My feature at PDC

The feature I have spent the most time working on for the last year or more was part of Bill Gates' keynote speech at PDC earlier this week. Here's the part of the keynote about it:

Now, there's an additional platform that I wanted to highlight that's new to Windows Vista that we're calling the Windows SideShow, and the SideShow is another platform that you can build fantastic gadgets for. We're working very closely with our hardware partners to support the SideShow, and I'm actually going to hold this up and hopefully people can get a sense of the hardware here.

This is just a laptop that's got an auxiliary display built right into the laptop, with a couple of hardware buttons here that I can click on. And it's running some mini applications or gadgets for the SideShow. Let me go ahead and put it back under this camera, so that you can actually see what I'm doing. But this connects me from my information when I'm actually away from my desk. So, when I'm on the road, I can get quick access to my calendar, to perhaps my e-mail, and Expedia as a third party has built the prototype gadget right here. I'm going to drill into this gadget, and you can see that I can get information about my flight to the PDC. So, you can imagine me getting out of a taxicab on the way into the airport, and just making sure I have that flight information, that flight number, right there.

Some of these gadgets run when the PC is turned off, such as that Expedia one, and the In box or Calendar, and some of them require the PC to still be powered on, such as controlling your music.

There's a tiny bit available for developers at http://microsoftgadgets.com/sideshow.aspx. At the moment I don't see a publicly posted picture so I can't show it to you. I work on the part on the PC, not the interface on the device. This is mainly the control panel. It doesn't sound like much, but since it's a scalable platform it's actually a really complex problem.