Just watched most of today’s keynote.  I say most becasue it’s daggum 3 hours long.  Next year, I gotta get to PDC.  It’s the Microsoft developer conference.  No question.  This year I’m getting to go to VSLive! Orlando, which is awesome, will be my first actual dev conference, but I’m going to do what I can to swing PDC next year (and a VSLive!).

My thoughts on the keynote:

Right off the bat, BillG strikes a chord.  He says we are always looking to “build our software on top of a richer platform” and “richen up” the user experience, making it easier, essentially, for people to do their jobs.  As a corporate software developer, that rings true with me.  My whole job is giving the users more while making them do less and increasing productivity and as a result, the bottom line.  In that regard, .Net has been the best thing that has ever happened to me.  I mean it.  I love the .Net platform, from a pure productivity enhancement standpoint.  I can do things in the corporate world of internal software that were unheard of even 5 (hell even 3) years ago.  I know that my biggest professional failure in software would have been avoided had I been writing that software today.  .Net just allows me to do things I never would have dreamed of when I was doing VB development.  I’ll never look back.

On to the other stuff:

Longhorn (no…I won’t call it the “V” word yet) looks badass.  Admittedly I’ve been not exactly on top of Longhorn for the last year, so this is the first I’ve really seen of it.  But from a visual and functional standpoint, and a developer standpoint, all I can say is “wow!”.  The demo of Alt+Tab alone had me drooling.  The sidebar looks badass, with a nice “gadget” (aka “widget”) development framework, which will make the desktop actually useful.  The SideShow…holy mother of God…I was loving that.  I can’t find any web stuff on it in this 5 minutes that I tried, but picture a LCD on the outside of your laptop.  Your laptop is off.  Meanwhile, you have a SideShow gadget that hooks up to Expedia and you can check your flight information in the cab without booting up.  Tell me that isn’t cool as hell.  Okay, later in my notes I have a link to Microsoft Gadgets which has a link to SideShow.  So there.

I hate to say it, but I was even impressed by a IE7 feature.  QuickTabs.  Like a tiled window thumbnail view in your browser of your open tabs.  Very nice.  Someone write a Firefox extension and I’ll keep using the better browser thank you.

Then there was a bunch of stuff on Office 12.  A bunch of people are blogging about this…I didn’t really care.  Sure it looks nice, but to me it’s all so much bling for those non-developer people that use Office for their jobs and know all the 3500 Word commands.  That ain’t me brother.  I do the bare minimum.  However, it does look like it will provide some more productivity enhancements (there we go again), so that’s a good thing.

All in all, I’m pretty much looking forward to the next couple of years in Microsoft developer world.  I wish I were at PDC ‘05, I hate all of you that are there (just kidding(not really(well…sorta I guess))), hopefully see some of you and more cool things at VSLive! Orlando (just in time for launch!) and yeah.  done with this post now.  Yeah, and LINQ looks really cool, but I don’t have time for that yet.