I’ve been watching the PDC2008 sessions on video. And yesterday I went to session at Microsoft Melbourne which talked about Silverlight, WPF and Windows 7.
PDC 2008 have several sessions on Windows 7.
First some interest statistics quoted yesterday
- Facebook are adding 10,000 new servers.
- Microsoft are currently adding 10,000 new servers every month.
Cool thing. During the opening session we did a pole using our mobiles and SMS. The results were shown graphically live on screen as the results came in. All via http://www.polleverywhere.com/
Cool stuff for Silverlight
- Treeview and Graph charts.
- Local Isolated storage (up to 1MB without prompting the user).
Here the app can cache images and files downloaded from the web. - Async download of files.
- Access the browser DOM.
Silverlight 3.0 announced
Silverlight 2.0 was big (lots of new controls). Silverlight 3.0 may be even bigger.
- H.264 production quality video.
- GPU Hardware Acceleration.
- True 3D support.
Internet Explorer 8
- Isolated tabs (crash one and the rest keep running)
- JavaScript Debugger (not to be outdone by FireFox Firebug)
- Slices and Accelerators. Monitor slices of a web page.
Windows 7
Great new features. The polish we expected to see in Vista.
Looks like the version number for this next version of Windows will be 6.1.
- Libraries. Group your music etc from different locations to a single virtual location (Library) for fast access and unified search. You can setup a library during installation if required.
- Ribbon control added to WordPad and Paint. MS Ribbon API now ships with Windows 7.
- Jump list. Access most MRU (most recently used) file lists from the taskbar right-click menu (even if a program not running). You may need to prepare existing apps to make use of this feature.
- New improved task bar and hover previews. Close windows and interact with programs from the preview. You may need to prepare existing apps to make use of this feature.
- UAC optimization. Now has 4 Levels of UAC control (for when apps are elevated to run in admin mode)
1. UAC on full (same experience as in Vista).
2. UAC on but do not dim the screen.
3. Signed Microsoft application do not require a UAC prompt.
4. UAC off.
Note: Skipping signed MS apps will reduce the number UAC prompts by round 70%. - Native Virtual Drive Support. Computer management (Storage > Disk Management) now has 2 new commands to Create and Load .VHD files. It also allows you to boot off a .VHD file.
- W7 has a much smaller footprint than Vista. Apps like Photo Gallery; Live Messenger; Live Services will not ship with W7 but be available by download only.
- Multi-touch. Touch screen support like you have seen in MS surface computing will be available in WIndows 7. Already HP have a touch screen on the market.
- Better Ink and Speech.
Visual Studio 2010
- UI/UA is now WPF. Richer UI.
- Programmer can now add the ribbon controls to their apps (Including a WPF version of the Ribbon).
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