I stumbled accross the Shipping Seven blog today… Its a blog from someone on the Windows 7 team who isn’t afraid to make their true feelings about Microsoft and Windows and general heard (all be it annomously )

 Check out this interesting post off the Shipping Seven blog: 

In almost every Windows OS release so far, we’ve changed something major in the OS subsystems, to improve the Windows infrastructure. And that generally screws up application or driver compatibility:
Windows 95
Long file names - Application developers had to fix their applications to support long file names. (A good thing, though: What is in 1NTINPRS.AVI?)
Windows NT
Driver developers had to write drivers for a new driver framework because of the hardware abstraction layer. Actually, most of them just stayed away, and supported Win9x only.

Windows 2000
A major annoyance for driver developers, who could ignore the NT driver models up to this point. Win2k ran on NTFS, and had locked-down permissions - developers couldn’t install their application’s files in \windows\system anymore.
We were telling corporations to set up their users as non-admins on their machines,

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2008 Is here, its now time to face the truth… The clock is ticking on Microsoft’s Windows XP. And whilst Microsoft may view this as a natural stage in the evolution of a product that was RTM’ed (released to manufacturing) all the way back in 2001, a healthy proportion of people will fail to see eye to eye with the company on this one. In this context… Windows Vista.

Vista In 2007

Even with Vista hot off the presses, XP did not give one inkling that it was going to give up the fight, with Microsoft focusing on winding XP up for good-Ending support for SP1 and soon to be SP2.

-Microsoft’s Windows Product Management vice president Mike Nash on September 27th: “with more than 60 million licenses sold as of this summer, Windows Vista is on track to be the fastest-selling operating system in Microsoft’s history.”
They had done it-sold over 20 million licences in the first month since RTM, passing 40million within the first 100days and 60 million by mid 2007. The last statistics made available to the public, dating back to the end of October, pointed to over 88

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BARCELONA, Spain — Nov. 5, 2007 — Today, during the keynote address at Microsoft TechEd Developers 2007, S. “Soma” Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft Corp., announced that Microsoft will release Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 by the end of November 2007. Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 enable developers at all levels to rapidly create connected applications that offer compelling user experiences for Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, the 2007 Microsoft Office system, mobile devices and the Web. Soma also unveiled plans to open new opportunities for Visual Studio partners, as well as to deliver new tools and resources for developers, including a first Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the Microsoft Sync Framework and new capabilities for Popfly Explorer.

“The highly social and visual nature of the Web has fundamentally changed what users expect from all applications they interact with, regardless of whether it’s on a customer-facing Web site or Windows rich client application, or a desktop business application built using Microsoft Office,” said Somasegar. “Traditionally, organizations have been hard pressed to deliver the richer, more connected applications and services they need to boost productivity, drive revenue and stay ahead of

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Microsoft has announced that support for the F# functional programming language will be fully integrated into Visual Studio. This marks a bold new commitment to facilitating functional programming on the .NET platform and could potentially help legitimize functional programming in enterprise environments. Microsoft’s promotion of F# to a fully-supported language in Visual Studio is also indicative of the extreme versatility of the .NET platform and Microsoft’s Common Language Runtime.

F# began its life as a Microsoft Research project to demonstrate the efficacy of .NET as a platform for mixing multiple distinct programming paradigms. F# is heavily inspired by the OCaml programming language, and a subset of F# and OCaml are largely compatible. F# offers developers many valuable and compelling features without sacrificing much runtime efficiency. F# supports type inference, pattern matching, high-order functions, and currying. F# also supports interactive execution, which means that F# programs can be run like scripts or inputted in an interactive top-level environment similar to the Python shell or Ruby’s IRB. F# also has full access to the .NET APIs and components written in other .NET languages.

The advantages of functional programming

Unlike imperative or procedural programming languages, in which computation is typically performed by altering

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If you are a .NET Developer, and you might found out that Vista( or Windows Server 2008) is not including the FrontPage Server Extensions for IIS7, this component which is important when hosting a ASP or ASP.NET web site.

A good news from IIS.NET, they are going to make a seperate installion package for you to install the FrontPage Server Extensions for IIS7. Althought it is still in Beta stage, you may try to install and test on it.

Microsoft and Ready to Run Software have released a beta version of the FrontPage 2002 Server Extensions (FPSE 2002) for Windows Server Code Name “Longhorn” and Windows Vista.

[Features]

This version of FPSE 2002 introduces no new functionality, and is essentially the same version that was created for Windows Server 2003 that has been updated to work on Windows Server Code Name “Longhorn” and Windows Vista.

[Benefits]

FPSE 2002 enables web hosters and developers to author their web content on servers or workstations that are running IIS 7.0 on Windows Server Code Name “Longhorn” and Windows Vista.

[Requirements]

The following role services and features are required to install FPSE 2002 on Windows Code Name “Longhorn”; if they are not already installed on your computer, they will be installed for you

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Windows XP SP3

On 8/28/07 we will also be announcing plans for Windows XP SP3 as a roll up of all the hot fixes and patches including security updates, out of band releases and hotfixes. This is a standard practice to release a service pack as a release nears end-of-life that rolls up all hot fixes and patches, for the convenience of our customers and partners. There are no new features in Windows XP SP3, with the exception of Network Access Protection, a capability in Windows Vista that is also being made available on Windows XP SP3 and will require Windows Server 2008.

When will Windows XP SP3 be available?

We are targeting 1H 2008 for the release of Windows XP SP3, though our timing will always be based on quality as a first priority.

Windows Server 2008 update:

· Windows Server 2008 is now slated to release to manufacturing in the first quarter of calendar year 2008. The joint Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 launch, scheduled for February 27,

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