A lot of cool stuff has been coming out of Microsoft recently at the PDC. You can watch the webcast of the event here.

Here is a short summary of some of the announcements, linking to a Channel 9 video of each (if possible):

Sparkle - separating visual components and design of an application from the data representation.

Start.com / Gadgets - nice, clean start/home page which can be extended using “gadgets”. and these gadgets can be re-used through inheritance. The windows vista sidebar will also sport gadgets which help people get to commonly used or needed data or tasks.

Microsoft Max - a kind of a cross between iPhoto and iMovie. allows you to create rich interactive photo albums with slick effects and to export these albums so that almost anybody can view them.

LINQ - a really cool idea of trying to remove the impedance mismatch between object and relational databases. From what I have seen, manipulating XML should be easier. It’s all done in C#. Creating and populating objects after using SQL joins should be easier.

WCF or Windows Communication Founcation (formerly Indigo) - Much more than just another web-services framework, it implements a lot of the plumbing that a lot of developers usually have to manage all the way from SOAP to P2P to some other method of app-to-app or pc-to-pc integration. So if you want 2 machines to talk to one another somehow you don’t have to worry too much about the plumbing going on behind all that communication. At least that’s the easiest way I see to summarize it

One the of absolutely coolest things that Jim Allchin showed off was the ability to increase the available memory of a PC running Vista by simply plugging a USB key in. It’s ingenious and I haven’t heard of anyone doing anything like it unless I am mistaken.

WPF/E or Windows Presentation Foundation / Everywhere. WPF was formerly Avalon, a new way to build rich interactive web / client apps using XML. They showed a very cool Netflix (video rental online) demo that they ran on 4 different machines and it scaled, etc flawlessly: a desktop machine, Media Center PC, Tablet PC and a PDA. Everything being vector based makes this a lot easier. Another cool North Face demo here

A lot more stuff than this has been announced of course but it is good to see at least a few cool things and possibly 1 innovation come out of Microsoft so far! They are pretty gung-ho on security nowadays and let’s hope that Vista finally gets security right (by right I mean a lot better than XP by default). Note that I’m usually *not* very pro-Microsoft, but I do believe in competition, and I hope Apple, Google, Linux et al give Microsoft all they’ve got because it makes things a lot more interesting for the consumer and gives us more choice. That is always a good thing.