DJ DMZ: Once again, ladies and gentlemen, I am using Windows 8 Release Preview, and it has been absolutely flawless.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome corporate vice president, Windows Web Services, Antoine Leblond. (Cheers, applause.)
ANTOINE LEBLOND: All right, good morning, everyone. Thanks for coming. I know this is a little bit of an early start maybe for a tech conference, so thanks for getting out there. I hope DJ DMZ there helped you get the blood flowing a little bit. Kind of cool that he’s running the consumer preview of Windows 8 on his laptop there. That’s pretty exciting.
So, in yesterday’s keynote Satya talked a lot about Windows Server and Windows Azure, sort of the cloud infrastructure and the on-premises infrastructure that runs businesses. Today, we’re going to talk about the third leg of enterprise infrastructure, and that’s the desktop. We’re going to talk about Windows 8.
We have quite a variety of folks in the room today. Actually, we have a lot of folks in the room today, which is pretty cool. So, we have some people who actually know quite a bit about Windows 8. We have some folks who know almost nothing about Windows 8, and who haven’t really had a chance to try it or see it yet. We have a lot of developers in the room, which is great. We have some folks who do not write code, have never written code, and have no intention to write code, and will want to get up when I boot Visual Studio a little bit later in my demo. Please stay seated. I promise no more than about five to seven minutes of Visual Studio time.
What we’re going to do is we have about an hour and 15 minutes, and we’re going to cover a lot of territory. So, what I’m going to try and do is give you a little bit of context behind Windows 8. We’re going to do a fairly extensive demo of the product. And while we’re demoing, we’re going to show you a bunch of really cool business apps that folks have already been writing for Windows 8. And then we’re going to talk a little bit about how you build those apps, and then finally we’re going to talk about how you deploy and manage those applications.
And there’s kind of three things that I want you to get out of this. The first one is I hope you’ll leave here really excited about Windows 8. We’re certainly excited about the product we’re working on and building, and I hope you’ll really love it, and I’m sure you will.
The second thing is I hope to maybe inspire you a little bit to think about the kinds of applications that you could be building for Windows 8.
Part of what we’re going to do with these apps that we show you is we’re going to try and actually show you a variety of different types of apps, so apps that maybe businesses are building for their employees, apps that businesses are building for their customers, apps that line-of-business ISVs are building for their customers and things like that. So, we’ll show you a variety and hopefully inspire you a little bit with that.
And then the last thing I want you to leave with is just the knowledge that Windows 8 is enterprise ready by design, okay?
So, the best way to talk about Windows 8 is to start by talking about the context within which we designed it, and that context of course starts with Windows 7. So, Windows 7, when we started working on Windows 8 we were sort of at the end of the product cycle for Windows 7. So, it was about two and a half to three years ago, and about to release the product. And the product’s been amazing. It’s been the best and fastest selling version of Windows ever. We just actually announced that we sold now over 600 million licenses of Windows 7, which is just an incredible number. So, it’s a really, really great product.
But if you think about its origins, it’s really rooted in the last big generational change of Windows we made, and that’s Windows 95, right? Now, of course, we’ve made thousands and thousands of improvements over the years, over the 15 or so years since Windows 95, but fundamentally if you think of things like the architecture, the app platform, the UI, notably things like the Start menu and things like that, all those things, they come to us from Windows 95.
So, the question is, how much has the world that Windows 7 was built on changed since then? Well, things have changed; they’ve changed a lot.
So, the question really then is, what does that mean for what we expect from our PCs, and what does it mean — take mobility — what does it mean that we’ve gone from this world where basically all of our PCs used to be desktops, there were laptops around but basically those were more like transportable desktops than they were real laptops. They had batteries, but the battery life was so terrible that you’d just plug them in in one place, use them, and then move them somewhere else. We’ve gone from that world to a world where this year over 75 percent of the PCs that consumers in the U.S. are going to buy are laptops, where the projections are that next year tablets will outsell desktop PCs. It’s a fundamental change in how you think about the software that you write for those PCs.
And the reason is that we’re going to go from PCs that are plugged into the wall, it’s not about portability really, it’s about the fact that they’re plugged into the wall and have an infinite source of power, to a world where the majority of the PCs that are running are running off of a battery.
I worked on Office for years, and we used to talk a lot and think a lot about, gosh, how much more can we offload to the idle process, right, so that when you’re not actually typing in Word we can do things like paginate in the background and pre-cache things and pre-render things and stuff like that. Of course, that’s exactly the right thing to do in the context of a desktop PC where wasted CPU cycles are just wasted opportunities.
But on a machine that’s running off a battery you want to do exactly the opposite. In fact, you know, in Word or something like that ideally what you’d want to do is get the CPU state down to zero between keystrokes if you could, because every microwatt of power you save is just battery life that’s extended. It’s a fundamental change.
What about touch? What does it mean to go from a world where basically we interact with our PCs with mouse and keyboard to a world today where basically almost every device that’s out there, everything that has a screen out there today has a touch UI? And that’s actually pretty — that’s kind of wild because that’s actually not the last — you know, that’s something that’s happened fairly quickly. If you think about, back of about four years ago, a lot of people were saying, you know, this iPhone thing is going to be kind of a niche product because it doesn’t have a keyboard; only a couple million people are going to want to use something that only has a touch screen. You know, go to your cell phone provider store today and tell me how many keyboard-based phones are out there.
Think of every device with a screen. I was at the airport yesterday and checked in at a kiosk with a touch screen. You go to the ATM, it’s got a touch screen. My watch has a touch screen on it, right? Touch screens are coming to PCs.
At COMPUTEX last week — I don’t know if anyone followed the news from COMPUTEX. COMPUTEX is a big hardware conference that’s in Taiwan every year. All the OEMs, all the PC OEMs all showed tons of devices that had touch screens on them: laptops, tablets, all-in-ones, monitors, standalone monitors that have touch. Touch is coming to PCs, and it changes the way you interact with your device radically.
What does it mean to come from a world where connectivity means going to your PC in the morning, flipping it on, connecting to the network, syncing your email, doing your work all day long, and then disconnecting from the network at the end of the day, to a world where connectivity is ubiquitous almost? Think of Wi-Fi networks being available everywhere, think of mobile broadband being available anywhere. Just like your phone is going to stay connected all the time, your PC can stay connected all the time now. That’s a radical change in how you think about being connected to things.
Content. We go from a world where you store your content on your local disk, on your machine, to a world where your content is splattered everywhere. I’ve got content on my local disk, I’ve got content that I sync with other machines, I’ve got content stored in storage services in the cloud like SkyDrive and Dropbox, Office 365, things like that, content that’s stored in all these other sort of one-off services, photos stored in Facebook or in Flickr, videos stored in YouTube and things like that. My content is all over the place.
What’s it mean to go from a world where the work I did on my PCs was all about documents and databases, right, it was about content authoring and things like that, to a world where we still do all those things but we also spend an incredible amount of time just sharing and communicating and interacting with people, where PCs have become a first class human interaction tool? It’s a dramatic difference in how we use our PCs.
And finally, what does it mean to go from a world where there’s this hard split between what I do at home with my technology and what I do at work with my technology? In fact, what I do at home and what I do at work in general. You can probably all relate to this. There used to be a hard split. Now you know what, you do work at home, you do home things at work, you want to be able to take the technology that you have at home and bring it into work. No one wants to be carrying the two cell phones on their belt anymore; no one wants to have a home laptop and a work laptop. Big difference even in how we live our lives there.
We collectively have reimagined the way we use technology in our daily lives, and we’ve reimagined what we expect from our PCs.
So, with Windows 8 we’ve reimagined Windows. From the chipset to the experience, Windows 8 takes the best of Windows 7 and looks forward to a world of new devices, new apps, new experiences, and all sorts of new things like that. We’ve built it for the billion people who use PCs today, which is an incredible number, and for the next billion people who are going to use them in the future.
We’ve reimagined Windows. We’ve reimagined the user experience so that it’s beautiful, it’s fast, it’s fluid, it’s full screen and it’s immersive. We’ve reimagined the way Windows talks to hardware so that it works on an even broader range of machines than it ever has, from super high-end desktops with multiprocessors, four monitors, liquid cooled everything and all that business, all the way down to these just incredible small, light, long battery life tablets that are built on these system-on-a-chip designs from ARM and Intel.
We’ve reimagined the way apps work so that they’re not in a silo anymore, so that they work together, so that every app you add to your system not only makes your system better but makes all the other apps that are on your system better.
And then we’ve reimagined connectivity so that your PC works just like your phone, so that you’re always connected to your people and to your files, to your apps.
Windows 8 is a bold new bet, and it’s a generational change in Windows.
But here’s the thing, it’s still Windows. In fact, one of the things that we like to say is that Windows 8 first and foremost is a better Windows than Windows 7. What do we mean by that? Well, first of all, it means that we’ve done a ton of work just on the fundamentals, right, the things that make a great OS great, so things like performance and memory footprint, the file system, connecting to devices, even basics like copying files around and things like that. We’ve improved all those things over Windows 7.
It also means that all of the things that you could do with Windows before you can still do with Windows 8. So, the logoed PC that you’ve got today that’s running Windows 7 will be able to run Windows 8 just as well, if not better than it did Windows 7. It means that the devices that you plug into your PC today will work with Windows 8. It means that the apps you run today will still work with Windows 8.
And it also means that you don’t have to compromise. With Windows 8 you could pick a tablet or a laptop or a desktop, you could pick a machine that has mouse and keyboard or a machine that has touch or a machine that has all three.
Windows 8 works equally well in a managed environment or an unmanaged environment. It means that it also works as well in a mixed environment of Windows 8 machines with Windows 7 machines with different versions of Windows like that, not just in a uniform one.
And it also means that you don’t have to choose like you do today, you don’t have to choose between a small, thin and light tablet or being able to run the apps that you use every day. You don’t have to choose between all-day battery life or being able to connect to your enterprise infrastructure. You don’t have to choose between the device that you want at home and the device that you’re allowed to use at work. What it means is that you can have a Windows PC without having the compromise.
So, let’s have a look; we’re going to do a demo.
Before I do that, it is worth noting one of the hallmarks of Windows has always been just the range of hardware that it works on, and on that table over there we have some kind of neat examples of hardware from some of our partners. These are all PCs that you could buy today, by the way. We have this great all-in-one. There’s a tablet there in the middle. There’s a handful of these ultrabooks, which are these wonderful new lightweight laptops.
When we do our demos today we’re actually going to demo on a range of hardware like that. I’m going to start by using this PC here. This is a Samsung Series 7 tablet. You can actually go buy this today. You can buy one with Windows 7 on it. It’s a really nice machine. It has an Intel Core i5 processor in it. It has 128 gig SSD. It’s really fast and nice, and it’s a great machine for running Windows 8.
So, I’m going to start over here on this slate. I’ve got one docked here that we can look at. So, hopefully we can switch over to that machine.
So, here I am, this is the locked screen for Windows 8. So, right away you can tell things look a little bit different and new. Not only is it beautiful, but it’s also useful, and it’s also personal and useful. It has some information for me.
If you look down at the bottom, I can see things about the state of my machine like the battery life and the connectivity, but I can also see things that are relevant to me, so things like the number of the unread email messages I have, maybe what my next meeting is or something like that.
If you notice here, if I just — I’m touching the screen, and you can tell — I don’t know if you see these little round things. I’ve actually turned on touch feedback here, so you can actually see what I’m doing with my fingers, because this is a touch-only device. Part of the challenge with demoing touch devices, but hopefully this should help you follow what I’m doing.
So, I’m going to unlock this PC here just by swiping up, and I have actually chosen to protect my PC with a password. What I’m using here is something we call a picture password where I can use a secret set of gestures instead of using a PIN or using an actual alphanumeric password, and it’s a really useful thing to do on a device that doesn’t have a keyboard.
So, I’m going to share my little secret with you here. To unlock this one, I’m just going to swipe down this ridge, swipe down this ridge, and then just tap the peak there. It’s a really easy way to just log into a machine that doesn’t have that, that doesn’t have a keyboard on it.
So, this is what we call the Windows 8 Start screen. You should think of this as basically a personalized dashboard. So, each one of these tiles represents a favorite app or maybe someone that I work with a lot or communicate with a lot, maybe some of my favorite websites or something like that.
And you can tell right away that these tiles are alive with information that’s both relevant and timely to me. So, if you look at the top left corner here, this top left tile where I’m pointing, that’s my mail app. And instead of just showing me a mail icon, it’s actually showing me sort of new unread messages. To the right of it you can see my calendar app where you can see my next appointment. At the bottom right there you can see my weather app, and instead of showing me a weather icon it’s actually showing me the weather here in Orlando, which is really nice. So, at a glance I can already tell a lot of things. There’s a lot of information that without having to boot these apps I can actually see a lot of things.
Navigating is just as you would expect. I can flick across here, and you can see how fast and fluid this is, and you’ll see this theme repeating itself all over Windows 8.
You’ll also see that there’s no chrome at all, there’s no toolbars, no menus or anything like that to distract you from the information that I’m actually trying to just deal with, and you’ll see this in the apps that we show you, you’ll see this across the design of the entire system.
Of course, I can rearrange these tiles if I want. I can just drag a tile and tear it off. In fact, I can do something kind of fun here. I’m going to use my other finger and what I’m going to do is I’m just going to — see how I can just swipe behind and actually move and then just drop it where I want. So, that’s a great example of what you could do with multitouch. I can drop it right back here.
I can zoom out. So, I’m going to do two finger pinch zoom here. And you can imagine if I have 100 — you know, after installing a lot of apps or something like that on my system, my Start screen will get quite long. So, being able to zoom out and navigate it easily is a really great way to just move around and find the things that I want.
You’ll notice here that things are actually organized in groups. So, this gives you a good way to just kind of organize things the way you want them. The groups, in zoomed out view I can actually just move these groups around to rearrange them if I want to.
You’ll see that the groups are named. So, for example, I could just select one here and name one and it will bring up the on-screen keyboard here, which lets me name it what I want. I can actually change the keyboard configuration. This is kind of a neat one. If you’re holding your tablet, you can type with your thumbs this way. So, I can pick whatever keyboard combination I’m interested in.
Okay, so that’s how you navigate the Start screen.
Now what I want to do is I want to actually — let’s go have a look at our first app here, and here’s the one I’m going to show you. I’m pointing at it down here.
Let me tell you a little something about this app. So, this is an app that’s called Ultimate Beer Ranger, so we love the name of it already, and it’s a custom line-of-business app that’s made by a company that’s called New Belgium Beer. So, they are a brewing company, and they sell their product to stores and restaurants and bars. But because of liquor laws they actually have to sell through a distributor. So, they can’t sell directly to their real customers, if you want.
But, of course, one of the things that’s really interesting to them is actually they really want to sort of maintain a relationship with these customers even though they don’t have a direct selling relationship to them. So, this is kind of a classic CRM problem. And, in fact, this app is built on top of Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
So, the New Belgium Beer Company, they’ve built this app for a set of folks, a set of their employees who are called Beer Rangers, and their job is to actually maintain those connections with the people who buy their product, right?
So, like I said, this is kind of a twist on a classic CRM thing. It’s a great scenario for a tablet, because it’s meant to be used on the road, and it helps to just manage that process of keeping those visits. So, it does things like manages their schedules and things like that, and information about all the accounts that they go visit.
Let’s have a look at the app. Now, before I even start it you can tell something kind of neat about it. Actually let’s go back to the Start screen for a second. Yeah, here we go.
You can see that actually even without booting the app or starting the app it already gives me some useful information. It’s got a list of my next four appointments that I can see right there on the Start screen.
To start it I just tap on it like I showed you earlier, and here’s a beautiful app. So, what you see on the Start screen of the app itself or on the homepage of the app itself is my schedule, and you can see again just like the Start screen I can navigate through here. It’s fast, it’s fluid. I can pan across. I can zoom out.
This is kind of an interesting thing. This is something we call semantic zoom. So, instead of zooming out optically, what it’s actually doing is it’s zooming out sort of conceptually, and it zoomed out to where I have the list of days in the week, and I can just go tap on a day here, and it will bring back up my schedule for that day.
Now, I can pick any one of these accounts to go drill in on it by tapping on it, and here I get sort of a rich detailed view of that account, so things like sales, the yearly sales volume, I get some information about my contacts at that company or at the bar, at the restaurant, I see appointments, notes, and things like that. I can go, for example, if I want to create a new appointment I can just go tap on appointments here and here’s the calendar and I can pick a new time. You can go back; you’ll see also I can have photos of the establishment. Maybe I can take a new photo here. This actually uses the camera — well, that’s a little frightening. It uses the camera that’s on the device. I won’t torture you with that photo.
I can go back — this is — actually one of the things I love about this — I love about this app is — or two things I really love about this app. It’s first of all, it actually is beautiful. It’s a beautiful line-of-business app. It’s one of the best looking line-of-business apps I’ve seen in a long time.
And the other thing is let me show you something cool here. This actually uses the location services in Windows 8. In this case it uses actually the GPS sensor that’s on this device to actually know where I am, and then it can show me my customers and my contacts that are nearby. So, that’s kind of a neat use of the device. So, I love the app because of that, and I love the way it actually uses the system.
Let’s go back here. So, let’s talk about another thing. I want to go back to the Start menu at this point. You’ll notice there’s no chrome, like I said. In fact, there’s a number of things that you might want to do that are sort of these system-wide commands, things like going back to Start, things like switching through apps, things like searching or going to settings or something like that. So, let’s talk about how we’ve designed that.
When we started working on Windows 8, we spent a lot of time thinking about how you actually even just hold one of these devices, right? And if you think of a tablet like this, I will hold it, the most natural way to hold that tablet is to just kind of hold it in your hands like this. If you notice where my thumbs are, you’ll notice that they’re just sitting on the bezel of the screen.
And so one of the motions that’s incredibly easy to do is to just swipe with my thumb, and you’ll see how we use these swiping motions on the edge of the screen to bring up system-wide UI in general.
So, what I’m going to do, let me show you how this works. I’m going to swipe — let’s go back here to the schedule. I’m going to swipe from the right, and you can see out come these little widgets. We call these charms, right, and these charms let me access some system-wide things. The one that’s closest to my thumb in the middle is the Start charm, and just by tapping on it I go right back to the Start menu. So, it’s an incredibly natural gesture to do.
If I want to switch back to the app, I just swipe from the left, and the app comes right back out, right? So, from the right here comes Start, and I can swipe back, incredibly easy.
Let’s go back to the Start menu. Let’s start some more apps. Here’s my mail app. Here’s my calendar app. Swipe back to Start. Here’s maybe my photos app.
So, now I’ve got four apps running, and I can just switch through them incredibly easily just by swiping from the left. See how easy that is, and it’s an incredibly comfortable gesture to do when you’re just sitting there with that tablet in your hands.
Let me show you one more thing. Another way to switch throughout is if I just drag one out and then come back out here, this brings up something we call the switch list. So, this just gives me actually a view of all my apps that are running right now, and then I can just select the one that I’m interested in and switch to it really easily that way. See how easy that is.
Okay, let’s talk about one other thing here. Let’s switch to — actually I didn’t want to do that. Let’s go back to our Beer Ranger app here. Let’s go find it. Here it is. You might have noticed these charms, there’s a whole bunch of them, there’s not just a Start charm. Let me show you another one here. This is one we call the search charm.
So, let’s talk a little bit about what this is. Part of what the platform enables is this concept of contracts, which are easy ways for apps to plug into system-wide commands that either talk to the system or talk to each other.
One of these contracts is something we call the search contract. Any app can implement this really easily and then expose its data to system-wide search.
So, for example, here I can go, let’s say we type Adam here, and I’ll do the search, and you can see it’s found my one contact that has the name Adam in it. But you can see I can easily actually just go look in other apps. Here I clicked on mail, and this finds mail items that have Adam in it. I can even go look at files, and it will find any files that are on my system that have Adam. So, super easy to do and super easy to actually make apps — this is an example of apps just working together or working with the system to make things better.
So, that’s kind of a view of navigating the Windows 8 UI and navigating Windows 8 using touch, but, of course, I said earlier that you really don’t have to compromise by using — you’re not compromising by using a system that maybe only has mouse and keyboard, and what I’m going to do is I’m going to invite Linda Averett to come out here and actually help demo the mouse and keyboard interaction. Linda actually is the Director of Program Management for our Developer Experience team. Her team designs basically the platform that Windows 8 apps are built on. Linda?
LINDA AVERETT: Thanks, Antoine.
Hi, folks. So, today I’m going to start (applause) thank you very much. I’m going to start out demoing on a Samsung ultrabook. So, this has mouse, keyboard, and it also has something we call a modern touch pad. We worked with the hardware partners to incorporate the key Windows 8 touch gestures into the touch pad. And, in fact, many of our hardware partners showed form factors at COMPUTEX last week that had the touch pad in it, and so you may already be starting to see some of the commentary about that.
So, Antoine showed you how to navigate in touch. So, I’m actually going to show you how to navigate with the mouse and then the touch pad. So, I’m going to start out first with the mouse, and so you can see I can just do the horizontal scroll. All I was really doing here was using the scroll wheel. See, I can actually do semantic zoom. We have a nice control down here. It zooms out. I can grab one of the groups, move it around at will. I can zoom back out, very, very familiar comfortable behaviors with a mouse.
The corners are special places with the mouse, very, very easy to target. And so we’ve made use of them. So, you can see the charms, and I can come down here through those. And actually on the other side of the screen we use it to show the other apps that are running, and you can move back and forth between the apps that way.
So, if you want to show the touch pad, I’m going to come here, and you see I’m doing a horizontal scroll there, and I’m using my two fingers to go back and forth across the touch pad like that.
Now, I’m going to semantic zoom right now, and I’m going to use the exact same motion you used actually with touch, which is this. So, I’m going to semantic zoom in, and I can click on a group again, move it around at will. And then I can semantic zoom out, just like that. Now, I wanted to show you one other thing with the touch pad here. And so I have a pinned IE site here, MSN.com, so let’s come here. And I wanted to show you actually this article growing. So, I just went up and down. I’m using, again, my two fingers, for the horizontal scrolling two fingers this way, vertical scrolling two fingers this way. And now I’m going to swipe in from the top, and I’ve brought up the App Bar. So, all these key input gestures working right here on the touch pad. And, you know, some of the initial feedback on it from certainly some of the bloggers and the online sites is that this is a really nice, comfortable way to kind of bridge between mouse and actually touch.
So that’s very, very nice there. Now, I’m going to swipe in from the side, and now I’m going to go back to the Start screen. And so I did that on the touch pad, and then I actually clicked on the Start screen with my mouse. And so I actually tend to go back and forth between the input mechanisms, and I use whichever is the most convenient for me, and it happens to be just wherever my hands are sitting at the moment.
Now, one of the best things I think about Windows 8 is that the Windows 7 desktop still works just like it always did. The apps still work. You can do the things that you’ve always done. So, you see that I have the apps that I use all the time pinned down here on the task bar. I’m very finicky about how they’re arranged. So I have customized the arrangement. You can move them around.
So, let’s see, Jumplist. I’m using the Jumplist on Word, it works just the same. I’m going to bring up a couple of documents. These happen to be blogs that my team is actually working on. And so I’m going to actually snap these. This is a feature of Windows 7 that I use all the time pretty much every day. And our data from customers tells us that many of them do as well. And so you can actually see it works exactly the same. Now, I notice that I don’t have PowerPoint on here, because I actually generally do pin PowerPoint to the taskbar as well. So, I’m going to go, and I’m using the corner again with the mouse, and I’m going to come down here to search. And I’m going to swipe in PowerPoint.
Now I’m going to come and right click. It brings up the App Bar with mouse. So, I’m going to go down here, click pin to taskbar. It’s actually that easy. Now I’m going to swipe in from the side on the touch pad, which lets me go back through the apps that are currently running. And you see it goes back to Word. But you can also see that PowerPoint is now pinned here on the taskbar.
But there’s one other thing that I think is actually quite compelling on the desktop, so I do want to show you. I think you’ll like it as well. So, we’re used to on a Windows 7 desktop having a Start menu right down here in the lower left. And so now, if you hover there you see a representation of the Start screen because we have a screen now so that you can do customization and arrange all of your icons. And look at this, if I right click on that it brings up this context menu for power users just like you and me. We know that lots of folks don’t use the things that are on this context menu. But you and I use them. And we use them a lot. And so this is a feature in here just for us, and it’s one that I actually like, and I think you will like as well.
So, you know, I have actually really enjoyed this ultrabook. It’s nice and light to carry around, and I actually think Antoine needs one, too. And I think I have an app that can take care of that. So, I’m going to go back to the Start screen, and I’m going to open up Newegg. Newegg is an online retailer. They’ve developed a Metro style app so that you can purchase content from the Metro style app on their site.
So, I see they have lots of hardware here, so I’m actually going to pull up the charm, and I’m going to search on ultrabook. And you’ve can see I’ve practiced here, because there’s ultrabook. I’ll just click on it. It’s going to bring up the ultrabook. And so it not only has brought up the ultrabooks, but it’s brought up all of the decals and things that you can use to personalize them.
So, I’m going to come back here, and I’m going to actually swipe down from the top on the touch pad, which pulls up the App Bar, and I’m going to sort this. I’m going to sort it by best ratings. So, what you’re actually seeing is how a developer can use the standard controls to actually make it work well for his or her application.
So, it’s now sorted and they use eggs, because it’s Newegg. I think that’s very cute. It amuses me so I like the eggs. I definitely want to recommend one of the five egg ones to Antoine. And so I’ve actually heard a lot about the HP Envy, and I see it’s here. So, I’m going to click and go into the details and, yes, fair enough, that actually looks pretty good. So, I’m going to share this information with Antoine.
So, I’m going to go back to the charms now, and I’m going to do share. Now, you’ll notice that I have several apps in here that are indicating that I can share to them. So, in the old days in my Newegg piece of software, I would have had to have an icon for everything I was going to share with. I would have had to have one for mail. I would have had one for Facebook, one for Twitter, one for whatever. And then as the developer I would have had to do special code to like make that work.
So, share is one of the new Win8 contracts, very, very straightforward for a developer to do the code to share to, or to receive the share content. And so what you’re seeing here is Newegg is sharing, too. And I have several apps here that can receive the content, and the more apps you add to the system, the better this gets. And it’s one of the things that we actually think is just quite easy and convenient to use as part of the platform.
So, I’m going to actually pin myself a note about this HP Envy, so that’s all I really had to do. There’s the blurb that Newegg is sharing. So, I will do that. And then I actually now want to tell Antoine, because I just am sure he will like this, so I’m going to share with mail, and I’m going to type in Antoine, and then I’m going to actually send it to him so that he can actually get one as well.
So, I’ve now showed you one of the many form factors we’ll actually be showing today, on which Windows 8 and the interaction model is really nice and convenient, and I’ve showed you Antoine showed you an app, and I’ve now showed you a different kind of app. So, I’m going to ask Antoine to come back on stage, and he is going to show you some more apps. And I’ll be back in a moment.
ANTOINE LEBLOND: All right. Thanks, Linda. (Applause.)
So, that’s a great example of how you use Windows 8 with mouse and keyboard. It’s also a great example of an app, a different kind of app than the first one I showed you. This is an app that a business would build for its customers instead of an app that a business would build for its employees. So, in the intro I talked a little bit about how Windows 8 first and foremost is Windows. That means a lot of things, but one of the things it means in particular is that it is a real multitasking operating system. You can have multiple apps running at the same time, doing things at the same time. And one of the great things about multitasking is sometimes you might actually want to have multiple apps up on the screen at the same time, so you can do two things, you can sort of monitor two things at the same time, or something like that. Let’s look at an example.
I’m going to start a website here. So, this is IE 10, this is the Windows 8 version of IE 10. So, again, chromeless, it’s fast, it’s fluid, it’s beautiful. This is actually the consumer preview download page for Windows 8. So, it’s got this nice video. I’ll just play the video while we’re doing this. Maybe while I’m watching this video, I might want to be monitoring my email or something like that. Let me show you how you would do that.
I’m going to go to the switch list here; actually here’s an email app, you see how I now have it pinned over on the left side on the left side of my here, actually let’s get our search results, I get the whole list. Now I have it pinned on the left side. I’m watching my movie. I can monitor my email at the same time. Maybe I want to move it over to the right side, and I could just drag down and move it like that. If I see something I’m interested in maybe I can actually move that swipe bar over. I can look at my email message, read it, and then go right back to where I was before and keep doing two things at the same time now. I can get rid of it just by swiping down, that’s taking it out of the way.
So, there’s an example of just using multiple apps at the same time on Windows 8. Let’s look at another example of an app here. So, let me explain what this one is. This is this app here. So, this is actually a prototype that SAP has actually been working on. So, this is let me explain what this app does. It’s a sales pipeline simulation app. So, this is a front end that works on top of SAP’s sales automation backend. And the scenario for this is, imagine someone who is a sales person; if you’re a sales person, you have a quota. You need to sell X amount of widgets or dollars worth of widgets by the end of the quarter or something like that. So, this is an app that lets you project, based on the opportunities that are in that sales automation system, whether or not you’re going to make quota. And if you don’t make quota, or it looks like you won’t make quota, what do you need to do in order to actually make it?
So, let me explain what this is. Each one of these bubbles in the app represents an opportunity. The size of the bubble represents the size of the opportunity. The horizontal axis is time. So, it shows me when I’m expecting to close a sale. The vertical axis shows me just my confidence. Now, if you look at the top there’s a green bar that says 89 percent on it. This tells me that basically, based on the opportunities that are in the system right now I am on track to make 89 percent of my quota by the end of the quarter. The quarter ends where the blue bar at the bottom ends. So, I look at this, and I go well, that’s not so great. I’d love to make 100 percent or more, because then I’ll get obviously a better paycheck at the end of all of it. So, what the tool lets me do is actually just manipulate these things directly and simulate changing things and see what the impact of it is.
If I touch one of the bubbles, I see this little panel that flies out that gives me a bunch of information about the opportunity. I can do things like just move the bubble over, right. And that would represent actually moving the sale closer in, so bringing in that sale. And what’s the impact of doing that? What’s the impact of actually raising my confidence level about that sale, and actually thinking that I can really actually complete it. Maybe I can pull another one in there. Just by simulating those things I can actually what if I make this one bigger. I can just swipe around, and you can see this is just a great example of what you can do with rich visualization, direct manipulation. They are all things that actually the app model for Windows 8 is really built for doing. So, it’s just another beautiful app.
This is a different kind of app. This is an app that actually SAP, the big ISVs, will build themselves and try to sell to their customers. So, it’s different than a custom line-of-business app. And maybe SAP would actually there’s an interesting question about how SAP would distribute an app like that, or how Newegg, the app that Linda was showing you, how does that get distributed to customers?
The way that happens is through the Windows Store. So, let’s have a look at the Windows store. The Windows Store is the place where you go get your Windows 8 apps. Okay.
I’ll tell you, let me give you a little bit of a tour of the store here. It’s organized into sections. The section that you see right now in front of me is something we call Spotlight. So, that’s a program section where we have a chance to show you new and noteworthy apps and great new things, and fun new things that show up. There’s also some algorithmic lists, some program lists here that show you things like top free apps and best sellers and things like that.
Then if I pan over to the right you can see that the content is actually organized into different categories. So, I’ve got games here. I’ve got social apps. We can drill into one of these. Let’s go drill into the entertainment section. And what I’ll get is a list of apps. So, by the way, what we’re looking at here is the store that’s live right now for the Windows 8 preview build. So, those are all real apps that ISVs and developers have been writing for Windows 8 already and that you can actually go play with.
Each one of these tiles here represents an app that I can get. I can just go tap on one. And then I get this rich description page for the app that lets me see all sorts of things about it. So, for example, here are some screenshots that I can swipe through. I can see a description of what the app does. Details about hardware requirements and things like that. I can look at ratings and reviews. And of course, if I want to install the app I could just go tap on install here. And the app will actually get downloaded and installed. Actually that happened really quickly. The app will just get downloaded and installed for me on my system. Then if I go back, you can see it got added over here at the end of my Start screen and just like that it’s super easy to get things from the Windows Store.
So, I’m going to bring Linda back on screen now on stage, sorry. And Linda is actually going to talk to us about some enterprise features now that we’ve added to Windows 8.
LINDA AVERETT: Thanks, Antoine.
I have a machine here that keeps going. There it goes again to sleep. And so let me get it started here. So, I am actually demoing now on a I’m going to sign into it first. Traditional laptops, this is a Lenovo laptop, again. Mouse, keyboard, but this one is special, because it has a touch screen. This is my form factor of choice. When I choose my laptop, I always like a laptop with a touch screen.
There’s going to be really quite a number of those to choose from for Windows 8. And in fact, in COMPUTEX last week many of our partners were showing their new form factors both ultrabooks and laptops that actually had a touch screen. I find this exceedingly convenient. And so you’ll see me going back and forth between the input mechanisms here.
So, as I started out this probably looks pretty familiar to you. You’re looking at Windows 7 here. However, you’re looking at Windows 7 running in a hypervisor client on Windows 8. So, one of the new features in Windows 8 that I think many of you will be quite happy with is the fact that the Hypervisor client is now a feature in the Windows 8 client. And you can actually (applause) yes, see, yes, I agree. And it makes, as you know, Microsoft actually provides images of past OSes, so it makes it actually very easy to check out things on the same set of hardware, or even to check out things at the same time. Because, remember, this is running on Windows 8.
So, one of the things that we know, IT professionals and developers do is they check out and see how things work in different versions of the browser. And so what I’m running here is IE9 on Windows 7 running in the hypervisor on Windows 8. I have a customer site. It’s a site that we actually use to verify standards compliance with HTML5. So, watch what I’m going to do. I said this was a touch laptop, so I’m going to swoop in from the side. And now through the magic of swooping, swiping actually is the correct term, but because I do this I have a tendency to call it swoop. So I now have “Cut the Rope” running in the Metro style IE in Windows 8 side by side with the “Cut the Rope” running in IE9 on Windows 7. So, it makes it actually very, very easy for me to determine if they behave the same, if the browser versions make a difference. It’s all on the same hardware, so quite, quite convenient for me.
So now I want to go to the Start screen. I swiped in from the right, because this is a touch screen. The same motion, by the way, I used on the touch pad when I swiped in on the touch pad, and there’s the Start screen. And I see I have a finance app here, and I see some of my directs have actually indicated that I have some expenses. You notice that because I have the browser on “Cut the Rope” snapped here, that this came up and replaced the hypervisor, which was running on Windows 8. It’s still there. I can swipe back through, and it would come up.
So, I don’t have time to deal with this now, because I actually have to leave. I need to go to another part of the organization. And so I wanted to show you what I have here. I have a key chain. Mine is hot pink, yours may not be, but I know many of you have key chains that you carry a USB key on. So, I’m going to take mine, and I’m going to go around here, and I am actually going to put this in, desktop, and then this, as you notice, and this is BitLocker-protected, but for right now, I’m going to show you something else. I am going to restart. It’s a Windows 7 system running on a traditional desktop with a mouse and keyboard, an old desktop I might add. So what’s happening here is I am booting from this USB key. So one of the other capabilities in Windows 8 is, in fact, the ability to put IT sanctioned, clean, pure image on a USB key and boot from it on any piece of hardware that you want to. It is BitLocker-protected, so if you lose the key you don’t have to worry about it because somebody else actually can’t get into it. And this lets IT come up with an image that can VPN back in. You can authenticate for the domain. You can have your line-of-business apps on it. But you can use it on other systems that don’t have that capability. You can take it home, and instead of polluting your business stuff along with your personal stuff, you can run off of this key.
So, let me actually type in my aha, yes, see, I knew you’d like this feature. I got to pick which enterprise features I was going to show, and I thought these would be two great ones here. And so I’ve typed in my BitLocker key and now I’m actually going to the desktop as we complete the boot into Windows 8.
Now, I did want to show you on a really old desktop, just to make the point that you can actually put this on anything. Obviously, if you’re running on really old machinery and desktops, it behaves to the ability that that actual machinery can. But I’m now here, and I have now come up, and I’m going to actually sign in.
Now, you will notice that all of the Start screens that I have shown you look the same. It’s not because I spent tedious amounts of time arranging them all the same, it’s because whatever account I log in under, because I actually use two different ones while I’ve been here this morning, I actually associate my Microsoft ID with it, which roams my personalization settings. I find this convenient. I like color. I don’t like ugly-looking screens. I spent a lot of time looking at them, and so I want it to actually look the way I want it to look. And so that’s a nice feature that I like.
So, I’m going to actually open up that expense app, the same one that you actually saw on the laptop, and I’m going to bring it back up. And, sure enough, I can actually open one of these up and process the expense, and go ahead and actually take care of business. And so, what you’ve now seen is we have shown you several different kinds of line-of-business apps. So, I’m on the Metro style platform for apps.
We’ve also shown you several different interaction models. Antoine started with pure touch. Then I showed you mouse, keyboard with the touch pad. Then I showed you mouse, keyboard with a touch screen, my form factor of choice. And now I’ve shown you desktop, pure, old mouse and keyboard interaction. So, what you know is it’s very intuitive in all of these, and that you can move back and forth between them, which means that you can feel free in an enterprise to mix and match. They don’t all have to have the same kind of input mechanisms. And people can move back and forth between them quite conveniently.
So, it’s a very nice choice. And it is a personal style, and what you actually feel comfortable with, and how you like to move your arms around, and things like that. And so, with that, I’m going to ask Antoine to come back on here, and he’s going to show you now how to write an app on this new platform. So, go for it.
ANTOINE LEBLOND: All right. Thanks, Linda.
(Applause.)
How about that Hyper-V on the client, isn’t that awesome? I knew she was going to get applause for that, I told her she would.
So, we showed you a bunch of apps here, like half a dozen apps at the beginning of the demo. And what I want to talk to you about now is how you actually develop apps. Are there a lot of developers in the room, here, developers? (Applause.) All right. So, let’s talk about developing apps.
So, the engine that powers these new Windows 8 apps is something we call the Windows Runtime, or the WINRT for short. And it’s a new platform that’s built on top of the Windows kernel. So, just like Win32 is, it’s a data platform built in the operating system, it’s not some layer on top or anything like that, and the platform has a whole new API set that’s designed to make it easy to build all sorts of this kind of app, it builds games, it builds all sorts of different types of apps. It has native controls that implement all the Metro design language, and support touch, and mouse and keyboard. It has an app model for security and for deployment, and process lifetime management, and state roaming, and things like that. And it has mechanisms to integrate seamlessly, for apps to integrate seamlessly with the system, and with each other. So, the contracts we were talking about earlier.
It basically does everything that a modern platform needs to do. But there’s one really important thing that you need to know about, and it’s actually quite unique about developing for Windows 8. And that is that we’ve designed the platform to make it easier for you to build Windows 8 apps using all of the skills and the experience that you already have. So, this starts with the tools. The new version of Visual Studio that we said, it’s called Visual Studio 2012, and I’m going to show it to you in a second, it’s built on everything you know and love about Visual Studio today to support Metro style development. So, the way you use the tool, the key strokes, the patterns for using it, and so on, all those things, all that stuff is stuff you already know, and it’s the same stuff you’re going to use to actually develop those Windows 8 apps.
It goes beyond that. The language, or the platform sorry is actually designed to be language agnostic. So, we’re not going to make you learn some new programming language, or some new UI markup language. The platform is designed to let you use the languages you know, or the language that you think is most appropriate for writing the app that you want to write. So, that means if you’re a Web developer, it means you can write Native Windows 8 apps using JavaScript. If you’re a Silverlight or a WPF any Silverlight developers in the room? If you’re a Silverlight or a WPF, or a .NET developer, it means you can use C#, or VB.net to actually write your native app with. If you’re a C++ developer, you can use C++ to write a native app with.
UI markup works the same way. If you’re a Web developer, you can use HTML and CSS to actually define the UI and to hold the visual stuff inside your app. If you’re a .NET developer you’re familiar with XAML, you can use XAML to do that. You can use DirectX. In fact, you can do something really cool. You can build a DirectX app and use a XAML-based UI on top of it, which is something really neat that a lot of people have been wanting to do for a long time.
So, that’s really, really cool. In fact, this pattern of leveraging and reusing applies across the board to other things. So, things like code design methodologies, things like code architecture, you could use the same sort of publicly available code libraries for JavaScript and things like that that you can use today. You can use third-party controls and things like that. It’s all just designed to make you take what you know right now and use it to build Windows 8 apps.
The point is pretty simple. We actually have a huge head start in being able to build these kinds of apps, just based on what you know already. So, let’s do a little bit of the demo here. But, instead of writing an app from scratch and making you watch me write hundreds of lines of code, or whatever, what I’m going to do is I’m going to actually take an app that we’ve already written and give you a little bit of a guided tour of it.
So, the app that we’re going to do is actually a very typical line-of-business app, at least in the pattern that it uses. Basically there’s a data source and the app actually lets you visualize some of that data, manipulate some of it. Maybe drill through it and then save it back. So, very typical in a line-of-business app that probably every developer in this room has written before.
It’s actually an expense approval app. So, this is a little bit like the one that Linda showed earlier, except that it’s actually a lot more beautiful. It’s written in C#. I assumed we’d have a lot of .NET folks in the room. We could have written in JavaScript just the same, used HTML and CSS instead of using XAML. So, let’s go have a look at this. So, I am going to, look, update to Visual Studio, I am going to just start. I’ve got Visual Studio running here. So, let me give you a little bit of a let me give you a little bit of a tour of the solution here. If you look on the right, you see I actually have four projects in here. This one at the bottom is actually just a Web service. So, this is the Web service that has my expense reports in it. This is the thing that would normally be running on a server somewhere in your enterprise. I’m actually running it locally here just for the sake of this demo to make things easier.
The next two projects up from is, are actually just two data model projects, right. So, if you’re a developer, you actually probably recognize. They’re actually symmetrical. One of them is meant to run on the client, and the other one is meant to run on the server. And that’s basically the proxy through which that data is going to travel. If you’re a developer, you’ll probably actually notice this pattern here is actually sort of a best practice in a classic way that you’ll set up an app like this. So, already it looks familiar, and what you know applies on what you already know applies.
The project at the top here is actually the one that I want to spend the most time in, and that’s the app itself. So, let’s expand this out. And you can see how it’s organized here. Again, developers, you’ll probably notice, actually the design pattern used in this app is actually just classic MDDM. So, we’ve separated the view code from the view model code, which is the data handling and the data manipulation code from the data itself. So, it’s a very clean layout, and again, sort of a familiar pattern that you’ll be able to use to build Windows 8 out.
We can go look here in the views section. You can see I have two views in this app. So, there’s a main page, which is going to list my expense reports, and then there’s a details page that I’m going to get to by selecting things in my main page and clicking on them, or tapping on them.
Let’s go look at we can look at the designer here. Here is basically the main page, the layout of it. I’m in the XAML design view here, and you can see it’s basically set up to have a grid. At the top there’s the title, and there’s a button, and at the bottom is basically the body of that view. We can go look at the XAML itself and you’ll see what it’s doing here. I won’t walk you through every line, but basically we set up that grid right here. You can see here that we’re actually setting up some data binding. If I scroll down here to the body you can see there’s this grid view object, which is basically going to be this list of lists that is the body of that page, and you can see how we actually hook it up to the data binding stuff that we set up earlier.
So, right now I actually have I’m going to run this app. I haven’t connected it to the service or anything like that. And you will see that sure enough the app runs, but it doesn’t show me anything. But, this is this will look familiar; this is the view that I showed you a second ago.
Let’s go back to Visual Studio now and let’s actually go connect things up. So, the way we’re going to do that, the first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to do something that will look familiar to all of you again, is we’re going to just add a service. We’re going to look for a local service here that I can connect to. So, we’ll do this one and we’ll just call it services, and we’ll add that reference. So, now what I’ve done is I’ve actually connected up to that Web service that I’ve got running on the machine.
Now, let’s go look at the code behind that main page. You can see here actually there’s very little code. There’s two event handlers that are interesting here. There’s this un-navigated to event handler, and this is the one that actually is going to get called when the page loads, and then there’s the event handler for when I click on one of the items in that grid view.
And you can see here, actually it’s two lines of code. The first one, basically what it does is it’s actually going to load the data from the Web service, and the second one just actually binds it to that view grid object. The thing I do want to point out really quickly here is I don’t know if you notice this wait keyword. So, this is actually kind of a cool thing. We’ve added support to the language, and to the platform for these inline async calls. So, if you think of how you write asynchronous code today, the thing you have to do is you’ll make your call to an async routine and then you have to set it up so that there is essentially an event handler that gets called later on, or somewhere further down in your code when that async routine finishes. You end up with all this incredible spaghetti code, especially if you’re chaining a bunch of service calls, because you jump around in the code all over the place. It makes it really, really hard to read. So, the wait statements in this model that we have here lets you write just procedural async code, which is a really, really neat thing and a really great way to deal with stuff like that.
Here’s actually my routine. Right now I have basically everything commented out. But, let’s actually put that back in. I’ve got 15 lines of code here and all they really do is get rid of the comment here. And all this really does is basically connects to the Web service. Here’s another async call to actually load those expense reports in, and what it does down here is it basically iterates through it and uses a little bit of lambda expression magic here to actually split things out into groups that are based on this status field in the expense report. And then it basically builds up the data that gets bounded in that grid view object. Well, let’s run it again, now you can see we’re going to load the data.
So, here are my expense reports. You can see how beautiful that is. And this is just this is all just about defining the right templates in XAML and actually binding the right data. There’s almost no code that I had to write to actually make this work this way. It works with touch the same way, just the way you expect it to. I can tap on one of these expense reports. I can drill into it. You can see this really rich view of the details of the expense report.
There’s this pie chart on the side, which is kind of neat, because that’s actually a third-party control from Telerik. Telerik, you probably know those guys. I know they have a booth here at TechEd. They build all these great custom control libraries for the various Windows platforms, or the various Microsoft platforms. So, that’s a really neat example of using a third-party control. Of course, I’ve got approve and decline buttons down here. So, I can approve or decline these expense reports.
I want to show you one other thing, actually. Let’s go back to Visual Studio again. And let’s go look at that details page. Let’s go look at the code behind it, because I want to show you something kind of neat. There are essentially three event handlers in here that are interesting to look at. Here’s the one that gets called when I click the approve button. It doesn’t do very much. Here’s the one that gets called when I click the decline button. That doesn’t do very much either. But, here’s the one I actually wanted to show you. This is an event handler that gets called when I invoke the share charm.
And you can actually see how easy this is. This is the code I had to write to actually make this share charm work. And actually, there’s more code here than I really need. Really what it does is check if there’s actually anything to share. And then it’s going to call this share data routine, which all it really does is it takes this data request object and puts data into it for me, so all the strings that are interesting.
Let’s run that again, and I’m going to show you what that does, which is really kind of neat. So, I’ll go drill into one of these, I can approve it. And then what I can do is, I’ll just swipe in from the side, there’s share. And now I’m going to share it, so I can share it in email. And there it says the expense report, the number of the expense report, and the amount, and then I can just send that to myself if I want to. So, there’s just an example of wiring up one of these contracts. Wiring up search would be just as easy, it’s super trivial to do.
Let me show you one last thing before we stop here. If you’re a developer, you might not have access to a whole bunch of different hardware. You might not have, say, a tablet to play with that has a locatable form factor. You might not have a giant high resolution, or high-density screen or something like that. But you want to make sure your app works in all those different kind of form factors and environments. One of the neat things in Visual Studio is this simulator that lets me actually simulate different kinds of hardware. So, I’m going to run the app again, but this time I’m running it in the simulator.
So, there’s my simulator. So, actually I can change the resolution here. Let’s go to this which actually matches the resolution of the device I’m running on. So, I can do things like simulate a rotation, and I can see that my app actually relays out properly. I can rotate it back. I can go to a much higher resolution screen, for example, and I can see that my app actually lays out properly. And this is my app running in the simulator. In fact, I can simulate touch gestures, and things like that. I can go approve my expense report. I can swipe from the side, and bring out the charms, and all those things.
So, this is the app just running in that simulator. And it’s actually a great tool for letting you make sure that your app reacts properly to all these different things like the screen resolution, and screen orientation.
So, that’s it for my Visual Studio demo. Thanks for actually staying in your chairs. (Applause.)
Again, the main point here, we only scratched the surface, but the main point here is that all this stuff is going to be incredibly familiar to you. And that gives you a huge head start in writing Windows 8 apps. So, Linda is going to come out again, and she’s going to talk to us now about how you deploy and manage apps on a Windows 8 desktop.
Linda.
LINDA AVERETT: Thank you.
(Applause.)
So, what I have here is an ARM device, ARM tablet, running Windows 8. This is a tablet that we’re using inside Microsoft to actually test Windows 8 on ARM. We’re all familiar with why you would want an ARM system, tablet, PC, either one, long battery life, low power consumption, highly mobile. But there’s more. With any Windows 8 ARM tablet, you have trusted boot. So, we establish a root of trust with the hardware using UEFI secure boot. And then we validate all code, we verify it, in the boot path before it actually runs. And there’s more, with all Windows 8 ARM tablets, device encryption is always on powered by BitLocker. And don’t forget the app model for Metro style apps is actually geared at producing apps that don’t change the state of the machine. So, this all combines to give you a very robust tablet that you can actually use and have a lot of confidence about what’s on it, and what’s the state of that actual machine is.
But there’s still more. You can use the same management infrastructure that you are used to using today to actually manage the device. You can make available applications to be deployed, and I’m going to show you how to do the deployment here in just a second. But you can do things like you can enable or disable convenience logon. You can set the number of complex characters in the password. You can check things like the status of auto update, all of those types of things that you’re used to doing, and you can provision or you can deprovision the system if you actually want to take it out of use.
So, these are things that are, we think, very, very convenient to give you some confidence to let either your employees bring these personal devices into the enterprise to use, or to use them yourselves in an application that I’m going to call typically kind of a vertical application, and I’m going to show you an example of one of those.
So, let me move around to the system I’m going to actually demo on here. And I’m going to now log in. Now, this time, and by the way that image that I have to brag just a little, the image you’ve been seeing, the cute little girl hugging up on the horsey, that’s my two-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter, and this lovely little girl here is my one-year-old granddaughter, and I’m going to use her to log in. And so I’m now on my Start screen.
So, there are actually several ways you can get applications, Metro style applications on to any Windows 8 ARM tablet. You see I have the store here, and so you can install from the store. There are business applications on the store that go out broadly, so that’s one choice. You notice that I have an RDP app here, so there a Metro style RDP client. So, in an enterprise you can actually use that to enable folks using your Win 8 ARM tablets to actually go back to a server that you’re running and use any kind of business apps that you want to make available to them. Or you can actually install your own Metro style applications on to the ARM tablet.
So, I’m going to show you that. So, I have previously connected to the management infrastructure, and my machine was provisioned to be able to install apps. And so you can see that at that time this application was put on my system. It’s really just a portal into the Metro style applications that the IT group would think I would want to actually use on my system. I’m actually going to install two of them. So, I’m going to install the finance app, which we’ve shown you a couple of times today. And then, I’m going to install Rooms To Go. So, it’s actually quite that simple.
Now, you have to do two things before you can install an application, a Metro style application on a Windows 8 ARM tablet. So, first it must be signed by a known trust authority, or you need to put the cert on the box, and you can do that with your management infrastructure as well. And you need to pass; the app needs to pass the Windows Applications Certification Kit, which we affectionately call the WACK. So, you need to run the WACK on your apps. We run the WACK on the app when they onboard to the store as well. And this is to help ensure, this is part of how we help ensure the fact that these applications, in fact, do honor the design principle of you don’t change the state of the machine.
So, I installed these two applications, and they will install at the end of the Start screen. Now, I’ve shown you the finance app before, so I’m not going to show it again. But I am going to show you Rooms To Go. So, Rooms To Go is an IT shop. They have an application running on Windows 7 tablets today. This is a showroom floor. The salesman carries the tablet around, interacts with the customers, doesn’t have to leave the customer and go back to his office, and things like that. So, it lets them make more money.
So, they have this application today. They were able to move quite readily to Windows 8 because they could reuse their XAML skills, they could reuse their C# skills, and they could connect to the exact same backend. So, it was actually quite straightforward for them to actually move to a Windows 8 Metro style app, and now they can actually take advantage of all of the new form factors both, by the way, ARM and x86. And if any of you went to COMPUTEX, or you actually have read any of the press about it, hardware partners began to show their new form factors, their new tablet form factors, and they showed both ARM and x86 Win 8 tablets at COMPUTEX.
So, I have the Rooms To Go app up here, and I think you can get the gist of how it actually works. So, I’m on the showroom floor all day long. I take a bunch of orders. You know, I have some of them in my cart, I’ve been doing it. And so there’s more.
At the end of the day, I think I should probably check my inventory, make sure I can actually fulfill all those orders. And so, check this out, I’m going to go back to the Start screen, and I’m going to go to the desktop, because on Windows 8 ARM tablets we also have the key Office applications that you need for doing detailed kinds of business things like managing an inventory XLS. And so I have gone back to my office, pretend anyway, gone back to my office. I’ve loaded up my inventory. And I’m taking actually a look at it, and you can see I can interact with it. I can interact with touch on that as well. And so, what we do think is that this gives you a nice kind of all-in-one, robust, highly mobile tablet that you can actually use throughout your enterprise and feel comfortable about it, managed in the same ways that you’re used to doing.
And so, with that, I’m actually going to call Antoine back on to wrap up, and thank you very much for all your time today.
(Applause.)
ANTOINE LEBLOND: All right. Thank you, Linda.
So, that about wraps up our tour of Windows 8 here. We’re about three minutes over, which isn’t too bad. Actually, we’re not even three minutes over; we’re just two minutes under. So, we’re going to be right on target.
Just a few things I would like to ask of you before we let you go. The first is to just download and evaluate the Windows 8 Release Preview. I kept calling it the Consumer Preview earlier, but it’s the Release Preview, and we actually released it about two weeks ago. And it’s a really, really great build of Windows. It’s actually super stable, and you can use it. It’s a great way to assess the value of Windows 8. So, go install it and go try it out. I’m sure you’re going to love it.
The second is, please start thinking about and just evaluating building Windows 8 apps. I hope that the apps that we showed you today kind of inspired you a little bit to actually just think about the kinds of things that you could go build. So, go try it out, because they’re actually really fun to build.
The third is, please go check out the dev content that we have up on Dev.Windows.Com. We actually have a lot of great training stuff for you. There’s all that content on Dev.Windows.Com. We’ve also been having these training or these developer events actually since back in September when we did the BUILD Conference, we’ve been having these Dev Camps. And we’ve had almost 500 over 500 of them now, and we’ve trained we actually had attendance the attendance at these have been actually over 194,000 developers. But go check them out, you can go to DevCamps.Windows.com, and you can actually see a list of the ones that are maybe available close to where you are. They’re worth attending. There’s also, you’ll see actually out here at TechEd in the hall, there’s a development lab where you can actually just go play around with building Windows 8 apps yourself. Please do that.
Then, finally, go check out some of the several dozen Windows 8-focused sessions here at TechEd, because there’s a lot of really interesting information for you there.
So, that’s it. On behalf of the entire Windows 8 team, thanks for actually coming and attending, and enjoy the rest of the TechEd.
(Applause.)
END