by Larry Richman
January 6, 2007 1:15 PM

Windows Vista RTM Lab Session 3 --

Karsten Januszewski talked to the group about third party software being developed specifically to take advantage of Windows Vista. While we have seen demoes before, there really aren't many applications ready for Vista just yet. One which is very very exciting is still embargoed, meaning that we cannot talk about it right now. But Sunday night at 12 midnight Eastern we will be able to post the press release and screenshots for you. Make sure to check back here, because we got a look at it and it's extremely cool.

One app which is ready is from Northface. It is essentially an online catalog for purchasing their products. Many companies will be coming out with these programs. We walked through a demo for that.

What all these applications use is the Windows Presentation Foundation WPF), which is built on .NET Framework 3.0, which ships with Windows Vista. By the way, 2.0 is still included so that there is backwards compatibility with 2.0 apps. This is what allows this new generation of software. WPF is a new graphics engine. It controls layout, vectors, text, effects, video, 3D -- pretty much everything you see in Vista.

The graphics and animations are similar to what we've seen in the Windows Vista operating system itself.

We then saw a demonstration of how to use the WPF under the hood, and using the language XML to develop applications.