.NETified

The Windows Vista, Office 2007 and Exchange 2007 launch was pretty fun. Not as fun as the Visual Studio 2005 launch last year, but I’m a developer, so what do you expect.

There was the usual slew of parters giving away swag. They were much more geared towards IT professionals than development. Most people were handing out cd’s with documents or training on their software. I was hoping for some actual applications to use, but got nothing. MS gave away a free copy of Office 2007 Professional and Office Groove 2007 along with Vista Ultimate Preview. This was curious… a preview version. It had a cd key, and looked like a “real” version, so I installed it. Everything seemed to work until I tried doing an update to get the Ultimate Extras, and they didn’t show up. Did some digging to find out that the preview version isn’t the RTM version, but the build just before it. This is kinda strange since the RTM has been out for 2 months. Oh well. Guess I’ll be purchasing it.

Vista has a great thing called People Near Me. If you have wireless, you can broadcast yourself, and create an ad-hoc network where you can share files, chat, and share your desktop, all without a router or server.

The demo of WPF using Visual Studio “Orcas” was probably the highlight of the day for me. WFP is just amazing and easy to use.

SharePoint 2007 has a lot of nice features. It’s integrated tightly with Exchange and Active Directory and has Wiki’s and blogs built in. It uses an IIS site instead of a Portal site now also.

Exchange has some nice new features also, such as voicemail. You can also hear your emails over the phone.

Anyways, there are a lot of cool things in all these products that I didn’t know about. Vista definitely isn’t “XP with a new look”. It has a lot of great new features that make it worth upgrading to.