public static Shifd {

Every attendee of the PDC received a copy of the 6801 build of Windows 7 last week. Now everybody’s a bit disappointed the new taskbar is not included in that build.. or is it?

Rafael of WithinWindows.com has been peeking around in the Win7 bits and has found out that the new taskbar is actually included in the build, but disabled… nobody knows yet why they did that (they being Microsoft here).

So if you have the PDC build, and want to enable the new Taskbar, go check it out!

Well um, since there’s so much going on around Win7 and everyone’s already blogging about it, what I’m going to do is just provide you with a collage of some of the most important stuff collected through various other sites. If you actually want deeper coverage I suggest you visit one of the original sites Win7 stuff is being posted to.

User Interface

Multi-touch

http://www.news.com.au/technology/story/0,25642,24569778-5014239,00.html?from=public_rss

The new Snap feature lets you expand and maximize windows simply by dragging them to different edges of the desktop. Drag a window’s top edge to the top of the screen to maximize it, and drag it away to restore it to its original size. Line up any window’s edge to either side of the desktop and that window will snap to fill up that half of the screen. Do the same with another window on the other side and you’ve got two equal-sized windows on either side of the screen.

http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/PDC_2008%3A_The_7_Coolest_New_Features_in_Windows_7

First impressions: the revamped Windows 7 taskbar

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/28/windows_seven_review/

Systray Improvements

http://www.zdnet.com.au/insight/software/soa/Windows-7-Official-screenshots/0,139023769,339292888,00.htm?feed=pt_windows_7

Icons represent devices

Jumpstarts

Multiple Windows of Same type

Performance

The operating system itself has gotten a considerable amount of reworking below the presentation layer. If M3 is any indication, that work has led to a tighter OS, and by "tighter" I mean that resource requirements are being lowered

http://www.cio.com/article/457622/Windows_Takes_On_Apple_and_IT_Needs?source=home_ln

"today at his keynote at PDC 2008, [Steve] waved an Asus EeePC running Win 7 with a 1GHz processor and just 1GB of RAM"

http://www.gizmodo.com.au/index-4.html

For starters, even the early build of Windows 7 feels like a fast, stable environment. There's a lot going on behind the scenes to make the OS more usable, one monumental improvement being how video memory is allocated for unseen windows. (Hint: It's not.) The result is a highly responsive machine that gets decent battery life.

Boot-Up Time -  25 seconds

Changes include a reduction in the overhead of the desktop Windows manager so you don't need to turn it off when developing, a "substantial" reduction in the disk I/O when reading from the registry, and an attempt to reduce the memory footprint of the core Windows 7 install.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/28/windows_7_vista_lessons/

Windows 7 DWM cuts memory consumption by 50%

Security

Set prompts using UAC's slider - Sliders are used regularly as a way of adding/removing config details

Bitlocker Drive Encryption tool

Driver Protection

Driver Protection helps prevent the operating system from starting drivers that are known to cause stability problems.

http://www.activewin.com/screenshots/windows7/Windows%20Live%20Family%20Safety%20Filter.png

Video

Announced at the PDC this morning is Windows Azure. It is going to be the next version of the Windows Operating System except, you’re not going to run it on your home pc or on your corporate servers, Azure will run in Microsoft Data Centers also known as ‘The Cloud’.

So what is this thing which we now refer to as Windows Azure? Basically it’s everything you expect from an Operating System running ‘a data center’. This all sounds really vague and unclear, so to explain it a bit. Imagine that you’re a small startup company. For example you have the idea of a service which will enable your customers to share and collaborate messages. Now how would you go about to realize this? Until now you had to think about how to build the application, what hardware to run it on, and how and when to scale your business needs. Now with Windows Azure, you can focus on the application or services you’re building.

The Windows Azure platform will allow you to not only scale up like many of the systems we (as developers) are building today, but also to very quickly and easily scale out. You will also only pay as you grow. You pay for only the capacity and capabilities you use, and you can easily add more capacity as your business grows. You can even deal with unpredictable spikes in demand easily, by adding capacity. You now can rely on Microsoft’s data centers to host, scale, and manage your applications.

Besides all that Azure will also be programmable by both managed and native platform code. So all the skills you already have as a .NET developer or as a Win32 developer will still be of use. With the new Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio, it’ll be very easy to build, debug, test and deploy Web applications and services for the new cloud platform.

In the early stages of CTP, .NET managed applications built using Visual Studio will be supported. Windows Azure is an open platform that will support both Microsoft and non-Microsoft languages and environments. Windows Azure welcomes third party tools and languages such as Eclipse, Ruby, PHP, and Python. If you want to start develop Windows Azure solutions today, you can download the Software Development Kit October 2008 CTP today.

Stephen Chapman (The UX Evangelist) reports that the build every PDC attendee will be likely to receive after the Tuesday keynote is M3 Pre-Beta Build 6801. The full build string will very likely be:
Build 6801.winmain_win7m3.081020-1655, (don’t sue me if I’m wrong ).

If you want to know more about where the build string comes from and what each of the codes mean, check out Stephen’s blog post as he explains what it all means.

So, it's been pretty quite for some time about the release dates for the 3rd Service Pack for Windows XP. Some even argued it's to give Vista with SP1 an extra head start. Either way, the release dates for XP SP3 have been announced and are as follows:

Not that I think anybody should still use XP, but for those who do.. this might be usefull news .

You probably know the feature in Windows to group multiple of the same windows together in the taskbar when they don't fit anymore. I have always wondered if it would be possible to group more than one of the same windows regardless if there is space on the taskbar. Well I just came across this post on10 and low and behold, it appears to be possible through applying the reghack below.

Create a new DWORD (32-bit) value named 'TaskbarGroupSize' at that location. Setting the value to 2 or higher specifies the number of programs to activate grouping.

With Windows Server 2008 just released Mark Russinovich published an article in the march issue of TechNet magazine about the kernel changes. It's an in depth article of some core architectural changes with respect to memory management, NTFS self healing, Hyper-V and more.

If you're interested how the internals of Windows work, I suggest you keep an eye out for Mark's blog as well as the books he authored with David Solomon called Windows Internals of which the fifth edition will be released November this year.

Yep, you read it right... their both Release to Manufacturing. I'm already downloading the x64 version of Windows Server 2008 as it's already available on MSDN Subscriber downloads. Vista SP1 however is nowhere to be found yet .

I also came across this interesting video on Channel9 where Alex Hinrichs who is the Project Manager for Windows Server 2008 talks about the development process and coordination that goes into launching a product as big as Windows Server.

Through Bink.nu I've come across this very interesting news item. Several industry sources have confirmed to TG Daily that a very early version of Windows 7, previously code-named Blackcomb Vienna, already has been shipped to “key partners” as a “Milestone 1” (M1) code drop for validation purposes.

This could very well mean an interesting year, perhaps we'll even be seeing some early drops of the Vista successor. Keep your eyes and ears open!