Other Vista Goodies available for development

In addition to the release of .NET 3.0, Vista will have other areas where you can develop. Microsoft's MSDN site has a good overview. Here are some of the features:

• Sidebar Gadgets: The Vista GUI includes a portion of the desktop called the sidebar, which is devoted to little applets. These applets are called gadgets. The intention is that they'll be handy little tools such as calculators, weather information, you name it. These Gadgets are essentially dynamic HTML pages, and you're free to create your own. You can find out more here.
• Windows Search: Microsoft has released a new desktop search engine. This tool runs on both Windows XP and Vista, although Vista comes with additional capabilities. Your application can query the search engine. You can also integrate your applications in with Windows Search and create add-ins to Windows Search including filters called IFilters so that the files your application creates can be searched and indexed. Check out this page on MSDN. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsvista/aa904980.aspx. Also, here's a blog on the MSDN site that provides a lot of good information about the search engine. And this blog is called Filter Central and provides information about filters.
• Speech Recognition and Synthesis: Windows has had speech synthesis for some time, and speech recognition is not a brand new topic. However, Vista now has a new set of APIs for both. Read about them here.
• Peer-to-peer: Vista includes an entire system for developing software for computers communicating directly between each other. The topic is actually pretty sophisticated and probably more useful than you might expect. This article on MSDN provides a good introduction to it.
• RSS support: Vista includes built-in support for the Really Simple Syndication (RSS) protocol. Here's an article on MSDN that introduces it.
• Security: Vista includes an overhaul of the security system in Windows. In short, when you create an application, you can mandate that certain portions of your program require a certain level of authentication, such as administrators only or only. When a user who is not an administrator clicks a menu item that starts that part of your program, they will be prompted with a login box to elevate the current access. If they can not enter the password, they will not be able to run the feature.
• Parental Controls: Believe it or not, Vista includes a Parental Controls feature that developers can make use of. This is actually a big improvement. Previously, setting up accounts for your kids to use on Windows was extremely difficult, as you had to basically learn the management system. Now doing so is easier, and writing software that takes advantage of the new features is possible.
• Windows Live: Windows Live is basically the new version of what used to be MSN. The MSN Messenger is now called the Windows Live Messenger. Windows Live also provides email for users, alerts, a word processor for blogging, contact management, and all sorts of goodies. Why am I mentioning it here? Because the whole system also has developer tools and SDKs. Check them out at Windows Live Dev.
• Windows Powershell: Technically Powershell isn't a part of Vista, but it's available for Vista (as well as Windows XP). Windows Powershell is a new command-line interface for working with the Windows system. It's far more powerful than the old DOS prompt that we're all familiar with. It includes its own scripting language (which looks similar to C#) and it handles piping of entire objects, not just piping of text.
• Office 2007 development tools. Although this is also not technically part of Vista, this is worthy of mentioning here because Office 2007 has a lot of great development tools available. You can develop add-ons for the Office tools, and also write code that can read and write Office file formats.

  Find out about the new Office file formats and why they're important to developers.

• New versions of C# and VB.NET. The next versions of the two main .NET programming languages won't be available until mid 2007. When they arrive, they're definitely going to be exciting, with some major enhancements to make your .NET programming more productive. For now, check out our own Julia's blog for some thoughts on this. Also watch for more articles here on DevSource about these exciting improvements.

Where to go next

Vista has a lot to offer for developers. That's good because it presents us with many opportunities. But it also means there's more to learn. Where should you go next? In addition to the links throughout this article, check out the following:

The Windows Vista Developer Center

The Learn Windows Vista page in the developer center.

Top Ten Ways to Light Up Your Windows Vista Apps

Microsoft's main .NET 3.0 site

The MSDN site for .NET 3.0