The Microsoft Developer Launch Event has now taken place. Below you will find details of all the resources used at the event together with links to webcasts of each session.
Microsoft Office Launch Materials
For the 2007 Microsoft Office system, there were sessions on using Visual Studio Tools for Office to customise the Office UI and on taking advantage of the new XML capabilities of Office on both the client and server sides. There was also be information on what's new in SharePoint Server 2007.
For Windows Vista, we talked about both the core Windows Vista capabilities, such as the new look and feel, built-in search and enhancements in security, reliability and networking. Added to this were the features of the .NET Framework version 3.0, which is shipped with Windows Vista and makes great advances in terms of security, presentation, communication and workflow.
As part of the Launch, we offered the chance to win a copy of either 2007 Microsoft Office system or Windows Vista. For the terms and conditions of these offers follow the link below.
Sanjay Parthasarathy, corporate vice president of the Developer and Platform Group at Microsoft, gave developers an overview of Windows Vista and the 2007 Microsoft Office system, the two most significant product releases in Microsoft's history.
The 2007 Office Microsoft Office system client applications include a number of new user interface features, including the Ribbon, custom task panes and Outlook form regions. In this session we looked at the programming model for these new features as well as Visual Studio Tools for Office, the managed environment for building Microsoft Office applications.
It's not just about file formats! Microsoft Office has embraced XML for many years and that connection just gets stronger in the 2007 release. As well as describing the Open XML File formats for Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint, this session covered how to create and manipulate such documents from .NET, the InfoPath client, the Document Information Panel, capabilities in Word for building dynamic documents and server document generation.
Connecting people to information and each other is just one of the tasks Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 sets out to do more effectively. See how Excel Services allows you to harness a centralised calculation engine and leverage Excel functionality both through a web browser and via Web Services. Create, publish and collate business forms using Forms Server to deliver InfoPath forms through a browser interface. The Business Data Catalog provides a mechanism to easily connect SharePoint to line of business applications and surface that data through web parts, lists and search. Finally, see how search has been improved including the ability to search people, documents and web pages across your organisation.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) helps organisations provide business intelligence (BI) capabilities to every employee, so they can share, control and reuse business information to make better business decisions. See how Dashboards, Report Center, KPIs and web parts integrate with SQL Server Reporting Services and Excel Services to unlock your business data.
MOSS incorporates and extends the technology from Microsoft Content Management Server to provide a powerful web content management system. In addition, it includes fully-fledged document and records management to support organisational knowledge management and regulatory compliance.
Collaboration is at the heart of Windows SharePoint Services version 3 (WSS) and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. In this session we walked through some of the new core collaboration features in WSS that you can take advantage of when building SharePoint applications. In addition, we covered Workflow Foundation and how you can embed extensible workflows into your SharePoint solutions.
Sanjay Parthasarathy, corporate vice president of the Developer and Platform Group at Microsoft, gave developers an overview of Windows Vista and the 2007 Microsoft Office system, the two most significant product releases in Microsoft’s history.
Windows Vista ships with the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) in the box and ready to provide a unified platform to rich client applications needing user interface, document and multimedia services.
In this session, we took a look at the new presentation features offered by the WPF, what they can do for you in your own applications and the coming tool support that lets both designers and developers build WPF applications for Windows Vista.
Windows Vista brings real clarity to the way in which users interact with information. Developers can take advantage of this in their application development.
We began this session by talking about how you can take advantage of the new AERO UI for Windows Vista and moved on to how to use the Desktop Window Manager and take advantage of the 'Glass' effect. We also looked at the new Windows Vista Sidebar and writing your own custom Gadgets for it.
The Windows Vista shell has a number of extensibility points for your document types and we explored adding thumbnail handlers and preview handlers in order that your users get the richest experience from your document types.
Search is a major feature of Windows Vista, and your application can both execute searches and surface its own metadata for the search indexer to work with. We covered how search works and how you can make use of it.
Windows Vista and the .NET Framework version 3.0 have a number of key new security and reliability features that you need to know about for your applications.
In this session we talked about the elevation model offered by User Account Control and what you can do to make sure that your applications work well with UAC. We also talked about the new .NET Framework version 3.0 identity capabilities offered by Windows CardSpace for website and Web Service authentication.
Windows Vista offers great opportunities to build more reliable applications, and we looked at the Restart/Recovery and Windows Error Reporting features that can help you do that. We also took a look at the new transactional features in Windows Vista.
The Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) is a key part of the .NET Framework version 3.0 that application developers can use to build Workflow capabilities into their own applications. The WF offers a re-usable design time component, an extensible set of building blocks for building Workflows and a flexible runtime that can be hosted in any application.
In this session we introduced the Windows Workflow Foundation, and illustrated its use by building a flexible RSS reader that uses Workflow and the new RSS platform capabilities of Internet Explorer 7.
Windows Vista brings to the forefront new and enhanced networking capabilities to application developers. It also ships with the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) for building distributed applications.
In this session we talked about the capabilities of the WCF, and we also brought that together with the new Peer 2 Peer capabilities in Windows Vista that WCF can make easily available to your applications. We also discussed other networking enhancements in Windows Vista such as Network Location Awareness and Network Access Protection.
