TechDays: Anthony Vranic on Optimizing Your Application for the Windows 7 User Experience

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Anthony Vranic doing his presentation at TechDays

My photos from Anthony Vranic’s session at TechDays, Optimizing Your Application for the Windows 7 User Experience, are a bit dark because I used a different camera; my main camera was on video recording duty. I’m including them anyway, because I’m trying to keep a complete record of TechDays.

Anthony Vranic doing his presentation at TechDays

The original version of this presentation from TechEd North America is somewhat different – its target audience was C++ developers, and TechDays is more of a managed code audience. Since the original TechEd presentation, Microsoft released the Windows API Code Pack for the .NET Framework , and Anthony added it to his presentation.

The Windows API Code Pack for .NET gives managed code access to a lot of features, including some new ones introduced in Windows 7, such as:

  • Windows 7 Taskbar Jump Lists, Icon Overlay, Progress Bar, Tabbed Thumbnails, and Thumbnail Toolbars
  • Windows 7 Libraries, Known Folders, non-file system containers
  • Windows Shell Search API support, a hierarchy of Shell Namespace entities, and Drag and Drop functionality for Shell Objects
  • Explorer Browser Control
  • Shell property system
  • Windows Vista and Windows 7 Common File Dialogs, including custom controls
  • Windows Vista and Windows 7 Task Dialogs
  • Direct3D 11.0, Direct3D 10.1/10.0, DXGI 1.0/1.1, Direct2D 1.0, DirectWrite, Windows Imaging Component (WIC) APIs -- (DirectWrite and WIC have partial support)
  • Sensor Platform APIs
  • Extended Linguistic Services APIs
  • Power Management APIs
  • Application Restart and Recovery APIs
  • Network List Manager APIs
  • Command Link control and System defined Shell icons
  • Shell Search API support
  • Drag and Drop functionality for Shell objects
  • Support for Direct3D and Direct2D interoperability
  • Support for Typography and Font enumeration DirectWrite APIs

Anthony Vranic doing his presentation at TechDays

Watch this blog – I’ll posting some example code for the Windows API Code Pack for .NET in the coming weeks!

[This article also appears in my personal tech blog, Global Nerdy.]