Today was a day o' panels, so it's difficult to sum them up... so I'll go ahead and just sum up the PDC as best I can.

Collaboration and Communication.

If you really want better details, hit the archives or hit PDCBloggers... there's a zillion times more info than I would think to give you in a single blog entry. But really, *so* much of the coming wave involves collaboration among people as an integrated part of an application (e.g. two people working on different pages of a Word doc at the same time, not just saving to disk and emailing changes back and forth)... and it will all be powered by the XML-based messaging bus, for now called Indigo.

Pretty good stuff, if you ask me. There are some killer apps just waiting to be thought of and developed, and I all but guarantee you that the people and groups innovations that Longhorn (and WinFS/WinFX) is bringing forward will be a big part of it.

Really, at this point, there is no excuse for not developing compelling software. The RAD advances in Whidbey, combined with the killer WinFX APIs, now reduce the trivial stuff, the annoying crap where noone in your group could ever agree on how to develop it (the small piece of my brain still devoted to proper grammar is cringing after reading that, but I digress), to almost nothing.

Your mission now is to find the really difficult answers... and most of these answers don't have questions written for them yet. People didn't know they wanted IM until they got it; now, just try and cut off your 16-year-old for even a day... I dare you. A similar killer app is out there, just waiting for the right mind to come across it.

Will you be that guy/gal? Will I? Only time will tell, but the clock is now ticking folks, with 3-4 years to go.

Go get to it... I know that I am.

- G

A few links to sum up this week's events:

The Longhorn Developer Center @ MSDN

ASP.Net Whidbey

Visual Studio.Net Whidbey (and a bonus: Orcas, VS.Net.Next.Next)

SQL Server Yukon

How could I forget this?

MSR's section on social computing

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