WPF: It's going to change everything

Today I watched this Microsoft developers launch event web cast, and I was well and truly amazed by what I saw. The web cast at its core is basically about the new things that will be possible using such things as Vista and the new Visual Studio integration with office 2007. This was all the usual Microsoft evangelism, however towards the end of the presentation they bring on a group of developers from The London Underground, and at this point things start to really heat up.

They start off by showing some of the features of Excel 2007 that allow them to pull data straight from a web service and manipulate it in the usual way in which you can in Excel. While this is nothing amazing it does show the power of web services when they are combined with analytical tools.

The real fun starts when they bring out their latest WPF based app. This thing is amazing, for a start it's running completely within a web browser and the responsiveness of it is instant. Fair enough the data source may be on the same machine but this thing is super smooth and extremely heavy on the graphics, in fact there are even full 3D sections.

It's just the way that they managed to combine so many different web service data streams and collate them together to give virtually every piece of information you could want to know about the underground at any given time. Not only this, but the use of WPF has allowed them to make a highly flexible interface that allows the data to be viewed in as many ways as you would want.

It's this kind of presentation that gets me excited about development again. The possibilities are mind blowing. I predict that in the next 6 months or so the web is going to become a very different place.

If you want to skip straight to the demo then just click on the fourth slide from the end of the presentation and you'll be in about the right place.