Windows Vista and Office 12 to revolutionise software devlopement and the end user experience, says Gates, Capossela.
Microsoft's vision of a service-orientated development and user platform will become a reality next year with the release of Microsoft Windows Vista and Office 12.
In his opening keynote for Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference 2005, chief software architect Bill Gates stated that Vista and Office 12, on track for release in the second half of 2006, will introduce both software developers and the average user to Microsoft's XML-based file formats and integrated .NET platform. Both the new operating system and Office Suite were demoed for the audience by Chris Capossela, vice president, information worker for Microsoft.
Some of the features demonstrated included the Vista Sidebar, home to a number of real-time gadgets such as an RSS feed box, clock, and a very stylish, animated version of Media Player; an extensive variety of window review functions that allow a user to view the content of a window by simply rolling over it in the taskbar and a 3D window view function tied to the Tab key.
Also part of the demonstration was a look at the parental control feature for games, which allows parents to score games using the official Entertainment Software Rating Board's ratings. It is unknown at this time whether Vista will have a localised version of this feature for countries such as Australia.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the new OS was the preview of Internet Explorer 7, the first, real update of Microsoft's browser since Windows 2000. IE7 will feature extensive tabbed browsing functions, increased security in the form of phishing protection that uses a monitored database of suspect websites and heuristic algorithms to isolate phishing attempts, and much-needed RSS aggregation capabilities.
Next in the demonstration was Office 12, now referred to by Microsoft as the Office 'System'. The new version is easily the most fully-featured yet. According to Capossela, many users have been unaware of the functionality available in Office, making the goal of the latest version to open up these features and make them accessible. Hence, Office no longer uses drop-down menus, replaced with graphic-rich toolbars. 'Live preview' was the phrase of the day, with Capossela rolling over fonts and formatted charts in the toolbar that would update the document in real-time.
Further integration of both Vista and the .NET platform were highlighted by BJ Holtgrewe, senior product manager for Visual Studio, in a demonstation yesterday. Using Visual Studio Tools for Office and a few lines of code, Holtgrewe showed the ease of creating an interactive Word document powered by .NET.
The Excel part of the demo show the app sporting a new feature called 'Data bars' that allows a user to display chart bars inside of spreadsheet cells. Using this feature, Capossela was also able to colour a series of cells to highlight high, medium and low numbers with just a few mouse clicks.
According to Gates, the need to improve productivity and make it easier to 'visualise information' were behind the work that has gone into the new OS and Office. Gates credited the drive for Microsoft to be more ambitious with its software to the increasing performance of PCs.
Gates also made it clear that XML was the 'dominant force' in the new versions of Windows and Office. 'XML is built into the core,' he said.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012