Windows 7
Microsoft may deliver Windows 7 beta within 8 weeks, says analyst
Microsoft won’t likely miss the chance to showcase Windows 7 in the next two months at a pair of tech conferences, and it will give developers code for hands-on work, an analyst said today. Windows 7, the follow-on to Vista, is already on the agendas of the Professional Developers Conference (PDC), scheduled for Oct. 27-30, and the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC), slated for Nov. 5-7, but Microsoft will likely provide early code to developers at one or both of the shows, said Michael Cherry, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft.
"When that many developers [come] together, you want them to go home with something that they can play with," said Cherry. "Microsoft will want to do more than just tell developers about Windows 7."
Of the two conferences, Cherry put his money on WinHEC as the most likely target for Microsoft. "It’s a small grouping by number," he reasoned, "so I think they are more likely to get something." That smaller number, he said, might be more attractive to Microsoft, which until recently has played Windows 7 closer to its vest than previous editions.
"Microsoft might have some concerns about the early code getting reviewed," said Cherry. "They won’t want anyone to do any performance testing with a beta, but once it’s out it’s inevitable that those of us as analysts will start writing our impressions about the early code. Analysts abhor a vacuum."
Source: Computer World
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Windows 7 Looking Like a June 2009 Delivery
Publicly, Microsoft has said Windows 7, the successor operating system to the firm’s much maligned Windows Vista, will not ship until early 2010, but its internal calendar has June 3, 2009 as the planned release date.
Also, Microsoft will use its Professional Developer’s Conference in late October as the launch platform for the first public beta of Windows 7. Microsoft plans to release the first beta on October 27, the first day of the show, when Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie will be the keynote speaker.
Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) has two major developer shows planned for the Los Angeles area in a two week period: PDC on October 27 to October 30, and the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC). While PDC has listed its keynote speakers, Microsoft has not listed who will be the keynote speakers at WinHEC.
Source- Internetnews.com
First Windows 7 TAP (Technology Adoption Program) Build?
According to a user by the nickname, "seveninsider" on AeroXP, build 6780 has gone out to the very, very select number of TAP customers. Usually designated for large companies and colleges, the TAP program is the mother of trust between Microsoft and whoever they accept. Members of a TAP receive very early builds of whichever program they’re accepted for. (There are various TAPs… Windows, Office, etc.) Anyway, though it’s very, very little to go by at the moment, "seveninsider" left a very miniscule teaser in addition to a couple of tidbits of information:
"…it has some nice new features that are not yet publicly known and major improvements to some old friends (WordPad, Paint, Calculator)… They also seem to have worked on the performance-side quite a bit… (I am running it inside Virtual PC 2007). This might also be the build that gets distributed at PDC an WinHec in October, who knows…."
With PDC right around the corner, it very well could be. With Microsoft undoubtedly thinking about the PDC build, it would make sense to gather all the information they could from TAP testers prior to compiling the PDC build
Source- US Evangelist
Windows 7:Follow-up on High DPI resolution
One of the cool results of this dialog is how much interest there is in diving into the details and data behind some of the topics as expressed in the comment and emails. We’re having fun talking in more depth about these questions and observations. This post is a follow-up to the comments about high DPI resolution, application compatibility, and the general problems with readability in many situations. Allow me to introduce a program manager lead on our Desktop Graphics team, Ryan Haveson, who will expand on our discussion of graphics and Windows 7. –Steven
When we started windows 7 planning, we looked at customer data for display hardware, and we found something very interesting (and surprising). We found that roughly half of users were not configuring their PC to use the full native screen resolution. Here is a table representing data we obtained from the Windows Feedback Program which Christina talked about in an earlier post.
Source- Engineering Windows 7 Blog
Windows 7: Beta 1 tracking for mid-December
Microsoft is on tap to talk publicly about and show off Windows 7 at two of its upcoming tech conferences this fall. But that does not mean the Windows team necessarily will be distributing bits at those shows.
Along with many other Microsoft watchers, developers and customers, I have been assuming Microsoft was going to provide attendees of its late October Professional Developers Conference (PDC) – or at least its early November Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) — with early Windows 7 bits. But according to new information I’ve received from sources that have asked not to be named, Microsoft is not planning to make Beta 1 of Windows 7 available until mid-December.
Source- zdnet.com
Wndows 7:The Windows Feedback Program
Introducing Christina Storm who is a program manager on the Windows Customer Engineering feature team working on telemetry.
In a previous article Steven has introduced the Windows 7 Feature Teams. I am a program manager working on telemetry on the Windows Customer Engineering team. Our team delivers the Windows Feedback Program, one of several feedback programs in place today that allow us to work directly with customers and make them part of our engineering process.
The Windows Feedback Program (WFP) has been active for several years during the Windows XP and Windows Vista product cycles, and we are currently ramping up to get all aspects of this program ready for Windows 7. At the core of this program is a large research panel of customers who sign up via our website http://wfp.microsoft.com during open enrollment. Customers choose to be part of a survey program, an automated feedback program or both. They then complete a 20-minute profiling survey, which later allows us to look at their feedback based on their profile. We have customers spanning a wide spectrum of computer knowledge in our program, and we are constantly working on balancing the panel to staff up underrepresented groups. The majority of customers who are spontaneously willing to participate in a feedback program like ours are generally enthusiastic about technology. They are early adopters of consumer electronics, digital devices and new versions of software. In contrast, customers who see the PC as a tool to get a job done tend to be a bit more reluctant to join. And we also need more female participants!
Source- Engineering Windows 7 Blog
Windows 7 — Approach to System Performance
The dialog has been wide ranging—folks consistently want performance to improve (of course). As with many topics we will discuss, performance, as absolute and measurable as it might seem, also has a lot of subtlety. There are many elements and many tradeoffs involved in achieving performance that meets everyone’s expectations. We know that even meeting expectations, folks will want even more out of their Windows PCs (and that’s expected). We’ve re-dedicated ourselves to work in this area in Windows 7 (and IE 8). This is a major initiative across each of our feature teams as well as the primary mission of one of our feature teams (Fundamentals). For this post, I just wanted to frame the discussion as we dig into the topic of performance in subsequent posts. Folks might find this post on IE8 performance relevant along with the beta 2 release of IE 8.
Performance is made up of many different elements. We could be talking about response time to a specific request. It might mean how much RAM is “typical” or what CPU customers need. We could be talking about the clock time to launch a program. It could mean boot or standby/resume. It could mean watching CPU activity or disk I/O activity (or lack disk activity). It could mean battery life. It might even mean something as mundane as typical disk footprint after installation. All of these are measures of performance. All of these are systematically tracked during the course of development. We track performance by running a known set of scenarios (there are thousands of these) and developers can run specific scenarios based on exercising more depth or breadth.
Source- Engineering Windows 7 blog
New Product Families - Windows 7
Yesterday a new product category for Windows 7 Client was published to Windows Update and was made available to WSUS (another one for Windows 7 Server should be appearing soon as well). As with all of our other new product categories, this is for Microsoft teams who are publishing Windows 7 beta drivers/updates in the near future. In the future, we’ll try to let you know about new categories ahead of time.
Source- Technet Blog
