WInHEC blogger lunch

For fun, went to the WinHEC blogger lunch today. Hosted by Joe Peterson, a great guy I worked with years ago. Well attended, probably thanks to the nice lunch at Tulio.

Joe opened with a message about community – how important the blogger and developer community was to Microsoft and how important events like this are. Talked about the recent 64bit Windows release. And for longhorn, mentioned a beta in early summer, beta2 in fall, and release to manufacturing next summer.

Questions from the bloggers present for Joe and team:

* Tagging in longhorn. How does this work without WinFS? Where are tags stored (in the files as file formats permit)? What about tag collisions (bummer. some talk about per-user tags but sounded like it won’t be in the product)? Personally I don’t get the excitement about tags in the audience or among the blog community, I don’t think users really want to use tags – they just want free text search. * Sidebar? cut for now. * Working to improve multimonitor support by pulling more out of display-specific drivers and into general level. display driver stability a big goal * By default, users will operate in “protected admin” and “standard user” rights levels – prompts for installs and admin ops. * Longhorn target – work on 256m system, prob will reco 512. 1gig proc. Will work with all old drivers. * Skinnable ui? working to add more skinnable features. * Dev team is purchasing only 64bit machines going forward. Daily builds of both, will simship both, you’ll be able to choose. For my money – if the dev team is running 64bit machines, then that is what I want to run, I know they will make that work well. * Will virtualpc ship in longhorn? Looking at.

All in all a great lunch. Thanks Joe et al.