The Longhorn Server conference finishes today but we had to part yesterday since we had to be in Costa Rica today :( This means that we missed some of the sessions on the last day. The one we regret the most was the second part of Virtualization which has some cool stuff for the future. I will not dive into specifics because I am sure Jose will probably blog about this so keep visiting often to read about how virtualziation on Longhorn will change the ways things are done.
I also had the chance to attend the HPC session. This deals specifically with Windows Server Cluster Edition 2003 which is slated to be released in Summer 06. What does this have to do with 64-bit, you might ask? Well, this version of Windows Server only runs on x64 hardware. It is really cool to see everything pointing towards 64-bit. Applications have been starving for more memory for a long time, and now that we have the tools and OS to get things up and running, we just have to stand back and watch the transition happens.
One session we most definitely enjoyed was Monad, which is a shell that will ship with Longhorn Server. This environment makes it so easy to carry out many tasks that in Unix would require several visits to the man pages again and again. What makes Monad so special is that its a shell in which you type commands that actually make sense from a human perspective - no AWK, GREP. For instance, a Monad command 'get-services', does what you expect, gets the list of services. Once you get this listing, there is a plethora of things you can do by piping to other Monad commands. One that blew me (and the audience as well) was a command to output the result as a series of bar graphs in IE - pretty neat stuff!