Windows Calendar in Windows Vista Build 5231

将文章归档于微软软件由. HUNG on 2005-10-20

I've made it no secret that this is one of the features I am excited to see in Windows Vista. Yes. I'm that big of a geek to get excited about a Calendar program. But to me, this isn't just a simple program that displays a calendar with events. Its much more.

In Windows Calendar, you are able to set up multiple calendars designated by different colors with different events for each calendar. So let's say you have a family computer and want to know what each member of the family's schedule looks like - Windows Calendar is just the program for that. But let's go further - to the more exciting stuff. You can share these calendars...or "publish" them. In Build 5219, there was an option to publish as RSS but that seems to be gone in this build (again, please bring this back!). In Build 5231, when you publish a calendar, it publishes as a .ics file (and publishes only to a WebDAV capable server). After a calendar is published - it can be subscribed to! So, let's go back to that family computer with all the different calendars of each family member. Those calendars could simply be "subscribed" calendars that are created by each family member on their own individual computer in their rooms. In my situation, I could create my calendar and publish to a website where my girlfriend can subscribe to it on her computer to see what I'm doing and vice versa. Of course, all this also applies to Windows Calendar's ability for task lists as well!

As stated above, they foreshadowed the ability in previous builds of Windows Calendar to be able to share calendars via RSS. I strongly believe in this option because if you publish a calendar in RSS, that means its viewable in all kinds of different platforms such as Apple's OS X. By locking down Windows Calendar to just publishing .ics files, it makes it so only Windows users can subscribe to people's calendars. Also, I am curious on how Windows Calendar will differ from Outlook's Calendar features. As you can see in the below screenshots, the Reminder window is pretty much the same seen in Outlook.

Overall, Windows Calendar is an exciting new feature to the Windows operating system and has real potential. I can't wait to see where it goes! I plan to follow this feature very closely!