I’m looking forward to PDC this year. More than anything else I want to leave with a really good understanding of what Longhorn is going to be from a developer’s perspective. I want nuts and bolts.
On the PDC site is a list of sessions. A few have grabbed my interest. Sure I want to check out the Avalon sessions and see what’s new with C++ and Longhorn. But I wonder what the collaboration and P2P sessions will be like? Will there be high-level SDK features available on par with creating applications such as ConferenceXP or the page sharing features in OneNote–or are these capabilities still excluded from use outside of universities?
On the Tablet side, there’s only one dedicated Tablet session:
Longhorn Tablet PC: Advances in Creating Ink Enabled Applications
Come see how ink integrates into Avalon and what the new and improved recognition APIs can do. In Avalon, the stylus is a premier input device adjacent to the keyboard and mouse, ink is a core data type, and several ink controls are built in. The ink analysis API unifies layout analysis (e.g., distinction of drawing, words, paragraphs, etc.) and ink to text recognition under a single API, in addition to improvements in accuracy and supported structures (e.g., bulleted lists and call outs). The combination of these advances and the expansion into touch digitizers enables new scenarios.
Sounds like the session is going to touch on several issues I’ve been wondering about. Can’t wait for this one.
It is a bit disappointing though that there’s going to be only a single Tablet session at PDC. I guess that makes sense however. Tablets are such a small part of the market and I’m guessing that most people want more Longhorn info than Tablet know-how.
What other Tablet stuff might there be? Maybe there’ll be a Tablet BOF–though I haven’t seen anything here yet. And I assume the Tablet team will have a good showing in the exhibit area.
This has got me thinking–even if it doesn’t make sense to have an agenda bursting with Tablet sessions at PDC, in what other ways can Tablets be promoted at a developer event? Simple: Have presenters use Tablets during their presentations. Maybe with ink support in Visual Studio, similar to this, Tablets might be more common in developer conferences like PDC.
We need a 64bit Tablet with a 256m gpu by the time Longhorn launches!