Ckeck out Windows Live: http://www.live.com/ 

What is Windows Live?
Your online world gets better when everything works simply and effortlessly together. That's the basic idea behind Windows Live. So the things you care about - your friends, the latest information, your e-mails, powerful search, your PC files, everything – comes together in one place. This is a brand new Internet experience designed to put you in control. And this is just the beginning – you'll see many more new services in the coming months.

So you got Hotmail, Feeds and a lot of Gadgets (Microsoft widgets) on a start page.

Great working AJAX stuff!

 
I just finished watching the 3,5 hour live Keynote from the Microsoft Professional  Developers Conference (PDC05). There where so many great things, that I filled five pages of notes on new technology that was shown. I just feel absolutely trilled with new cool ideas and visions.

I will post some of the coolest things I noticed:

Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere (WPF/E)

This is a subset of the Windows Presentation Foundation (codename Avalon) that can be run on many platforms like: PC’s, Tablet PC’s, Media Centers, Pocket PC’s and Mobile Phones.

It handles automatics scaling of the user interface base on the type of device and support all kinds of input devices like Media Center Remote controls, keyboard and phone pads.
Today a video was released by Channel9.

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF or codename Indigo)

It was already know that Indigo would bring a easy solution to build and host webservices on the Windows Vista platform. But today Microsoft announce it would also do REST/PCIX,
MSMQ and Peer-to-Peer!

Atlas
This is A new Client framework development tool that  consist of two parts:

- It’s a rich clientside javascript library (for Visual Studio)
- And Server side controls based on ASP.Net

And it can be used by developers to quickly and easily build AJAX (DHTML/Javascript/XML) based,  browser independent interactive web applications.

WinFS
With the new WinFS (Windows next File System) according to Bill Gates it will be possible to realise a ‘schematic server and client storage’. Bill Gates talked about a 'extend and rich way to hyper linking data’.


LINQ

This is the ‘Language INtegrated Query(LINQ)
It’s the query language that can be use to query all kinds of datasources like databases, file stores and XML files.  You can do some very cool thing with it like doe a ‘SQL JOIN’ on a database and the file system with just a couple lines of code.  Here is a video from Channel9.

Office 12
And there is much cool news on Office 12. Too much for me to write down at the moment.
Just check this great Channel9 video!

More cool stuff can be found on:
http://microsoftgadgets.com/  (the Windows Widgets)
http://windowsmarketplacelabs.com/ (the way to buy and download software in the near future) 

There is much, but since a lot of people will wite about it in the next couple of days, seach here for what you like:

http://pdcbloggers.net/
http://www.technorati.com/tags/PDC05
http://www.talkdigger.com/index.php?surl=pdc05

Have fun! 

Last night Microsoft release the first beta of Windows Vista (formally known as Longhorn) with the first IE7 included. But they also release the IE7 Beta1 for Windows XP SP2!  

Check it out the Story from Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley ..

Microsoft Delivers Pair of Internet Explorer Betas

MSN Virtual Earth Beta is live.
MSN Virtual Earth

It isn't a Google Maps killer yet, but it has some nice detail photo's.
This is going to be a nice 'Mapping War' that will change our lives.
Here is a nice Flash demonstration about the differences of both products (its 22 MB!)


Last month I showed Google Earth (the Windows app) to friends and family. They all responded in the same way 'So Cool!'
And second: How old are these photo's? Is this a 'live feed'?

Hmmm, I guess the live feed will take another 5 years...

Check it out!

The new name for Windows Longhorn has been set!  It's Windows VISTA !

Microsoft Unveils Official Name for “Longhorn” and Sets Date for First Beta Targeted at

Windows Vista Beta 1 
targeted at developers and IT professionals, will be available by August 3rd 2005.

 

This will be a beta program i would like to join!

I made some video's at Teched 2005 Amsterdam...
I had put them on Google Video and they where approved yesterday.

They can be found here:

Google Video Search for Teched 2005 Amsterdam
(You will need the 'Google Video Viewer' that can be downloaded here).

My excuses for the bad video quality
(i have a memory problem on my HTC Magician PDA/Phone)

This are the things i found most interesting at Teched 2005

• SQL Server 2005 has become a far more powerful product that in already was.
• SQL Server 2005 in combination with Sharepoint Services, Office Scorecard Server (codename: Maestro) is really gone make Business Intelligence available for the masses.
  
• BizTalks Server 2006 is going to tot transactions, what SQL Server is for Relational databases.
  A really powerfull product for managing proceses, and busines to business transactions.
  
• The integration between SQL Server, BizTalk and Visual studio 2005 is very, very good.
  This is more and more the ultimate programming environment that developers are dreaming about.
  
• Windows Server 2003, the Compute Cluster Edition looks to be a pretty cool product.
  It lets you you do 'grid computing' (share server resources) with your Windows servers.
  Bink.nu has some goods info and screenshots of the beta product.
  

There where no real spectacular new product announcements, but a lot of great improvements on existing products…I'm off to the teched party now.  I will upload some videos to Google video later this week, so you can get an impressions of the event.