Dean Hachamovitch (GM IE) presented the second keynote this morning. He started off with an apology about Microsoft not doing a new release of IE for so long. Nice, but he also made some claim about MSFT being committed to the browser during that time that drew a couple of under-the-breath "yeah right" comments from attendees near me. Well deserved IMHO because you can't say we were committed to IE for five years with barely any work done on it outside of security.

Otherwise a mixed review of the keynote. I won't dive into a ton of detail, but I think they missed a chance to hit a real homerun with this one. The IE7 demo was nice but did not elicit a lot of ooohhs or ahhhhs from the crowd beside print preview. A lot of the stuff shown I have with my Maxthon browser today.

The RSS feed stuff was cool. Having RSS feeds be a core part of the Vista platform is indeed cool. The Simple List Extension stuff really does open up the use of RSS to do some cool stuff with RSS beyond simple news and headline types of things. Scott Guthrie did a nice Atlas presentation. It was a bit high level but I think it resonated well with the audience. He got two or three applause reactions to some of the stuff he did. Again, if you haven't checked out Atlas, now is the time to start doing it.

Lastly, the Windows Presentation Foundation demo TOTALLY sucked. It showed running a prototype of My Yahoo! inside the browser using WPF. It should have been really cool but I am sure many if not all of the attendees left thinking - that looked a lot like a fancy web page. WPF is so much more but I think this demo completely missed. Not smoothly presented and did not really show anything compelling about why you would do WPF instead of cool AJAX/CSS stuff. I was sorely disappointed in the missed opportunity.

InfoCard demo was very cool. It does make so many authentication scenarios (and others like promotions or discount club things) very easy. I have not delved much into the technical implementation of InfoCard, but those I have talked have made it sound very approachable. The fact that it can be used on platforms other than Windows also gives this a lot of potential. I will have to dig more into this when I find some time.