For me this second quarter of 2006 has been so interesting with all these beta and CTP products from Microsoft. The summer will be a long wait for the Release Candidates and the autumn a huge and shaky wait for the gold products. Here is a short summary of what i think so far;
**Microsoft Expression Graphics Designer**An interesting product which I have big hopes for, I really like, and have just adjusted, to the vector way of doing my graphics.
**Microsoft Internet Explorer 7**The long awaited update of the most popular webbrowser; tabbed interface and integrated RSS reader and a lot of security improvements. Lot of stuff here to implement for Microsoft though; I lack the native support for text/xhtml+xml.
**Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 SDK - Domain Specific Languages**For me the most enticing stuff and for my company. We really need this in Visual Studio to get our application development more Visual.
**Microsoft Office 2007 - Word, Excel, PowerPoint…**The best improvements in user interface design the last decade. After working with the applications I don’t see any reason not to upgrade. The suite is extremely slow - but I hope it’s all beta related.
**Microsoft Outlook 2007**A great new version of the best PIM product!
**Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007**Finally a good product to work with; 2001 was a real buggy fast hack and 2003 lacked the document management features in 2001.
**Windows Vista**Security, User Interface, Media Center and more memory needed!