Engineering Windows 7 blog

[Iced_Eagle]

blogs.msdn.com/e7

A blog from MS on the engineering aspects of Windows 7.

It just started this week, so there isn't a lot of content yet, just a long welcome post.

TL;DR version: Windows 7 information is coming in October @ PDC.

 

[Seagull]

should be interesting to see how much they update this blog, hopefully they update it regularly.

 

[Iced_Eagle]

I hope so as well.

It's wierd that they even did this since Steven Sinofsky is so anti-information... Hell, if he had his way, they wouldn't have shown Win7 at D6 at all... He originally said no to the presentation, but Bill Gates basically told him that he's going to have his way and that they are going to be showing it off.

 

[blahblahblah]

They are doing this because they need to build hype with Windows 7. Which is kind of amusing because they had a huge amount of hype with Vista until they axed nearly every innovative planned feature with it, which killed the hype (and corresponding sales) with Vista.

 

[Iced_Eagle]

They are doing this because they need to build hype with Windows 7. Which is kind of amusing because they had a huge amount of hype with Vista until they axed nearly every innovative planned feature with it, which killed the hype (and corresponding sales) with Vista.

People have already gotten the opinion that Vista is a complete flop. Honestly, Vista is mostly a perception and marketing issue. The OS itself is great. Yeah, it has issues, but so does every OS.

That, and the fact that Vista is actually selling pretty well. If you look back to XP sales, it's basically right on track. Couple that with the fact that if you can even remember to when XP launched, a lot of people labeled XP as a failure (with SP2 though, people started to change their opinions due to the massive changes MS made in it).

Yeah, I agree it's a bummer that a lot of features were axed for Vista. However, Vista was now turned into a foundational OS. Everything in Vista is going to be improved upon in Win7. Gone are the days of Windows making huge changes every release (thanks to Jim Allchin), and now Windows is going to be on a much better release schedule of major/minor releases more frequently, thanks to Steven Sinofsky.

On the bright side though, whether the industry comes kicking and screaminig or not, Vista has built a great foundation and has taken all of the punches for trying to uproot users from XP. I'm sure if users had it their way, they would only want service packs for XP from now on.

But you know, there comes a time when you can't listen to your customers anymore and do what you feel is best. If Henry Ford had asked his customers what they wanted, they would have simply told him "A faster horse". Thank god he didn't listen to them.

 

[VirusType2]

I saw a leaked build of Windows 7 on a torrent site.

Do you figure it's a functional operating system? It's probably extremely buggy and missing many features.

 

[Iced_Eagle]

Windows 7 is extremely stable at this stage, and leaked builds do not contain the necessary activations to turn on the awesome features (for example, the new taskbar redesign... You need both a secret registry key with all of the right codes, and your computer needs to be authenticated on a Microsoft domain before it will activate). It's part of their leak protection to hide some of their best features.

But the build you're talking about, at least the recent one I've heard about, is fake. Build number is way way too high.

 

[DreamThrall]

Iced_Eagle are you a Microsoftie? (just lookin at your location )

 

[Sedako]

Iced_Eagle are you a Microsoftie? (just lookin at your location )

Based on his sig, I would say no.

 

[DreamThrall]

Could be a part time thing? /shrug

 

[Iced_Eagle]

Not exactly.

Partial disclaimer: I'm a volunteer external tester for MS though. Can't say more than that unfortunately.

 

[Iced_Eagle]

*bump*

There's been some interesting posts on the blog now. Latest one is the debate of "Is Windows7 a major/minor release?"

 

[Kyorisu]

Fix the broken networking kthnx.

 

[Iced_Eagle]

Fix the broken networking kthnx.

Describe what is broken.

 

[Iced_Eagle]

Bump!

I'm sure that this post will be of some interest to people. They talk about how they're judging performance of Windows 7.

http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2008/08/27/windows-7-approach-to-system-performance.aspx

As you would hope, they use gaming frame rates as one of the benchmarks of Windows to make sure it still is performing well.