January 2009 Entries
So after playing with the TouchSmart from the user point-of-view, it was time to take a look at the dev story. It turns out that touch-enabling your applications in Windows 7 will be a great deal easier than before! This isn’t just detecting that there was a touch somewhere (like on a PDA/smartphone), but keeping track of multiple touch points, and understanding gestures (select, pan, zoom, rotate). There are three levels of compatibility depending on how much work you want to do and what your app needs to accomplish: Level One: Essentially do nothing. As long as your application...
Well this has been another great day! The focus was on Windows 7 today. I got to play with the HP TouchSmart PC for one thing. It wasn’t as cool as I’d hoped! Touch is a bit laggy and not all that accurate much of the time. Instead of typical touch screen technology (capacitive or resistive) it uses cameras. It can only detect two touch points, but it got confused pretty often. We talked a lot about the ribbon user interface paradigm as seen in Office 2007, and sometimes called the Fluent UI. It looks like there will be...
Well it’s been another great day! I love learning these under-the-covers details about Windows 7. New updates to BITS, service control, PowerShell V2, and energy efficiency. I’ve got lots of ideas for talks I’d like to do, code snippets to write, and blog entries. Of course the concepts here are evolution for the most part so far. The revolutionary stuff comes the next two days! Still though, it shows some good work coming out of MS. Still no FTP support in BITS. This was disappointing to me. From the start, this is what has prevented it from being a truly...
This week I’m in Redmond for some training on Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. It was quite a day and it will be quite a week overall. I spent a good chunk of the morning listening to Mark Russinovich. Having used his Sysinternals tools for years, and seeing his move to Microsoft (currently a Technical Fellow), it was a neat experience to be able to be one of a fairly small group in this talk, getting to ask him questions when I needed to. He’s a great speaker and knows the kernel like few people do! I...
Well I don't know if I set any world records, but I've definitely beaten my own records for file transfer over Skype – 24GB! It took over ten hours to complete, but it was flawless. I initiated it, the other person accepted, and we were able to walk away. Much better than overnighting DVD's! I've been really happy With Skype since it first came out. Both audio and video are great most of the time, and file transfers are rock solid.
I've been thinking about a project I might start working on. I haven't done any VSTO (Office coding) for some time now, and I'd like to get back into the swing of things. As an avid Subversion user, it's pretty common for me to be checking Office docs in and out of Subversion repositories. It should be fairly straight-forward to create a new ribbon to add the Subversion commands to any document. I am envisioning Revert, Commit, and Update being the most common. Clicking Revert would close the current document, invoke Update, then re-open it. Update would act similarly,...
I’ve been really excited about getting my hands on the Windows 7 beta from everything that I heard about it. I finally got the official download link and installed it on my Acer Aspire One (1GB RAM, 160GB HD). It is just perfect so far. I had been running Vista Home Premium on here before, and honestly it was pretty good, but Windows 7 definitely installed faster, boots up faster, and is just smarter to use. A few small things really make a difference. The no-hassle wireless networking, Start items disappear when you are searching by typing, Aero Peek...
I'd like to congratulate my friend, Chris Sutton, for joining the ranks of Microsoft MVP's. Chris is a highly-motivated coder, trainer, and community organizer. I'm sure we'll be seeing great things from him in the future as we have in the past. He's one to watch for sure! Chris's blog: http://subjunctive.wordpress.com