[phileysmiley]

Since you haven't locked this thread, I'm going to assume that we can ask questions about what you posted

Exactly.

The one part of the demo that was new to us was a walk-through of some of the new P2P features. We saw how 2 people with wireless laptops, sitting in a cafe somewhere, can share files and connect (like remote desktop). This can be done where there is no internet connection. Anyone with Longhorn and wireless capabilities can "join in" on the meeting.

Am I missing something? This doesn't sound too special.... It souds like it's just an ad-hoc wireless network.

I suppose you can look at it that way. Say there are 10 people sitting in a restaurant/cafe. They all have Longhorn. I want to share files and have a "meeting" with 4 of them. I can search who else in the area is available, then I can invite whoever I want. They accept the invitation, and we can have our meeting. You can see what is on my desktop. I can see what is on yours. If I am working on a document in Office, you can access the document and make changes in real time. We can share applications and we can send files. No third party app is needed.

Or you are doing a presentation using your laptop. You are adding to or editing numbers on your spreadsheets or pie charts along the way. Now you turn the presentation over to me. You don't have to give me your laptop and I don't have to change anything on my laptop. I just connect to you and continue the presentation. Anything I change on mine then changes on yours in real time also.

[SHK]

Thats sweet, and I could definatly see using that feature......

[phileysmiley]

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3 - Expo Marketplace

I spent most of the afternoon at the Expo Marketplace. There is so much to see and do at the WWPC, but for an all-out assault on the senses, the Marketplace is the place to be. Picture hundreds of "MS Partners," basically companies who provide products or services for use with Windows, all set up with their own booths, giveaways, demos, recruiters, salespeople, models, etc. This goes on all day every day and you could spend the whole weekend there and not see it all.

Microsoft has their own display area set up, where they are showing company reps how to participate in the Windows Marketplace, an online directory of companies who are in the Partner program. There is also an x64 kiosk and a Longhorn kiosk. I bounced back and forth among the 3, with Aaron showing the Windows Marketplace and Jay Kenny demo'ing Longhorn. The x64 area was tied up, though, since Unreal Tournament was on it. Last I looked, the same guy was standing there playing it all afternoon. He may still be there now.

I went over to the Longhorn kiosk and asked the MS staffer there (I won't mention his name) to show me the new RSS feature. He was very proud of this much-talked about new capability being added to Longhorn. He explained how one only has to go to a site with RSS and you can subscribe. To illustrate, he showed me the NY Times. So I said, "hmm...can we try another site?"
MS: Sure, where would you like to go?
Me: Hmm...how about my site? Try pronetworks.org
MS: Do they have RSS?
Me: Oh, yes, you'll see the button on the homepage.
MS: Okay, let's try it...yes, here's the RSS button. Now I just click it...now, see in the browser (IE7) I can bring down a menu with all the forums you have RSS feeds for.
Me: How about...Longhorn News?
MS: Okay, we'll select Longhorn News...

"The application has crashed. IE will now close."

MS: Oh, my. That's my first crash of the day. Darn.
Me: Hey, kind of ironic, eh? Longhorn News crashed Longhorn?
MS: Ya, well, that's why we're not delivering it yet.


Jay Kenny (Product Manager, Longhorn) and me at the MS booth in the Expo Marketplace


Some friends at the booth


Jay demonstrating Longhorn


Aaron demonstrating the Windows Marketplace


Jay and me again at the Windows Marketplace kiosk


Aaron and me again

[phileysmiley]

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4 - "Community" Dinner

Last night Aaron invited me to dinner with 3 of his coworkers. There were only 2 other Featured Site reps there. So there were 7 altogether: 4 from MS and 3 of us. Pretty much the opposite to how these events usually go. I promised Aaron I wouldn't say how we got lost driving over there. If you ever get to Minneapolis, you must go to Chino Latino. Needless to say, this was more a bunch of friends sitting around telling stories for a few hours than a meeting.

It is now Saturday morning and I am about to head into session AN019: "Longhorn Fundamentals Overview."

In this session we will cover the most important innovations that make Longhorn the best desktop Operating System Microsoft has ever released. Important focus in the design and development of the new Longhorn Client is to get the fundamentals right. We have built a powerful, reliable operating system that people can use witrh confidence and control. We have established new coding practices to ensure a high quality, more secure, and more reliable OS, and have delivered new features and technologies that provide advanced security and make it easier to deploy and manage Longhorn PCs -- which results in improved efficiency and reduced costs of managing Windows desktops. This innovation in the PC fundamentals will enable organizations to drive management cost down, increase the productivity of the end-users and enable new connected scenarios.

This one sold out yesterday and they added another one today by popular demand. I don't expect anything new that we at PROneT don't already know, but I'll report back later.

[JabbaPapa]

Sounds like you're having a great time, and digging up some pretty good stuff

[phileysmiley]

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5 - Longhorn Fundamentals

The Longhorn Fundamentals Overview session was definitely more in-depth than what we've seen, with more detailed demos than the keynotes at WinHEC and here yesterday. Although it was essentially a recap of what we already know, Amy Strader (Senior Product Manager) was able to do a much more focused presentation in front of a small room of about 50 people than a large hall of 3000.

BTW the demos were done on Build 5088 (yesterday's keynote was 5086).

Some of the points:

1) LH will organize files and apps the way you think vs the way computers have done it in the past --
2) After analyzing past trends and pains, what we need most are better security, less costs, and to solve the problem of information overload --
3) Protected user accounts -- most people need to run with administrative priveleges, but that can be risky -- they picked 400 common apps and over 30% could not install using normal user accounts -- the new protected user accounts will allow administrative priveleges for specific tasks only when needed --
4) MS mantra: "No hangs, no crashes, no reboots" --
5) LH will launch apps 15% faster --
6) 2 second resume from standby --
7) Boot 50% faster --
8) Error reporting tool -- now only reports crashes -- in LH will also report unresponsive apps and hangs --
9) Will automatically recognize what services need to be running, start them, and start their dependencies when needed --
10) Patches will require 50% less reboots, for example, Windows Updates --
11) Windows Update will not depend on IE, but will reside on PC -- let's say you have a document open that you are editing and you go to bed and leave it up unsaved -- at 3 am you get an Automatic Update and MS installs a patch -- the way it is now, your PC will reboot and you will lose your unsaved file -- in LH, it will see that you have an app open with an unsaved file, it will save the file, close the app, reboot, start up the app again, and reopen the file for you --
12) Built-in diagnostics -- LH will automatically detect a problem, and either resolve it or walk you through a resolution, for example, you are running out of memory, your drive has errors, etc. -- the goal is no more BSOD or error messages -- instead of telling you "something is wrong," it figures out what is wrong and fixes it --
13) Another example is networking problems -- a common question is, "I can't connect to my wireless network" -- LH will see you are trying to connect, figure out why you can't connect, and either fix it for you or tell you what to do --
14) No more multiple language versions of LH -- the LH disc will be one image, and on top of the image the language you need will be installed -- you can also add patches to the image, so you won't have to install LH, then run patches, and if you need to reinstall you won't have to install all the patches again -- you can simply apply the patches to the image --
15) The task scheduler can be event based -- for example, instead of saying, "run defrag once a month on the 15th at 3pm," you would say, "run defrag when disk reaches X% fragmented files" -- or "run disk cleanup when cache is X% full," etc. --
16) Capability for ad-hoc & peer-to-peer network (discussed in above posts) --
17) LH will scale to your hardware -- for example, the UI will display a level of graphics based on what your graphics card is -- it will automatically detect your hardware and adjust itself accordingly --
18) Alt+Tab will show your apps running in graphic form, that is, let's say you have WMP playing a video -- you click Alt+Tab and a horizontal window opens with a "slideshow" of the apps you have running in the background --
19) Device sync center -- for syncing Laptop, Tablet, PDA, etc. --

Finally, WinHEC was for the first aggressive public discussion of LH -- this conference is for the purpose of engaging the partners -- and step 3 is the release of Beta 1. Beta 2 will follow 6 months after Beta 1 (end Jan 06) with LH release in Fall 06.

And one more very very important point, which we have posted about before:

*Beta 1 will have only the basics in it. Most of the features discussed and/or demo'd here and in previous conferences will not appear until Beta 2.
*Beta 1 is to engage the corporate users and partners. Beta 2 is to engage the end-users (us).
*Beta 1 will not have most of the bells & whistles we have heard about and/or seen in demos. They will appear in Beta 2.

[JabbaPapa]

Awesome info, Larry !!

1) I'd guessed, and I'm glad to see it's true

3) 5) 8) 10) 11) 12) 13) 17) we already knew

14) is something I've been wondering about, and is very good news, not a 100% surprise, but news nonetheless

18) I can't wait to see what they end up doing with this

[phileysmiley]

Awesome info, Larry !!

1) I'd guessed, and I'm glad to see it's true

3) 5) 8) 10) 11) 12) 13) 17) we already knew

14) is something I've been wondering about, and is very good news, not a 100% surprise, but news nonetheless

18) I can't wait to see what they end up doing with this

Thanks Julian. We have posted so much in the context of much longer articles. But since I was just trying to take as many detailed notes as I could and post it right away, I hadn't even processed in my mind what we had already posted or not and I was on to the next event.

I can give more details about any of the above. I tried to condense it down from an hour-long session.

The Alt+Tab feature was pretty cool. We did see it work in the demo. If you can picture this: Say WMP is playing a video. Now click Alt+Tab. A rectangular window, about the size of your post here, opens on top of WMP. You can still watch the video while this is going on. In the window, you see 3 large thumbnails of the other apps running, from left to right. Then you can scroll from left to right (if there are more than 3 apps running) to view the other apps.

[mfwit]

The Alt+Tab feature was pretty cool. We did see it work in the demo. If you can picture this: Say WMP is playing a video. Now click Alt+Tab. A rectangular window, about the size of your post here, opens on top of WMP. You can still watch the video while this is going on. In the window, you see 3 large thumbnails of the other apps running, from left to right. Then you can scroll from left to right (if there are more than 3 apps running) to view the other apps.

Pretty niffty

Can't wait to see all of these features in action!

[phileysmiley]

One additional item I found out from a reliable source is that there is no such thing as a red screen (RSOD) in Longhorn. The guy who did that forced his system to crash before Longhorn had even booted up. The red screen appeared within a 3rd party app (a VMWare type of app) and not within Longhorn itself.

This story appeared all over the internet. We posted about it here:
<img src="http://www.pronetworks.org/forum/images/smiles/view.jpg" border="0"> <a href=http://www.pronetworks.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=55387 target=_blank>Longhorn: BSOD Bad, RSOD Badder</a>