This morning I attended the Windows 7 launch event in Pittsburgh. It was the start of a very good morning. First, I had set up some time to meet with the local Microsoft Partner Evangelist so we could set up a lunch meeting. ConsultUSA is a Certified Microsoft Partner and we're wanting to level set with Microsoft to see how we can make our partnership beneficial for both of our companies.
The Evangelist was gracious, of course, giving me some valuable information about other people at the Pittsburgh office of Microsoft that could probably be more help than he. He even grabbed my attention a few minutes after we were done talking to introdoce me to one of the people he'd mentioned. I'm going to try and set up a lunch meeting with him as well.
When I get together with these gentlemen, I need to remember that I've been wanting to talk to someone about getting some .Net MVP's in Pittsburgh. It's amazing to me, we have a pretty large community of developers in Pittsburgh, but no developer MVP's. I think it would help bolser the area if we could get a handful of MVP's in the Pittsburgh market.
Well, then we went into the launch event itself. We sat toward the front, which is what we get for going into the theater late. I guess my gabbing gave us less than optimal seats. Normally, I would consider the front row, or seats toward the front, to be great seats, however, the setting for the event was a movie theater. Not just any theater, it was a 3D screen. The presentation wasn't in 3D, but the screen was HUGE, making it hard on the neck from our vantage point.
Testiment to the size of the community for Microsoft is in the fact that there were two theaters sold out. There were no seats in either.
The first presentation was titled, "Taking Your Application to the Next Level with Windows 7". The presenter took us through some of the new features of Windows 7 and showed us how easy it is to put them into our existing or new applications. Features such as The Windows Troubleshooting Platform, which will be great for our system admins. The admin that was with us declared that he was excited, he could put troubleshooting steps in place that could stop many mundane calls to the help desk.
Another nice thing that is in Windows 7 is the ability to stretch the battery life of a netbook out to 6 - 8 hours by changing the settings of services. You can now set certain services to turn on "On Demand" instead of always being on or off.
Some other neat features are the ribbon bars that were once proprietary to Microsoft Office are now part of the core of the OS. The ribbons can be added, fairly simply, to new applications. We can now take advantage of the new task bar in Windows 7, which is one of my favorite additions to Windows 7, by the way, you can now place quick links on the preview windows. An example would be an MP3 player application. You could add the play, rewind, forward, pause and stop buttons on the preview panel and they would work in the same way the same buttons would on the full application. The Zune software does that well and it's awesome, one of my favorite features of the Zune 4.0 software on Windows 7. Meaning I don't have to Alt+Tab to the application to go to another song, or pause, I can mouse over the Icon and hit the right button without ever bringing up the application in the main window.
The second session was, "Beyond Human Interaction with Windows 7 Sensor and Location Platform". It turned out really sad though. The speaker had dropped the sensor panel that he was going to use the day before and it wasn't working right. It's a shame, I was really looking forward to seeing it in action. The link above gives the how to on the platform.
The final session was, "Building the Next Generation User-Interface with Multitouch and Ribbon on Windows 7". it was just really cool to see how easy it is to turn an existing application into a multitouch enable application. I hope to get an HP Touchsmart someday, so I can start working on some Multitouch applications. There are some great features in Windows 7 that I will not be able to use until I can get a touch enabled PC.
After the event we all got copies of Windows 7 Ultimate. I'll be giving the copy I recieved away at my Windows 7 house party, since I'm already running it from my MSDN collection. If you haven't gotten an invite to my house party and would like one, and I actually know who you are, leave me a comment.
As an aside, when we got back to the office the owner of the company had brought in his 2009 Stanley Cup Championship ring. Here's a pictury of me wearing it. it made for the perfect end to a really good morning