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Windows & .NET Watch: A wide view of Vista for developers

By Larry O'Brien

December 1, 2009 — (Page 1 of 3)
While the joke about Microsoft is that it takes them three tries to get something right, with operating systems it seems that it’s the service packs that lock things down. Windows 3.1 was vastly better than Windows 3.0, it was the Service Packs that delivered on XP’s promise, and Windows 7 is an excellent improvement on Vista. What’s that? You say that Windows 7 isn’t a service pack and a rebranding, but a major release? Yeah, okay.

It may be petty to start off with this, but I have to say that the first thing that struck when studying the new Windows 7 APIs is that they are C-based. Microsoft premiered .NET and the CLR almost a decade ago. In 2003, they swore up and down that the future of all development, including for rich client applications, was managed code.

We all know that the ambitions of “Longhorn” had to be “reset” in order for Vista to ever ship, but Microsoft never did a similar reset on developer guidance. They never said, “Hey, you know what? You ought to hold on to that copy of Rector’s ‘Win32 Programming,’ and you might want to keep some space on your shelf for some C++ books.”

The failure of the “smart client” development model relative to browser-based and “rich Internet" applications is caused by far more than hiccups in accessing new OS-level APIs, but by this point, the assumption should be managed, not native. Instead, the API Code Pack provides .NET developers “a source code library that can be used to access some new Windows 7 features.”

The flashiest capability in Windows 7 is multi-touch, but its actual practicality is minimal with today's computers. I was a big fan of the Tablet PC, whose APIs actually supported multiple styluses (although such drivers never surfaced). I've owned three Tablet PCs and learned the hard way that the market for touch-based custom development is tiny—at least until Office supports touch in a serious manner. (Given the revenues from Office, it may be too much to say that Office is the tail that wags the Windows dog, but Office’s requirements and UI choices trump all others.)

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Ballmer announces Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 betas
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer used the CES 2009 spotlight to announce the availability of betas for the upcoming version of Windows. Preview versions of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 have been distributed to testers, with general availability coming tomorrow Read More...

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