Windows 7 Watch – Micro Edition

These articles today on W7 were just too important and good to pass up a fast post tonight.

Videos, Videos, Videos!

Engineering Windows 7 : Back from the PDC…next up, WinHEC – in of itself a fairly standard “whew we made it' post.  However it provided awesome linkage to most all the major presentations in streaming video.

So if you didn’t get to make it to the conference and want a bit more information than the web-post digests you have been reading, these are the places to go:

• KYN02 Day Two #1 - Ray Ozzie, Steven Sinofsky, Scott Guthrie and David Treadwell (Windows 7 starts +17:00 minutes)
• PC01 Windows 7: Web Services in Native Code
• PC02 Windows 7: Extending Battery Life with Energy Efficient Applications
• PC03 Windows 7: Developing Multi-touch Applications
• PC04 Windows 7: Writing Your Application to Shine on Modern Graphics Hardware
• PC13 Windows 7: Building Great Audio Communications Applications
• PC14 Windows 7 Scenic Ribbon: The next generation user experience for presenting commands in Win32 applications.
• PC15 Windows 7: Benefiting from Documents and Printing Convergence
• PC16 Windows 7: Empower users to find, visualize and organize their data with Libraries and the Explorer
• PC18 Windows 7: Introducing Direct2D and DirectWrite
• PC19 Windows 7: Designing Efficient Background Processes
• PC22 Windows 7: Design Principles for Windows 7
• PC23 Windows 7: Integrate with the Windows 7 Desktop
• PC24 Windows 7: Welcome to the Windows 7 Desktop
• PC25 Windows 7: The Sensor and Location Platform: Building Context-Aware Applications
• PC42 Windows 7: Deploying Your Application with Windows Installer (MSI) and ClickOnce
• PC43 Deep Dive: What's New with user32 and comctl32 in Win32
• PC44 Windows 7: Programming Sync Providers That Work Great with Windows
• PC50 Windows 7: Using Instrumentation and Diagnostics to Develop High Quality Software
• PC51 Windows 7: Best Practices for Developing for Windows Standard User
• PC52 Windows 7: Writing World-Ready Applications
• ES20 Developing Applications for More Than 64 Logical Processors in Windows Server 2008 R2

If I only had a W7 loaded USB Drive…

Of course, had you and I actually been invited to attend the PDC, we would have walked away with an awesome USB hard-drive loaded with a pre-beta version of Windows 7 to play around with and test and then blog a whole lot of warm-fuzzies about W7 with.

Had I received one, this post from Long Zheng would have been very helpful indeed:

Tip: make your PDC 2008 USB hard drive a bootable Windows 7 install disk – istartedsomething

Long provides a great and clever how-to. Worth looking at even if you don’t have one of those disks.

Putting Lipstick back on a pre-beta W7….

But keeping with our fantasy…not only did we attend the PDC, and got our W7 loaded drive, and made it a bootable install platform, we loaded it up on a test-bed as quickly as we could get home.

Unfortunately, we soon discovered that it didn’t “quite” look like the W7 version that was presented officially.  Many of the neat parts and eye-candy seemed to be missing from our version.

Luckily, l33t reverse-engineering guru Rafael Rivera Jr. got curious and poked that version of W7 with a stick for a while and ended up making a breakthrough:

Flashy Windows 7 bits protected by elaborate scheme, workaround - Within Windows

Read his how-to, download a file, patch the W7 system and you almost get the same eye-candy in your W7 release version that the Microsoft presenters had.  Great work and Rafael’s blog has earned placement into my RSS feed list.

One last finding

Turns out that W7 now has native ISO file burning support.  ‘Bout time.

That took long enough: Windows 7 can burn ISO files - Download Squad

Yes I above many others know that there are ton of free and tiny and fast ISO burners for Windows. You can still use them, but I think the decision to include this feature “out of the box'” in W7 is a good move.  Certainly will make things easier on a lot of noobies who are told to download and burn an ISO file for some recovery reason, but end up copying the ISO file to a data disk burn and can’t figure out why it didn’t work. (Burn the image file to a disk, not the ISO file to a disk. Sheesh. How hard is that to understand?)

Like I said, good move.

--Claus