I attended Microsoft’s The New Efficiency launch event for their new Windows 7 operating system. The presentations were targeted to Developers and IT Professionals, although I got the distinct impression that these people were few and far between, but I will get to that in a minute. The event was held off the Boston Common at the Loews theater. The event staff were friendly and helpful. The presentations went off pretty much without a hitch and the giant movie screens were great for displaying demonstrations. My main problem with the event was that the presentations consisted of talking about what features Windows 7 offers (many of which I was aware of from reading internet articles) and very little about how to actually code them.
Hey Windows 7 can do this! Download the demonstration code when you get home!
My response was:
Hey, why don’t you mail me my copy of Windows 7 and not waste my time!
I know I am being harsh, but I expected a lot more depth to the demonstrations, but perhaps the reason for lack of depth is because of what I alluded to earlier at the start of this article. It seemed that there weren’t many developers there. The guy next to me got up and left after the first break, maybe to take a nap in the bathroom stall until he could get his free copy of Windows, and was replaced by a guy that had to ask me what managed code was. The other guy I was sitting next to was nice enough, but admitted he wasn’t a developer. Somebody else decided to shout out to the presenter whether you can use a laptop touchpad to control the multitouch functionality of Windows 7. So perhaps they already knew that this wasn’t a true developer demonstration and were just doing a feature overview for all the computer nerds drooling to get their hands on a free copy of Windows 7 Ultimate.
Anyways, let me get to a quick overview of the features covered.
First of all they covered dynamic background services which are a nifty new feature. Instead of having a system tray packed full of background apps polling for something to happen, you can now subscribe to system events and then invoke your background service. The example used was waiting for a usb drive to be plugged in and then automatically copying the files to the system. I was more excited about this as an end user than as a developer since I don’t code background applications. Unloading the crapload of system tray applications is a life saver. Well done MS! For your next demo though, don’t spend fives times as much time demonstrating how it works vs actual code.
The next topic covered was the new troubleshooting platform. This consisted of a wizard for configuring what we all know as msconfig. It is about time MS made this more accessible to end users. Along with it came the Troubleshooting Pack which was another wizard for developers to utilize powershell and system analysis to troubleshoot customer issues. This was not a very exciting portion of the program. If I know how to develop why exactly do I need a wizard to encapsulate basic operations?
Things finally got more interesting with libraries. These are an abstraction of the file system that allow you to group files of like types in a single folder. Both local and networked files are fair game. A default file location can be specified for the library and files can be organized into stacks by things like month. I can imagine using this myself for organizing my pictures. Currently I have all my pictures sorted by year and then by month and event. With this system I can easily access all pictures at once and find the one I am looking for. You may be asking yourself the same thing I was at the time though… what does this have to do with software development?
The New Taskbar is a great improvement over the old one and offers developers (hey that’s me!) lots of opportunities to enhance their application. Examples given were adding play/pause functionality to a media player, dynamic progress bars displayed on the task bar, and pretty much anything else you might want to access from the taskbar instead of having to switch applications to get it accomplished. I was very impressed with the idea and the .NET framework had lots of nifty tools available to quickly incorporate this functionality. MS has done well with this one.
The presenter then went on to discuss the move from GDI to DirectX and the enhancements associated with it – better scaling, speed and AA. They demonstrated PacMan running on a 3D cube and when Pac Man went through the secret passages the cube would rotate. This solicited a big oooh and ahhh from the audience, but if this sounds familiar it is because Compiz (or Beryl) have done this for years on Linux. I have to admit it is cool though.
Sensors were an interesting introduction to .NET and allow developers to use third party devices like accelerometers, light sensors and touch pads. .NET allows developers to subscribe to events for the different sensors and maintains the programming paradigm that we are used to. This makes incorporating some nifty/cool technology into your app much simpler. The guy to my left rolled his eyes, but I was excited. With all the cool changes in input conceptions these days I welcome the ability to easily extend my apps functionality to sensors.
The final point they touched on was support of multitouch. It seems really cool, and yes it has certainly proved itself on cell phones, but on the desktop? As I watch someone move photos around on their virtual table and drag and drop stuff on to a usb thumb drive or rotate pictures with their hands all I can think is… my mouse does that twice as fast and is way more accurate. Is this really what people are clamoring for? Don’t get me wrong, I think multitouch will have its place, but I think it gets way too much marketing cred for something that can’t come close to matching the mouse/keyboard combo now and perhaps never will.
You could tell the presentation was coming to a close and sure enough a large number of the participants started shuffling their papers, putting on their jackets and generally completely dismissing the presenter so that they could be the first in line for their free copy. Overall I thought it was pretty rude. They couldn’t wait an extra minute or two for him to finish? I guess this just reiterated the idea that we weren’t dealing with developers here, just some free loaders that had to endure a presentation for free swag. Next release point your Cupid’s arrow at Developers MicroSoft and make them write a program that fetches their free ISO of Windows. That way they will have to pay attention in class!
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