Kognitive Jelly

Today I had the pleasure of attending the Microsoft launch event for Vista & Office 2k7. While many Rubyists are not big fans of Microsoft, I have nothing against them at all. Not to mention the prospect of getting a copy of Office 2007 for free to go hear some propaganda seemed like a good trade off to me. Seeing as we are considering an upgrade of Office inside in work, I was also able to justify this as a business event.

There are a lot of reviews and comments out there about Vista and Office, so rather than run the full gamut, I would like to highlight a few of the features demoed that caught my eye:

For network file operations, Vista analyzes the current load and changes the network window on the fly. A file that took about 5 minutes to copy from a slow network connection from Vista to Windows XP, took about 1.5 minutes between two Vista computers.

Deployment of new Windows installations (XP or Vista) are much easier with the new BDD tool and Windows PE. BDD allows for easy managing of installation images. Windows PE allows for loading windows drivers, turning the installation into a GUI based process.

Visio 2007 comes with some really nice integration options with various data stores, allowing for complex dynamic visualization tools to be created and managed with limited effort.

Powershell on Vista Enterprise allows for full on Unix like automation scripting. This will really help take the effort out of daily maintenance tasks especially when combined with powerful scripting languages like Perl & Ruby along with access to .NET objects. (’bout time!!)

(And for giggles, this post was made using the new blog features in Word 2007. Looks like the category flags are broken however, oh well).