Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Microsoft Build conference, Sept. 2011

Highlights from the Microsoft Build conference KeyNote delivered on Sept 13 2011:

  1. Less memory than Win7 (281 MB vs 403 MB); dropped 3 processes
  2. New WinRT – Windows Runtimes
    • Graphics, transitions, effects built-in
    • Supports multiple languages on top
    • Visual Studio 11 – really smart!
  3. Cloud
    • Integration built-in
    • E.g. no need to download a photo from web-services and store it locally before uploading it to another web-service
    • New Windows App Store
    • Can publish apps to store directly from Visual Studio 11
  4. UI
    • “Fast and Fluid” vision and execution
    • Hardware accelerated graphics
  5. Hardware:
    • Fast boot!
    • Signature-checking on boot
    • Can boot from a 256 TB drive (in comparison Win7 can boot from upto a 2 TB drive)
    • Lots of work on supercool devices like sensors, 3G cards, etc. including protocols (e.g. USSD support)
  6. Experience measurement, remote desktop
    • New task manager
    • Windows Assessment Console that runs benchmark tests
    • Metro style remote desktop
  7. Virtualization
    • New Hyper-V integrated into Windows 8
    • Mount ISO’s, mount VHD’s!
  8. Desktop
    • New tile-based start screen
    • Ribbon-based UI
    • Quick access toolbar (if you use Office 2010 you’ll know what this is)
    • New multi-monitor support
    • Search built-in start screen – just start typing and go
  9. IE10
    • Hardware acceleration support
  10. Social integration (context)
    • LiveID login – can connect a PC to Live
    • People application (from Windows Phone 7)
    • Photos application (local HD, Skydrive, FB, Flickr)
    • Other applications open from same context as social apps (e.g. mail app from photos app when you share via e-mail)
  11. Live API’s for SkyDrive
    • Sync across PCs and phones
    • Can create your own SkyDrive store - this looks like a killer proposition along with cloud integration and linking capabilities!
 
Some cool things demoed:
• Wrote a photo-doodle app that grabs pics from a content store and allows doodling on it with “58 lines of code”
• A demo system started up faster than my TV!!!
• USB 3 support built-in – showed a speed comparison between USB2 and USB3
• Tap to share through NFC!
• Samsung developer preview PC

No comments:

Post a Comment