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

By Larry O'Brien

December 1, 2009 —

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.)

Speaking of Office, the now-familiar Ribbon from Office has migrated to the OS. I am among those who don't at all care for the Ribbon and have spent an inordinate amount of time trying to keep myself from having to deal with it, so it is hard for me to enthuse about “More Ribbon, More Often.” For those who are more enthusiastic about consuming large amounts of pixels to present their users with confusing combinations of graphics and text, though, welcome to the fun!

The UI improvements that I’m most enthusiastic about are changes to the Taskbar that bring it to parity with, and arguably leapfrog, Mac OS X’s Dock. The majority of Taskbar improvements (docking, thumbnails with “Arrow Peek,” rearrangement) come for free with the OS, but one can provide value and UI sweetness by customizing such things as the taskbar icon and preview thumbnail, give quick feedback by implementing a progress bar for a long-running task, and one can directly add easily accessed functionality by writing custom and tabbed thumbnails, or by creating “jump lists,” which are essentially context menus for items in the taskbar.

The other major APIs don’t have customizable UIs but provide a lot of value for developers. “Shell Libraries” replace the “My…” hierarchy of known folders (“My Documents,” “My Pictures,” etc.) with a more general concept of a folder that is a virtual view of files physically stored in different locations. It may not be WinFS, but it’s a good start and almost certainly of interest to application developers.

More specialized, but very welcome, is a new “Sensor and Location” platform that provides a consistent API for interacting with physical sensors and provides location services for the most-likely physical sensor: a GPS.

One of the things that have come out of the mobile development world is that sensing the environment is an excellent way to unlock value. Accelerometer-sensing has changed the gaming world, but there’s great value in taking cues from the environment (light and sound levels, temperatures, maybe even air quality) and responding appropriately.

The Windows 7 Service Control Manager now supports starting a service in reaction to system event triggers. Taking advantage of the ability to start and stop services could mean significant power savings, which is a topic of increasing interest, both in mobile and server situations.

Finally, I have to mention that Windows 7 ships with PowerShell 2. Hopefully, this excellent shell and scripting language will finally gain the following it deserves. It may not be a developer feature, but it’s a feature that developers will love.

Larry O'Brien is a technology consultant, analyst and writer. Read his blog at www.knowing.net.

Related Search Term(s): Windows

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