Looks like Bill Gates has RSS in his cross hairs. Longhorn is going to have integrated RSS support (no surprise here). So, get ready to uninstall all your third party RSS readers and have 95% of user-based RSS traffic come from Microsoft products.

To better enable developers to take advantage of these opportunities, Microsoft is providing three new technologies in Longhorn. One is a new Windows presentation system codenamed Avalon. Avalon is the graphics subsystem in Longhorn that features a unified architecture for presenting data, document and all forms of media, Gates said.

Hillel Cooperman, product unit manager for the Windows User Experience, joined Gates onstage for a demonstration of Avalon and showed elements of the system that included transparency, animations, and the use of pixel shaders and "other technology that's been typical of game developers," Cooperman said.

In addition, the Avalon sidebar in Longhorn shows such things as communications and services a user has in place, as well as other things like the time, buddy lists, slide shows and could even feature ''an RSS feed built right into the sidebar."

Longhorn also will feature WinFS, the next generation of data storage, which provides more security in and enables developers to tap pre-built data structures in applications they are working on.