Posting this from the Microsoft PDC Windows 7 preview build. Which is not very different at all from Vista, in fact. A few UI tweaks here and there, the Windows Explorer layout is improved; there's a new thing called Libraries which aggregates multiple folders into a single view, which is quite cool. Wordpad and Paint have Ribbon interfaces.

According to MS, it's got full driver compatibility with Vista. I'm running it in a virtual PC, so I can't really tell.

Also just been watching a demo of Office 14 (on Channel9), which looks really cool. There's a browser-based version which uses Silverlight if you've got it, AJAX if you haven't, and it's cross-platform. That includes Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote. If you've got a document stored in SharePoint or on Office Live, you can have multiple people editing it at the same time from the full smart client, the web client and the Windows Mobile client, getting live updates from each other. The browser Excel has the same calculation engine as the full smart client Excel.

It's happily installed the Virtual Machine Additions, which are just a bunch of drivers, so that's something.

 

Maybe when they release a beta I'll be able to persuade work I need a Tablet PC...

What is a ribbon interface?

It's like mouse gestures but you have to do rythmic gymnastics.

(giggle)

It does look as if it will end up being what Vista should have been when it comes out. Which will be nice. It's also handy that they're maintaining driver compatibility. After all, one of the things that helped XP when it came out was that most Win2K drivers would work fine with it. Either way, I'm quite looking forward to it really. If they can fix many of Vista's foibles, maintain compatibility and add in features that never made it into Vista, it might actually be worth getting.

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.