Highlights & Events: Windows 7 – It Doesn’t Get Any Better
As I write this, I am thinking about my upcoming Windows 7.0 launch presentations. There is so much good to say, I don’t even know where to start. I’m going to be up on stage for almost 3 hours, limiting myself to just developer centric topics, and I need to start thinking about reducing the amount of content. In fact, I won’t even be able to talk about all these features in this editorial.
Background Services
Much of the public has been critical of the long startup time for Windows. However, if you look under the hood you will notice that much of this latency is caused by the starting of background services. Background services are there to accommodate the growing list of hardware and software manufacturers who have created web cams, IM clients, MP3 players, and photo editing applications, to name a few. Windows 7 does a great job at solving this problem by introducing Trigger-Start services, which are background services that are loaded only when they are needed, not necessarily every time your computer boots. And this dramatically reduces computer startup times.
Task Bars and Jump Lists
The Windows taskbar has undergone radical improvement by introducing new features such as jump lists, overlay icons, progress bars, and tabbed thumbnails. For example, you may wish to overlay an icon on your application’s taskbar icon to indicate to the user that your application is in some specific state or performing some specific work. More specifically, you may wish to put an icon of an hourglass on the taskbar icon if the application you are developing is performing a long running task. You can even animate the taskbar icon, much like you would animate the progress bar within your application.
Jump lists allow you to provide quicker access to your application’s features. For example, you can programmatically manage your own “most recently used” list right from within the taskbar icon of your application.
Built-in Problem Solving with the Windows Troubleshooting Platform (WTP)
If you are an application developer, you’ll often want to empower your end users to solve their own problems. For example, you can use the WTP to provide a wizard-like interface to your end users that would help them discover such things as missing registry entries, bad connection strings, and unavailable network resources. You are limited only by your imagination here – if you can write some basic script, you can solve many problems. Naturally, you would not want your end user to go into the registry and make modifications. Instead, they can click on your troubleshooting wizard to find the problem and fix it automatically, directly from within your application. The WTP provides an interface into which you can paste some script code that both identifies the problem and subsequently fixes it.
Windows 7 Training Kit for Developers
If you were to ask me what the quickest and most simple way for you to learn of all these great new features, I would direct you to one link. This link includes presentations, hands on labs, and demos to learn about all the great new features of Windows 7. A few hours spent here is time well spent. I strongly recommend you download it and walk through some of the samples. This training kit version one, so it is not perfect. But, it is the single best placed for you to get started.
Happy coding everybody and thanks for reading.