PDC: Windows 7 Client: What Do You Think?
Now that Microsoft has given a first look at the next version of Windows at
this week's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, the 8,500 attendees
on Tuesday were able to get
first
dibs on the pre-beta release.
In yesterday's
keynote address, Steven Sinofsky, senior vice president of the Windows and
Windows Live Engineering Group, and key members of his team demonstrated a slew
of new system and user interface features to Windows.
Dan Thornton, a business analyst at Teradyne Inc. in North Reading, Mass., was impressed with what he saw -- particularly the improvements to the
UI. Rather than have multiple places to launch and toggle between apps, Microsoft
has brought together the Start menu, Quick Launch and the taskbar into a common
view. "It's a lot easier to use," Thornton said after a session highlighting
the new UI.
For Thornton, that's critical: In his role, he's responsible for the user experience
of employees at the semiconductor test equipment manufacturer. "I am pretty excited
about the possibilities of using Windows features instead of inventing our own.
There's some pretty good stuff there," he said.
But Windows 7 and its integration with the forthcoming Windows
Server 2008 R2, and ultimately Microsoft's Live Services Framework including
Live Mesh, will mean different things to various developers.
We'd like to hear from developers what they think about the new Windows 7 pre-beta
client. If you're one of those who has started to poke around it, please drop
me a line at [email protected].
If you weren't one of the lucky developers to get a copy, Microsoft yesterday
released the Windows
7 Developer Guide -- share your thoughts on it with us.
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on October 29, 2008