Posted by Alin Irimie
on June 03, 2009
Steve Guggenheimer’s anniversary keynote address at leading OEM conference highlights partner opportunities with upcoming Microsoft innovations:
“Today during a keynote address at Computex 2009 in Taipei, Microsoft’s OEM Division Corporate Vice President Steve Guggenheimer revealed that the company is confident with the progress made with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, and that as a result, Microsoft will deliver Release to Manufacturing (RTM) code to partners in the second half of July. Windows 7 will become generally available on Oct. 22, 2009, and Windows Server 2008 R2 will be broadly available at the same time.”
Whow … that seems fast compared with Vista release …
Posted by Alin Irimie
on April 30, 2009
Today Microsoft Corp. announced the Release Candidate (RC) of Windows 7 operating system, now available for download to MSDN and TechNet subscribers at http://technet.microsoft.com. Broader public availability will begin May 5 on the Microsoft Download Center at http://microsoft.com/downloads.
New to the Windows 7 RC are advancements such as Remote Media Streaming, Windows XP Mode (beta) and the upcoming beta of the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor.
System Requirements for Windows 7
With the RC, Microsoft is also providing guidance on the minimum system requirements for Windows 7, showing that Windows 7 will work on a broader array of hardware than any other release of Windows at launch:
* 1GHz or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
* 1 GB of RAM (32-bit)/2 GB of RAM (64-bit)
* 16 GB of available disk space (32-bit)/20 GB (64-bit)
* DirectX 9 graphics device with Windows Display Driver Model 1.0 or higher driver
I hope Windows Azure SDK will work fine on this release …
Confirmed: Windows Azure Local Development fabric works on the Windows 7 RC
Posted by Alin Irimie
on January 17, 2009
In a post on windows azure forums, a Microsoft employee makes clear what we knew already - the latest drop of Windows Azure SDK, January 2009 has issues working in Windows 7.
A number of you must be eager to try out Windows 7 Beta that was announced recently along with the Jan 2009 release of the SDK and VS Tool. Unfortunately, at the moment you may face issues running web role projects through the local development fabric. There is no workaround available at this time. Both the Windows 7 Beta and Windows Azure SDK teams are currently working through the issue and will release a fix/workaround as soon as possible.
The only proposed “solution” is to use a Virtual PC image loaded with a free trial of Visual Studio System SP1. The VPC expires at the end of 2009, so there’s enough time for Microsoft to sort things out.
Well, the SDK is CTP, Windows 7 is BETA, we just need some patience …
Posted by Marcio Castilho
on October 28, 2008
Barry Collins, from PDC 2008 in Los Angeles, writes
“At PDC 2008, Microsoft has just released a pre-beta copy of Windows 7, and PC Pro has a series of in-depth guides to User Interface, Multitouch Controls, Networking, Device Management, and other IT tools. The revamped Windows desktop has clearly gleaned more than a little inspiration from the Mac OS X Dock, but it goes further than the Apple concept.”
It appears that these announcements of Windows 7 mimics many nice features Mac users have been experiencing for quite some time with Mac OS X. The system Taskbar now only shows the icons of the open application, which is very similar with the Dock in OS X. The widgets “or gadgets” can roam free now through the entire desktop, which resembles even more the Dashboard introduced several years ago.
Some other features announced includes:
- Remote desktop support for multiple monitors
- Notification bubbles similar to Growl in OS X.
- Integrates SysInternals ZoomIt with quick Win + shortcut
- VHD Integration, so you can boot and attach virtual images disk natively
- Same kernel as Windows Server 2008 and Vista
- New Calculator
- Paint has a Ribbon bar similar to Office applications
Microsoft needs to get the hint that the beauty of Mac OS X Leopard is not just on its appearance and cool animations but lies a lot on the stability, user interface consistency, organization of the file system, security and robustness. So far, I have only seen a little bit more on the “eye candy” aspects of it with a few interesting new features, but nothing too compelling to believe that this will change or improve my experience with Windows Vista.
