Gates rounds up Longhorn plans
eWeek | at | by Mike
At Microsoft Corp.'s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) 2003, Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates highlighted his company's vision for the next wave of software development in the Longhorn era.
"The opportunity for software developers is stronger this decade than any other," Gates said in his keynote presentation opening the conference here. "We believe in the next wave. Over the last four years Microsoft's R&D budget has doubled." He said the company's budget for research and development was $6.8 billion for the last year.
Hillel Cooperman, product unit manager for the Windows User Experience, joined Gates onstage for a demonstration of Avalon and showed elements of the system that included transparency, animations, and the use of pixel shaders and "other technology that's been typical of game developers," Cooperman said.
In addition, the Avalon sidebar in Longhorn shows such things as communications and services a user has in place, as well as other things like the time, buddy lists, slide shows and could even feature ''an RSS feed built right into the sidebar."