twitter.com/spsextonPosted by Sean on 17 November, 2008
I just created my first Deep Zoom Composer project. I added all of my Windows 7 install screenshots to a Deep Zoom project and then simply published them on Photo Zoom. This was surprisingly easy–no coding required. To zoom around in this set of images, click here.
Posted in Windows 7 | Tagged: Deep Zoom, DeepZoom, Windows 7, Windows 7 Install | No Comments »
Posted by Sean on 7 November, 2008
I thought I’d do my part to flood the web with screenshots from the M3 preview of Windows 7 that was distributed at last week’s Professional Development Conference in LA.
The obvious place to start in Win 7 is with the installation process. I’ll put up more posts later with screenshots of various bits and pieces in Windows 7. But this first post will just contain: every damn Windows 7 installation screen.
Ok, admittedly, looking through install screens is about as exciting as watching bacon fat congeal. But really—there are people out there who will eat this stuff up. So it’s for them that I’ve suffered an endless series of screen captures. Enjoy.
The Environment
I installed my copy of Windows 7 to a VMWare virtual machine. The only “gotcha” was that VMWare creates a SCSCI virtual hard drive by default—which Windows 7 failed to recognize. Simple fix—just delete the default hard drive and create an IDE drive in VMWare.
The Screens
Ok, here we go.
You just get shivers as you start to install a new Microsoft OS for the first time, don’t you?
Then we switch from a DOS-looking progress bar to a cute Windows-looking progress bar:
Next we get the first Windows 7 install screen. This is the spot to insert the angelic music.
After picking an install language, you get to the main install kick-off window:
I once met a guy who actually read these EULAs. Can you believe it?
This next dialog is just as confusing in Windows 7 as it was in Vista.
In my first try, I went with the Upgrade option, which only got me this next confusing empty dialog. Nice.
Restarting everything and instead choosing Custom gets us where we want to go:
If you click on the link that reads “Drive options (advanced)”, you’ll see some options for managing hard disk partitions:
Finally, the actual installation begins.
At some point, near the end of the installation, Windows boots for the first time. It lives!
This was an interesting detail during the boot process:
All of the services apparently start firing up, as the boot process continues. (Hallelujah)!
And for some reason, we’re allowed to go back and look at this status dialog one more time.
And then back to the main boot screen. (Are you starting to feel as if you were really there)?
Oh, this is a nice little touch. No screen flickers or anything, but nice to know that it’s “checking” my video performance. (Whatever that means).
Now Windows is more or less running and we start doing some of the final configuration stuff. First, we specify a default username. This will be the Administrator user account. Seeing a PC name of “PC” also makes me think of John Hodgman and the Mac switcher ads.
And I enter my password:
And (of course) the product activation key. Wouldn’t it be cool if every key had a barcode and I could use a barcode scanner at this point? (My key did not have a barcode).
I also get to set my time and time zone.
This is an interesting one. Right out of the gate, I’m asked to specify whether my network is public or not. Like Vista, this dictates some default security settings.
I picked Home network and Windows 7 did some remaining network configuration work.
Ok, here’s one of the first really new things to show up. A “homegroup” is basically a relabeled “workgroup”—something short of a domain. I’m wondering if I’d chosen Work location in the earlier screen, if I’d now be joining a domain.
Finally, we are “welcomed” to Windows 7.
We’re so close, I can taste it.
And voila! The Windows 7 installation is complete and we’re sitting at the desktop screen. Note that I don’t have that cool new taskbar in the build that was handed out at PDC. More on that next time—the new taskbar is actually in the build and Rafael Rivera has found a hack to unlock it.
Posted in Windows 7 | Tagged: Blackcomb, Installation, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Windows 7, Vienna, Windows 7, Windows 7 Screenshots, Windows Screenshots | 1 Comment »
Posted by Sean on 1 November, 2008
PDC 2008, Day #4, Session #3, 1 hr 15 mins
Allison Klein
I jumped off the Azure track (starting to be a bit repetitive) and next went to a session focused on Direct3D.
Despite the title, this session really had nothing to do with Windows 7, other than the fact that it talked a lot about Direct3D 11, which will be included in Windows 7 and available for Windows Vista.
Direct3D 10
Direct3D 10 is the currently shipping version, and supported by most (all?) modern video cards, as well as integrated graphics chips. I’m not entirely sure, but I think that Direct3D 10 shipped out-of-the-box with Windows Vista. It is also available for Windows XP.
Allison spent about half of the talk going through things that are different in Direct3D 10, as compared with Direct3D 9.
I’m not inclined to rehash all of the details. (I’ll include a link to Allison’s slide deck when it is available).
The main takeaway was that it’s very much worth programming to the v10 API, as opposed to the v9 API. Some of the reasons for this include:
Direct3D 11
In the second half of her talk, Allison talked about the advances coming in Direct3D 11. She mentioned that D3D11 will ship with Windows 7 and also be available for Windows Vista.
Again, the details are probably more appropriate for a game developer. (See the slide deck). But the high level points are:
Futures
Finally, Allison touched briefly on some future directions that the Direct3D is thinking about.
The main topic that she talked about here was in potentially using the GPU to perform highly parallel general purpose compute intensive tasks. The developer would use HLSL to write a “compute shader”, which would then get sent to the GPU to do the work. As an example, she talked about using this mechanism for post-processing of an image.
Posted in PDC 2008 | Tagged: Direct3D, DirectX, DirectX 10, DirectX 11, DirectX 9, Microsoft PDC, PDC 2008, pdc08, pdc2008, Windows 7, Windows Vista | No Comments »
Posted by Sean on 29 October, 2008
PDC 2008, Day #2, Keynote #2, 2 hrs
Ray Ozzie, Steven Sinofsky, Scott Guthrie, David Treadwell
Wow. In contrast to yesterday’s keynote, where Windows Azure was launched, today’s keynote was the kind of edge-of-your-seat collection of product announcements that explain why people shell out $1,000+ to come to PDC. The keynote was a 2-hr extravaganza of non-stop announcements and demos.
In short, we got a good dose of Windows 7, as well as new tools in .NET 3.5 SP1, Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and the future release of Visual Studio 2010. Oh yeah—and an intro to Office 14, with online web-based versions of all of your favorite Office apps.
Not to mention a new Paint applet with a ribbon interface. Really.
Ray Ozzie Opening
The keynote started once again today with Ray Ozzie, reminding us of what was announced yesterday—the Azure Services Platform.
Ray pointed out that while yesterday focused on the back-end, today’s keynote would focus on the front-end: new features and technologies from a user’s perspective.
He pointed out that the desktop-based PC and the internet are still two completely separate world. The PC is where we sit when running high-performance close-to-the-metal applications. And the web is how we access the rest of the world, finding and accessing other people and information.
Ray also talked about the phone being the third main device where people spend their time. It’s always with us, so can respond to our spontaneous need for information.
The goal for Microsoft, of course, is that applications try to span all three of these devices—the desktop PC, the web, and the phone. The apps that can do this, says Ozzie, will deliver the greatest value.
It’s no surprise either that Ray mentioned Microsoft development tools as providing the best platform for developing these apps that will span the desktop/web/phone silos.
Finally, Ray positioned Windows 7 as being the best platform for users, since we straddle these three worlds.
Steven Sinofsky
Next up was Steven Sinofsky,Senior VP for Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group at Microsoft. Steven’s part of the keynote was to introduce Windows 7. Here are a couple of tidbits:
Steven mentioned three warm-fuzzies that Windows 7 would focus on:
Julie Larson-Green — Windows 7 Demo
Next up was Julie Larson-Green, Corporate VP, Windows Experience. She took a spin through Windows 7 and showed off a number of the new features and capabilities.
New taskbar
Windows Explorer
Home networking
Media
Devices
Gadgets
Miscellaneous
Multi-touch capabilities
Applet updates
Sinofsky Redux
Sinofsky returned to touch on a few more points for Windows 7:
Steve talked briefly about how Windows 7 will more seamlessly allow users to connect to “Live Essentials”, extending their desktop experience to the cloud. It’s not completely clear what this means. He mentioned the user choosing their own non-Microsoft services to connect to. I’m guessing that this is about some of the Windows 7 UI bits being extensible and able to incorporate data from Microsoft Live services. Third party services could presumably also provide content to Windows 7, assuming that they implemented whatever APIs are required.
The next segment was a fun one—Vista “lessons learned”. Steve made a funny reference to all of the feedback that Microsoft has gotten on Vista, including a particular TV commercial. It was meant as a clever joke, but Steve didn’t get that many laughs—likely because it was just too painfully true.
Here are the main lessons learned with Vista. (I’ve changed the verb tense slightly, so that we can read this as more of a confession).
The read-between-the-lines takeaway is we won’t make these same mistakes with Windows 7. That’s a clever message. The truth is that these shortcomings have basically already been addressed in Vista SP1. So because Windows 7 is essentially just the next minor rev of Vista, it inherits the same solutions.
But there is one shortcoming with Vista that Sinofsky failed to mention—branding. Vista is still called “Vista” and the damage is already done. There are users out there who will never upgrade to Vista, no matter what marketing messages we throw at them. For these users, we have Windows 7—a shiny new brand to slap on top of Vista, which is in fact a stable platform.
This is a completely reasonable tactic. Vista basically works great—the only remaining problem is the perception of its having not hit the mark. And Microsoft’s goal is to create the perception that Windows 7 is everything that Vista was not.
Enough ranting. On to Sinofsky’s list of things that Windows 7 provides for Windows developers:
Next, Steven moved on to talk about basic fundamentals that have been improved in Windows 7:
Decrease
Increase
Yes, you read that correctly—256 processors! Hints of things to come over the next few years on the hardware side. Imagine how slow your single-threaded app will appear to run when running on a 256-core machine!
Sinofsky at this point ratcheted up and went into a sort of but wait, there’s more mode that would put Ron Popeil to shame. Here are some other nuggets of goodness in Windows 7:
As a final note, Sinofsky mentioned that as developers, we had damn well all be developing for 64-bit platforms. Windows 7 is likely to ship a good percentage of new boxes on x64. (His language wasn’t this strong, but that was the message).
Scott Guthrie
As wilted as we all were with the flurry of Windows 7 takeaways, we were only about half done. Scott Guthrie, VP, Developer Division at Microsoft, came on stage to talk about development tools.
He started by pointing out that you can target Windows 7 features from both managed (.NET) and native (Win32) applications. Even C++/MFC are being updated to support some of the new features in Windows 7.
Scott talked briefly about the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, which has already released:
Scott then demoed taking an existing WPF application and adding support for Windows 7 features:
Scott announced a new WPF toolkit being released this week that includes:
Scott talked about some of the basics coming in .NET 4 (coming sometime in 2009?):
At this point, Scott also starts dabbling in the but wait, there’s more world, as he demoed Visual Studio 2010:
Whew. Now he got to the truly sexy part—probably the section of the keynote that got the biggest reaction out of the developer crowd. Scott showed off a little “third party” Visual Studio plug-in that pretty-formatted XML comments (e.g. function headers) as little graphical WPF widgets. Even better, the function headers, now graphically styled, also contained hot links right into a local bug database. Big cheers.
Sean’s prediction—this will lead to a new ecosystem for Visual Studio plugins and interfaces to other tools.
Another important takeaway—MEF, the new extensibility framework, isn’t just for Visual Studio. You can also use MEF to extend your own applications, creating your own framework.
Tesco.com Demo of Rich WPF Client Application
Here we got our obligatory partner demo, as a guy from Tesco.com showed off their snazzy application that allowed users to order groceries. Lots of 2D and 3D graphical effects—one of the more compelling WPF apps that I’ve seen demoed.
Scott Redux
Scott came back out to talk a bit about new and future offerings on the web development side of things.
Here are some of the ASP.NET improvements that were delivered with .NET 3.5 SP1:
ASP.NET 4 will include:
Additionally, Visual Studio 2010 will include better support for web development:
Scott then switched gears to talk about new and future offerings for Silverlight.
Silverlight 2 was just RTM’d two weeks ago. Additionally, Scott presented two very interesting statistics:
IIS will inherit the adaptive (smooth) media streaming that was developed for the NBC Olympics web site. This is available today.
A new Silverlight toolkit is being released today, including:
Visual Studio 2010 will ship with a Silverlight 2 designer, based on the existing WPF designer.
We should also expect a major release of Silverlight next year, including things like:
Whew. Take a breath..
David Treadwell – Live Services
While we were all still reeling from Scott Gu’s segment, David Treadweall, Corporate VP, Live Platform Services at Microsoft, came out to talk about Live Services.
The Live Services offerings are basically a set of services that allow applications to interface with the various Windows Live properties.
The key components of Live Services are:
The Live Services are all made available via standards-based protocols. This means that you can invoke them from not only the .NET development world, but also from other development stacks.
David talked a lot about Live Mesh, a key component of Live Services:
Applications access the various Live Services through a new Live Framework:
Ori Amiga Demo
Ori Amiga came out to do a quick demonstration of how to “Meshify” an existing application.
The basic idea of Mesh is that it allows applications to synchronize data across all of a user’s devices. But importantly, this means—for users who have already signed up for Live Mesh.
Live Mesh supports storing the user’s data “in the cloud”, in addition to on the various devices. But this isn’t required. Applications could use Mesh merely as a transport mechanism between instances of the app on various devices.
Takeshi Numoto – The Closer
Finally, Takeshi Numoto, GM, Office Client at Microsoft, came out to talk about Office 14.
Office 14 will deliver Office Web Applications—lightweight versions of the various Office applications that run in a browser. Presumably they can also store all of their data in the cloud.
Takeshi then did a demo that focused a bit more on the collaboration features of Office 14 than on the ability to run apps in the browser. (Running in the browser just works and the GUI looks just like the rich desktop-based GUI).
Takeshi showed off some pretty impressive features and use cases:
Ray’s Wrapup
Ray Ozzie came back out to wrap everything up. He pointed out that everything we’d seen today was real. He also pointed out that some of these technologies were more “nascent” than others. In other words—no complaints if some bits don’t work perfectly. It seemed an odd note to end on.
Posted in Azure, Mesh, PDC 2008, Silverlight | Tagged: pdc08, Windows 7, Microsoft PDC, Live Mesh, Windows Azure, PDC 2008, Live Services, Office 14, Ribbon, Multi-touch, Scott Guthrie, Visual Studio 2010, ASP.NET 4, Silverlight, Ray Ozzie, Windows Vista, Sinofsky, pdc2008, cloud computing | No Comments »
Posted by Sean on 27 October, 2008
Ok, yes, everyone seems to be at PDC and those who aren’t are getting sick of all of the hype. But hey—PDC only comes along every few years, so we have to take advantage of it when it does!
Things are starting to come alive here at the convention center in LA. I stopped by yesterday to pick up my badge and “swag bag”, but didn’t attend any of the pre-conference sessions.
Swag bag: I didn’t see any signs yesterday directing me to where I might get my swag, but I started watching the geeks wandering by who DID have bags and followed the geek-trail backwards.
I was a little disappointed not to get the external USB drive in the swag bag that we’ve heard about. Instead, I score a silly mug, geeky t-shirt, conference booklet and a crapload of 3rd party adverts.
But then I noticed that I had a second ticket for picking stuff, and it mentioned being valid only after Tuesday at 1PM. Ahh, got it. The USB drive is going to contain the Windows 7 alpha, as well as probably copies of all of the session slides. So Microsoft doesn’t want the alpha or session info “in the wild” until it is officially “released” at the keynotes.
Speaking of keynotes, today’s will feature Ray Ozzie and Bob Muglia and starts in about an hour. Two hours of Ozzie goodness. Tomorrow, we have another 2-hr keynote with Ray Ozzie, Steven Sinofsky, Scott Guthrie and David Treadwell.
So far, it’s clear that Windows 7 will be prominently featured at PDC. Posters and market splashes are everywhere. You’ll do fine if you just mentally subsitute “Vista 6.1″ whenever you read the marketing-derived “7″.
Also promising to make a big splash here at PDC–Live Mesh and cloud computing. More to come..
There will be five session slots today, starting at 11:00 AM and running through 6:30 PM. I plan to blog rough notes from the sessions that I attend, if I have time.
Oh, by the way–LA is supposed to hit a high of 86 degF today, and sunny. (Well, in LA, “sunny” really means “mostly smoggy”). Thinking fondly of my fellow Twin Citians and the first snow flurries of the season.
Posted in PDC 2008 | Tagged: Live Mesh, Microsoft PDC, pdc08, Windows 7 | No Comments »
