Day 2 began with more sizzle – lots of announcements and goodies.

SilverLight 4

Scott Guthrie - as always – gets to make the best announcements.  SilverLight 4 is out in Beta now and release will be 1st half of next year (probably around MIX time I’d guess).  Here’s the highlights:

• Support for external devices including cameras and microphones.  Scott did a fun little demo using a web cam and some special effects. You can also interact with the stream – in another demo that took a snapshot of a barcode and did a lookup for the book.
• Printing.  Let me say that again PRINTING!!! Awesome!!  Custom print preview also.
• Multicasting support.  Don’t know what this is but it got a couple of ooo’s and ahhhh’s.
• RichText, Clipboard (system or app), MouseWheel, Right Click and Drag and Drop. They demoed some of these using an awesome (so I say awesome too much?) Facebook client (the code for which is available).
• Command Manager and MVVM framework.  Our SL gurus spend a lot of time getting this basic code working on every significant SL project.  This will save many hours!
• HTML Control. Totally awesome!  You can use this to display any old HTML including plugins such as Flash. In this demo they played a Rick roll video off YouTube in a HTML control that was embedded in a SL app.  Then they chopped up the ‘page’ into a jigsaw and shsuffled the pieces.  All this while the video was still playing!  Incredible stuff!
• Shared Assemblies.  No more sharing of code and recompiling.  Assemblies compiled in .Net 4 will be able to be used from SilverLight and non SilverLight apps. Another big timesaver there.
• WCF & REST enhancements including support for TCP Channels!! OMG!
• Intellisence for data binding.
• COM automation via the DLR.  They demoed this by creating items in Outlook. Very easy and natural.
• Implicit Styles. 
• Keyboard in fullscreen mode.
• Profiling support.
• CHROME support.  Ha!  Take that Google.
• And best of all – fully trusted applications outside the browser!!  WICKEDLY AWESOME!
• Oh and it’s still only ~5MB and it’s twice as fast.

The relevance of WPF is in question now I think.  SilverLight 3 now has a 45% install base (that’s 45% of all PC’s on the planet I think). 

SharePoint and Office 2010

Apart from watching an awesome SharePoint and SilverLight demo involving a racing car that looked strangely familiar there wasn’t a lot of stuff shown.  Highlights were using the new tools in Visual Studio 2010 to create SharePoint Solutions.  This has improved the experience by several orders of magnitude. Main features I caught:

• Sandbox deployments
• F5 compile and debug – no more compile, deploy, activate, run, attach blah blah.
• Can develop without SharePoint installed locally.

Beta is out now.

Goodies

They demoed a bunch of the latest hardware and some of the cool new things you can do with this gear.  Stuff like HD, MultiTouch and many cores.  Then they announced that every attendee at PDC would get a free notebook!  AWESOME!!  I didn’t think this would include me – given the nature of my attendence – but I asked and I recevied!  Woo hoo.  I love Microsoft.