I suspect the remaining foibles in Vista will be fixed in SP2, which is in limited beta at the moment.

 

Vista -> Windows 7 is looking more like one of Apple's OSX "upgrades" than a traditional Windows major release, which is probably no bad thing. They're synchronising the client and server releases: Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 are due out at the same time and have a bunch of complementary features, like the Direct Access remote networking and such. The server edition is pretty impressive: it scales to 256 processors/cores; Hyper-V 2.0 supports live migration; .NET 4.0 will be supported in Server Core installs. The biggest thing with the client is the multi-touch support, which is of limited use to most of us, and the improved integration with Windows Live Services, although they're going to have to watch the anti-trust regulators on that or they'll have every provider of online mail, calendar, photo gallery, bookmarking and so on filing suit.

 

I have to say, I'm much more excited about Windows 8. According to the rumour mill, it's a completely new microkernel, has virtualisation coded right into it and is going to provide backward compatibility using application virtualisation, which means they can ditch all the godawful legacy API stuff.

 

In other news, Visual Studio 2010 appears to be written in managed code and uses WPF, presumably on .NET 4.0.

What Office 2007 has instead of menus and toolbars.

These days, it's more interface problems with Vista that I dislike and these aren't going to be fixed with service packs. Apart from the search box, I still think the new start menu is pants, and many other areas seem to have been designed by a complete plonker when it comes to actual usability. A pity too seeing as most of the bugs etc. have now been fixed.

Hence I'm hoping that with some tweaking and new features, Windows 7 might be enough of an improvement for me to think about ditching XP as my main OS and upgrading.

Windows 8 is a bit too much of a wait though :-(

According to this, Windows 7 includes MinWin, although whether it's an actual binary distributable or just a refactoring of the kernel code to reduce interdependency is unclear.

I have also found a hack that activates the new Taskbar in the PDC preview, so I'll have a play with that in a bit.

Did you jimlad a version of windows 7 or are you a Tester?

I've got the PDC preview M3 build. I'm sure I don't know this lad "Jim".

Does it blend? Is it stable?

Haven't the foggiest, haven't done anything with it yet. When they release the first beta next month I'll half-inch a spare laptop from work and try and use it in earnest (with Office 14 and VS2010), but for now I've just been exploring.

 

The new Taskbar's not all there yet in this build, but it's an improvement already. You can move the buttons around, which I've wanted since Windows 95, so that's good. You can pin a running application to the taskbar, and it creates a shortcut with whatever start-up parameters were specified. Not a lot else, and the Start Menu appears to have only changed cosmetically.

 

Windows PowerShell v2 has a new graphical IDE-type thing, which is very cool, a lot like those Python or Ruby tools you can get (immediate execution window, all that stuff).

>>You can move the buttons around, which I've wanted since Windows 95, so that's good.

 

Wooo! Finally! I used to have a plug in thingy that let you do that... Hmm, was it a power tool? I dunno. I lost it in a reformat years ago but it was sooo handy if you're anal like me about tasbard window order (I'm having cold sweats today because Outlook opened after IE and it's at the wrong end of the taskbar and I'm too lazy to close the various IE windows I need to sort it out)

 

I'll be speaking to Jim this evening to see if I can borrow his copy, me thinks...

I feel a virtual machine moment coming on.

Interesting. I was under the impression that MinWin was just the NT kernel with minimal API layers to make a vaguely functional system but that would seem to indicate that they have also refactored the kernel too to improve the API layering.

On a similar note, there's a great rebuttal to a hilariously* misguided blog post about MinWin here

*warning - may only be amusing to programmers.

You want Taskbar Shuffle:
http://www.freewebs.com/nerdcave/taskbarshuffle.htm

I have just finished installing it on to a VM with 1.5Gb RAM. It's running great and pretty fast as well. I installed the Windows 7 superbar hack as well. Its a shame Vm does nto support D3D becuase the bar has lots of snazzy 3D functions. Its pretty much what Vista should have been. moving the tasks around is great and pinning to start bar is pretty useful.

 

Need to play with it some more, it does freeze for no reason when opening certain programs (word pad for one)

Ooh, that looks like just the thing. Must try and remember to install it when I get home.

It's even got an option to not appear in the system tray, for maximum unobtrusiveness.

I just watched the interview with Mark Russinovich on Channel9, and he said MinWin is an ongoing project to remove upward dependencies in the kernel, which means they can draw a line at the layer which includes the functionality they need (for testing, mainly) and be sure that what they build won't have any dangling bits. It also means they can change or replace APIs more easily since they can reliably map the relationships between them.

Thanks for the reminder.

 

Just installed it - I love how in the options if you select not to display the system tray icon it puts up a sad face (giggle)

Ahaha, I love the message you get when you disable the systray icon :')

I went to a presentation on Windows 7 at TechEd, and the guy was running the latest build with all the task-bar-y goodness working. He went into a fair bit of detail about what it means for application developers.

 

They've merged the task bar, quick launch bar and custom toolbars together; running applications get a single icon (if they're on the taskbar already as shortcuts, they just get a visual indication that they're now running. Mousing over the icon for a running program gives you little preview thumbnails of all windows for that app (and all tabs in the case of IE8 - the application developer can define what's shown in the thumbnails).

 

The thumbnails can also have buttons on them, so for example, Media Player has your basic play/stop/fwd/back buttons. From the thumbnail, you can view a full-size preview of the window, or actually go to the window, if you really want to. The task bar icon can also have an overlay (MSN style indicators, for exampled), and a progress indicator. It's all quite nifty, although I'm not sure what mouse-phobic alt-tabbers will make of it, and it will no doubt piss of Peter Boughton for reasons that are completely different to everyone else's reasons for being pissed off.

 

There's also a right-click context menu for quick launch applications - it lets you see your recent file list or whatever (if it's that's kind of app) or open the app in certain ways (if it's that kind of app). For example - Word will show you your recent files, WinIPConfig7 would give you options to release and renew IP addresses, purge your DNS cache and that kind of thing.

 

The way the system tray works is being changed round, so that only things that the user chooses to have in it will be displayed in it.

 

Under the covers, they claim to have done a load of optimising, and have apparently made a load of efficiency improvements over Vista; the example the guy gave was DVD playback - you get an extra hour of hotel-room pornfapping out of your laptop battery with Windows 7. (He maybe didn't describe it exactly like that).

 

Also in Windows 7: Notepad Multitouch. It's awesome.

 

 

And now I'm posting this from the 6.1.7000 build that's doing the rounds, which is probably the proper beta. Initially installed as an upgrade over Vista, which didn't go so well: the performance was appalling and Outlook wouldn't connect to the remote Exchange server. Format and fresh install and it's all looking a lot better.

 

The new taskbar is ace, big improvement over the Windows 95 one. Performance seems good but obviously it's a clean install so that's an ongoing thing. Other than that there's a lot of tweaks and refinements to the Vista UX, which are very welcome.

 

Office 2007 and Visual Studio Team System 2008 both seem to work fine.

 

It's installed on my work laptop (I also have a desktop which is still on XP SP3 for legacy support reasons) so I'm using it for real unless something goes horribly, horribly wrong. Woo.