ Music Bar at Ortigas.

I wonder which gig to go to but the Jazz night at Saguijo sounds sooo tempting. Who wants to come with me?

III. Bad News?

Summer vacation is starting to look like it’s cancelled. Practicum starts at May and this trimester ends at the last week of April. I’m a bit excited for practicum too. I don’t know. I just feel like it’d be great to be free from school for awhile.

I hope it won’t be disappointing.

I. Thanks God It’s Sunday
II. Fun with Physics
III. Another First, by Smart

I. Thanks God It’s Sunday

painted in a wide-ass mudguard of an old truck on the way to Rising Sun. I asked Ramel to come with me to buy a DVD writer. I chose the Benq DW1640. I’m trying it out now and I’m wondering why I can’t burn a couple of files because the software says I need a CD-R/W for that task. DVD manufacturers made burning life very complex. I’d have to choose if I were to get a DVD+R or a DVD-R. Why can’t we all get along? Ugh.

Oops, got it working now. I could blame Ahead (it was bundled with Nero 6) for poor UI design. I also can’t understand why I’d have to choose between two recording devices which point to one drive (CD-R/W or DVD-/+R).

Watched Final Destination 3 with Gian, Joy, Ramel and Kat yesterday. Man, the seats at Greenbelt 1 are annoyingly small. The movie was kinda bad too. The story sucked. I only liked the gory parts but Final Destination 1 and 2 had a better story. Only the chick and the dude knew about the escape-from-death’s-revenge thing.

II. Fun with Physics

I was browsing around again and bumped unto this cool physics site. They have this Factbook and has lots of stuff to know about everyday life/things.

They even researched some stuff from films like the speed of a car in Bad Boys II or the tension in Spiderman’s webs. Good place to check out if you have spare time.

III. Another First, by Smart

In case you haven’t heard and if you’re a Smart WiFi subscriber, their’s been a security issue that’s been discovered (I think it was mentioned somewhere before though). Check out this post at Pinoy Tech Blog.