During Wednesday’s keynote, Brian Goldfarb demoed an amazing Silverlight 4 client for Facebook. Beyond its amazing looks, this Silverlight 4 demo provides a full and complete desktop client application for Windows (and Mac). SilverFace is built on top of Silverlight 4 – also announced during the keynote. If you want a cool Facebook client application to work on from your Windows desktop, you should take a look at the Fishbowl for Facebook Preview. Fishbowl is a great WPF application that you can install and enjoy as a user, and at the same time it is a great code sample for developers whom are looking to write WPF applications that use Windows 7 features.  If you are interested, you can download the source code for Fishbowl.

In today's world, the client’s experience is more important than ever before. Your application doesn’t just have to be fun and interesting; it has to be good looking, polished, and functional, providing a “natural” user experience that just works. As a developer, you need to push the envelope and use any available technical tool that the OS provides or any other available means (if installed on mobile devices) to provide a superior user experience, or users will switch to the next guy. In such a competitive scenario, using the Windows 7 Taskbar to shave a few seconds from day-to-day tasks looks like a very obvious choice.

Both Silverlight 4 demo and Fishbowl applications each provide a great UX and enhance user productivity. Scott Guthrie also announced the Facebook SDK for managed code applications that combines the latest in Web and Client platform innovations with leading Social technologies (services) to help developers plug into Facebook. But, beside the new Facebook SDK and beside the great looks, the Fishbowl application is a great WPF (3.5) example that demonstrates how to write applications that produce amazing experiences on Windows 7.

As a WPF application, Fishbowl runs on multiple Windows versions, including Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7, and it integrates with the Windows 7 Taskbar and Multitouch. One of the main ideas behind the Taskbar is to provide users with quick and easy access to their content and help them accomplish tasks and navigate between windows easier and with more confidence. For example, JumpList provides a great tool for surfacing common work items and tasks. If you have a task that you perform once or twice a day, taking two or three clicks to perform the task is not that bad. However, if you have a task that you perform 10, 20, or even 30 more times, using JumpList tasks or items in the recent category list goes a long way. Facebook users often check their wall, write notifications and messages, view friends' pictures, and so on. Therefore, in some scenarios, the Taskbar JumpList tasks, icon notification, thumbnail buttons, and other functionality become major tools in the application.

Fishbowl uses the taskbar to provide a quick, easy, and seamless integration with Facebook functionality directly from your Taskbar. Let’s review some of the user functionality before jumping into code behind.

The Fishbowl taskbar offers a few tasks even before you start your application. You can go to Facebook.com, or you can actually “jump” directly and see your wall, friend's picture, and more, as the following image shows. One of the amazing things in Fishbowl for Facebook is that it changes it functionality between the different modes of the application. Being able to use the taskbar differently for

different scenarios provides an amazing user experience in heavily used application like Fishbowl.

When Fishbowl runs in normal mode, the Taskbar JumpList reflects items and tasks that you can actually perform in the context of a running application, like viewing the last few notifications and messages that you received without opening the application, as shown by the following image.

If you hover with the mouse above the Fishbowl control, you see the thumbnail preview provided by Windows 7 taskbar. However, Fishbowl uses the thumbnail button again allowing you to both view a preview of the application and act immediately upon the thumbnail preview as shown in the following image.

If you hover with the mouse above the Fishbowl control, you see the thumbnail preview provided by Windows 7 taskbar. However, Fishbowl uses the thumbnail button again allowing you to both view a preview of the application and act immediately upon the thumbnail preview as shown in the following image.

(And thank you Raman for writing so many PDC tweets J)

Fishbowl also has a mini-mode operation mode. This mode shows just one message in a small window. As you can see in the following image, a small arrow allows you to switch between messages. When you hover over Fishbowl taskbar icon, you can see the preview but you can also control the message, again using the taskbar thumbnail preview.

 

Besides great Taskbar integration, Fishbowl offers a great Multitouch experience, allowing you to scroll between messages using your finger to touch the touch screen. It is a little hard to illustrate Multitouch with screen capture so you will have to trust me on this one.

We've covered most of the Fishbowl features unique to Windows 7, and in the next post I will dive into the API that enabled these Taskbar and Multitouch features. If you are interested, you can download the source code for Fishbowl.

Today is Day 2 of PDC09, and attendees were given a nice “treat.” During this morning’s keynote, Windows and Windows Live Division President Steven Sinofsky took the stage and announced that all attendees* of this year’s PDC will be given an Acer Aspire 1420P Convertible Tablet PC. This is being done to show our gratitude for the support we received by PDC attendees in the development process of Windows 7. This PC enables developers to leverage many of the unique Windows 7 capabilities including multitouch – which I will talk about further down in this post.

This laptop promotion is the result of a collaborative effort with Acer, whom we worked closely with to have these laptops ready for PDC. This PC is not yet available in the US (Acer has not yet announced pricing and availability for this PC) so that makes this “PDC Edition” of the laptop exclusive to PDC attendees.

 

The Aspire 1420P PDC Edition comes with the following specs:

• Windows 7 Ultimate x64
• Processor: Intel Celeron CPU SU2300 @ 1.2GHz
• Memory: 2GB (Supports up to 8GB)
• Display: 11.6” Widescreen |1366x768 Resolution
• Graphics: Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 4500MHD
• Network: 10/100/1000 Ethernet | Intel Wi-Fi Link 1000 802.11b/g/Draft-N
• Mobile Broadband: 3G
• Storage: 250GB

For a more complete and detailed list of specs, click here.

The Aspire 1420P comes with 3 USB ports, 1 HDMI port for connecting to HDTVs and monitors, a VGA port, Ethernet port, and a headphone and microphone jack. The laptop features a unique design with a metallic textured design just above the keyboard and a metal hinge for converting the laptop into Tablet mode. Its design is essentially a small laptop with Tablet PC features. It’s slim, light, and has a small footprint – making it easy to carry around. This laptop features a CTRL+ALT+DEL button and a Flip 3D button. Also, the Aspire 1420P uses the Windows 7 Sensor and Location Platform to adjust the screen depending on which way you hold the PC (in Tablet mode). For example: if you’re holding it a landscape position, the screen will display in landscape for you. Vice versa if you hold it in a portrait position.

   

We worked with Acer to image the laptops with some great software – including the beta release of Office 2010.

• Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 Beta
• Microsoft Touch Pack for Windows 7
• Windows Live Essentials
• Windows Virtual PC with Windows XP Mode
• Microsoft Security Essentials
• Corel Paint it! touch

Because the Aspire 1420P supports Windows Touch, we’ve included the Microsoft Touch Pack for Windows 7 as well as Corel Paint it! touch.

Corel Paint it! touch allows you to use your fingers to draw and paint. You can also turn your photos into paintings too.

One application I’ve written about recently is Amazon’s Kindle for PC. Amazon has released Kindle for PC and it works great on this laptop. You can download the beta of Kindle for PC today here. You can use multitouch gestures to move from page to page on the Kindle book you are reading. You can also zoom in and out with ease. For more on the Kindle for PC app, check out my demo video here on this post. In Tablet mode, reading books with Kindle for PC is very nice.

The Aspire 1420P also sports Mobile Broadband. With Windows 7, using Mobile Broadband is easier than ever before. Windows 7 will automatically detect if a Mobile Broadband connection is available (after inserting your SIM card).

You can choose to connect to the Mobile Broadband connection where you will be required enter subscription details from your mobile carrier. No need to mess with 3^rd party Mobile Broadband connection utilities.

Not only can you use multitouch with the Aspire 1420P, you can also use it as a Tablet. The Aspire 1420P is perfect for writing down notes using Microsoft OneNote 2010 (my favorite Office app).

Overall, this PC will be great for all the developers attending PDC to experience many of Windows 7’s new features and to be able to develop with those features in mind.

* This promotion is for full-conference attendees who are onsite at PDC. It is not available to Microsoft attendees, members of the media, government employees, staff, speakers, crew, volunteers, day pass attendees, guests, or Workshop-only attendees.

During this morning’s keynote at PDC09 – Seesmic Founder Loic Le Meur joined Ray Ozzie on stage to make a very important announcement regarding the future of Seesmic. Seesmic focuses on bringing many of your favorite social networking services like Twitter and Facebook together into a single application so you don’t have to bounce between those services. They are best known for their Abobe AIR Twitter and Facebook app called Seesmic Desktop today.

While on stage with Ray, Loic announced the launch of Seesmic for Windows.

With the vast majority of Seesmic users coming from PCs running Windows, the move to the Windows Platform made sense. By moving development to focus primarily on the Windows Platform, it will allow Seesmic to focus on providing the best user experience to the majority of its users. This includes addressing issues with performance. Loic also announced that Seesmic for Windows will allow developer to write plug-ins that can run securely within the application.

As part of today’s announcement, Seesmic is releasing a Preview release of Seesmic for Windows. Seesmic for Windows is Seesmic’s brand new desktop client developed on the Windows Platform. They have been working aggressively to have this Preview release ready for you today.

Seesmic for Windows provides an excellent way to manage tweeting on Twitter. It helps you stay on top of what your friends are tweeting and what the latest trends on Twitter are.

Seesmic for Windows provides a “tabbed” UI (left-side of the app) that lets you filter your Twitter “stream” of tweets. You can filter by account as Seesmic for Windows supports having multiple Twitter accounts signed in, searches and Twitter’s latest new feature called lists. Everything can be filtered into specific columns. You can drag the columns into whatever position you like and scroll right to left to view your columns. And the new posting bar in Seesmic for Windows makes it easy to switch from one account to multiple accounts.

I’ve had the pleasure of using Seesmic for Windows for the last few weeks now and it works great! I’m currently managing 2 Twitter accounts, a few lists and use the Twitter Search capabilities track tweets on Windows 7, Windows Live, and more. I am very excited about what’s to come for Seesmic for Windows. You can expect to see Seesmic for Windows take advantage of the Windows Taskbar enhancements in Windows 7 and when Twitter adds support for dynamic location, it will use Windows 7’s Location and Sensor Platform!

Seesmic for Windows was released to all Team Seesmic members during the keynote this morning. If you are a Team Seesmic member, you should have an email from Loic in your inbox with a link to download Seesmic for Windows. If you’re not a Team Seesmic member, don’t worry. Join Team Seesmic to download the Seesmic for Windows Preview and receive the latest and greatest builds. You can also head on over to Seesmic.com right now and sign-up to receive Seesmic for Windows when it becomes available as well. Give Seesmic for Windows a spin and be sure to follow @windowsblog and @mswindows!

Loic also demonstrated Seesmic ported over into Silverlight and running as a Silverlight-based app. Seesmic is also excited about the possibilities Silverlight will provide in regards to eventually creating a cross platform application.

For more on today’s announcements from Day 1 of PDC09, click here. 

UPDATE: For more information on Seesmic’s announcements today including Seesmic for Windows, check out Loic Le Meur’s blog post!

Here we are at the LA Convention Center, attending the FREE Windows 7 Seminar: Boot Camp. We managed to “sell out” (just a reminder-- it is free) this event, getting more than 1200 registrations. This day is all about learning what’s new in the Windows 7 kernel, how developers can take advantage of these feature, and then learn how to take advantage of some “user mode” features like multitouch, taskbar, sensor and location, and others.

Today started with Mark Russinovich, Technical Fellow and the man behind SysInternals and many of the improvements in Windows 7, describing some of the changes made to the Windows 7 kernel. Immediately after Mark, Arun Kishan, a Principal Architect for the process management components, described his work around the thread and process allocation that frees the kernel from its thread dispatcher locks and gives Windows 7 the ability to scale seamlessly to 256 cores. Then Landy Wang, a Distinguished Engineer in the Kernel team, described changes made in Windows 7 memory management, mainly focusing on memory Working Set and memory trimming.

After lunch, Jaime started his run, giving some insight and very useful tips about using the Taskbar, from understanding the difference between Application ID and Program ID to the effective use of custom previews. Jaime has only 60 minutes, but I am sure his tips for working with the Taskbar will prove very useful. For example:

• Tip1 – when writing your own jump list item or link, make sure you remember what items you wrote, because you can’t just “read” the jump list items
• Tip2 – if you decide to invest in cutom switcher and provide your own thumbnail preview and Aero Peak make sure you “save the state” of your application and images as DWM will not always perform for you.

I'll be up next, explaining Windows 7 libraries in depth, with a focus on useful tips for programming Windows 7 libraries, and specifically how to stay in sync with library updates. We have already had plenty of Windows 7 libraries posts - Windows 7 Programming Guide – Libraries, so I am not going into great detail. However, I do want to hand out the presentations and code samples used. All my demos as well as Jaime’s are part of the Windows 7 Training kit.

Right after our discussion about libraries, we will take a deep dive into the Windows 7 Sensor and Location platform. I just LOVE the endless amount of innovation and opportunity developers have generated while using this platform. After the Windows 7 launch on October 22^nd, we saw a large number of laptop models coming out with built-in sensors. Developers will most probably use these to create truly adaptive applications that adjust their functionality and UI based on sensor input. 

After our Sensor and Location Platform discussion, it will be Michael Oneppo's turn to explain the changes in the Windows 7 graphics stack. Michael's presentation is very interesting, as it describes some of the DirectX API that was down ported to Windows 7 as a result of the Platform Update for Windows Vista and the Platform Update for Windows Server 2008. For example, did you know that the Microsoft Direct3D API DirectCompute feature allows your applications to use a new pipeline stage in the GPU, the compute shader stage, to implement highly data-parallel algorithms with unmatched speed and performance? This means that now you can use GPU power for parallel programming, freeing your CPU to do other things. It is amazing how powerful these GPUs have become; allowing them remain idle would be a huge waste of resources. If you want to learn more, you can always view Chas Boyd PDC session – DirectX11 DirectCompute.

To close the learning part of the day, Jaime Rodriguez takes us through a quick tour of Windows 7 multitouch. Jaime is taking his usual practical teaching approach of focusing on a few tips and tricks that will make it easier for you to start using multitouch.

The Professional Developers Conference (PDC) is the one event that all developers who use any Microsoft technologies must attend at least once in their professional careers. It’s the flagship event for developers, offering the most comprehensive, future-looking, technically deep, densely-packed set of sessions from Microsoft speakers you can find anywhere. This year’s PDC is no exception and you can expect it to be a very exciting event.

My first PDC was PDC08, held last November at the LA Convention Center. As one of the people at Microsoft who work on Windows 7, I was fortunate enough to be in the loop regarding Windows 7 @ PDC08, and was able to contribute (even if only in a small way) to one of the keynote. During the Day 2 keynote,

Steven Sinofsky presented Windows 7 to the world and for the first time people outside of Microsoft saw the new Taskbar, the Windows Ribbon, and witnessed a live multitouch demo. Attendees received a 160G hard drive (makes you wonder what they'll get this year…) with Windows 7 build 6800 (does anyone remember this build number?). The Windows team presented a lot of its technologies in a series of impressive sessions. And since then, through the different versions of Windows--Beta, RC, and RTM--we continued to push new content to help developers ramp up and get ready for Windows 7.

Windows 7 will become “Generally Available” (GA) to the public on October 22^nd, exactly two weeks from today, and this year’s PDC takes place right after Windows 7 GA. With the pre-release veil of secrecy lifted, during this year's PDC we can dive deep (very deep) into Windows 7 to extend our understanding of how Windows 7 works and, even more importantly, how developers can take advantage of all the great new improvements and features Windows 7 has to offer.

To start with, on the day before PDC09 starts, there is a FREE Windows 7 (seminar) Boot Camp led by top Microsoft Windows experts like Mark Russinovich, Landy Wang, and Arun Kishan. Then, during the PDC proper, we’ll have several deep-dive Windows 7 sessions.

So here is the first set of Windows 7 sessions that we are announcing:

This first one is probably my favorite topic (I am a geek, what can I say). What could be more important than performance, especially as it relates to Windows 7 and applications running on Windows 7? This has to be a MUST Attend session for any developer who writes any software (native or .NET) for Windows (and not just Windows 7) – this is truly a unique opportunity.

Optimizing for Performance with the Windows Performance Toolkit

The Windows team uses the Windows Performance Toolkit (WPT) to optimize the Windows OS. Come and see how the Windows Performance team used the WPT throughout the Windows 7 development cycle to optimize for customer scenarios and how you can leverage many of its features and capabilities to help you build faster applications on Windows. This session will present case studies that demonstrate how you can use the toolkit to pinpoint areas for improvement in your application and provide you with some best practices to follow in order to create applications with optimum performance.

The next two sessions are also personal favorites (you can’t blame me for loving Windows 7), as I think these technologies represent new levels of user interaction and adaptive user interfaces:

Building Sensor- and Location-aware Applications with Windows 7 and .NET

How many times have you thought to yourself, “My application would be so much better if it knew where the user was?” With Windows 7 and.NET Framework 4.0, you now have the tools at your fingertips to location-enable your applications. Based on the new Location platform for Windows 7, the location API in .NET Framework 4.0 provides a single, consistent API to get you your latitude and longitude regardless of the underlying technology that acquired it—allowing you to focus on creating exciting, differentiated location-aware applications.

Windows Touch Deep Dive

Windows provides applications with a default experience for gestures and touch interaction. This provides applications that you want to go beyond that basic experience with a powerful platform to build upon. This session is targeted at developers interested in building touch-optimized experiences. We’ll look closely at some of the more powerful portions of the Touch platform, like manipulation and inertia processors, as well as cover real-world problems that developers have encountered and overcome. Come help build the next generation of user experiences!

Another highly recommended session is the Windows Ribbon session. Before you dismiss the Ribbon, I suggest you take a second look and read between the lines of the Windows Ribbon native API. There is a lot of very interesting software architecture in the current API that provides a glimpse into tomorrow’s “commanding framework.”

Windows Ribbon Technical Deep Dive

This talk will cover some of the more subtle and complex aspects of ribbon implementation, like designing a great gallery (a critical task for any ribbon), adding an outspace MRU, etc. We will draw from specific experiences with Windows Live and other partners and spread the learning that those teams amassed as Windows Ribbon guinea pigs.

A lot has been said about the update to the Windows 7 graphics stack. This stack plays a major role in the performance improvements Windows 7 offers. You, as a developer, can tap into that user experience and start enjoying a rich and modern graphic framework that pushes GPUs to their limits.

Modern 3D Graphics Using Windows 7 & Direct3D 11 Hardware

Dig deep into the capabilities of Direct3D 11 and Windows 7to gain practical knowledge that will help you push graphics to the limit. Learn about the new tessellation stage in Direct3D 11, which enables an unprecedented level of rendering quality by dynamically generating geometry on the GPU. In addition, see how the multi-core improvements in the Direct3D 11 runtime can help you scale your application to take full advantage of all of the cores on a machine. Finally, take a peek at the power of DirectCompute (the hardware-accelerated general purpose computing technology) in a graphics application context.

Advanced Graphics Functionality Using DirectX

The number of PC configurations is exploding. With both netbooks and high-end desktop systems using the latest in graphics hardware, creating an application that can target all of these systems is getting harder every year. Join us as we explore the many options available in Windows 7 to facilitate graphics development across all kinds of hardware configurations, from low-end integrated GPUs to top of the line discrete GPUs. Learn about Direct3D 10 Level 9, which enables Direct3D 10 applications to run on pretty much every computer in the market today. Check out WARP, our new software rasterizer that lets your application use high-quality graphics even when there’s no graphics card. Finally, learn about Direct2D, DirectWrite, WIC, and the interoperability of Windows 7 technologies for making slick, high-quality graphics for your applications of the future.

The last session for today’s post, but most certainly not the least, is about the Windows API Code Pack for the Microsoft .NET framework. This is a framework that I have a personal interest in and I often blog about. With Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4, .NET developers have an easier life. Nonetheless, there are still a great number of valuable Windows APIs that are NOT in the framework. This Open Source library provides a good intermediate solution.

Developing with the Windows API Code Pack for .NET Framework

The Windows API Code Pack for Microsoft .NET Framework provides a source code library that you can use to access some new Windows 7 features (and some existing features of older versions of the Windows operating system) from managed code. These Windows features are not available to developers today in the .NET Framework. This session will show you how to access features like taskbar integration, JumpLists, libraries, the sensor platform, Direct2D, and more.

Back in July, Yochay blogged about the Code7 Contest on the Windows 7 for Developers Blog. The Code7 Contest is a worldwide contest recognizing developers building innovative and really cool applications for Windows 7. I wanted to give a quick update on the contest. We are now 5 days away from the close of the Code7 Contest.  Developers, hobbyists and students (age 18+), can upload their videos by October 10th to compete for prizes up to $17,777 at www.code7contest.com.

We’ve had over 4,000 registrants submit applications! We offer kits/training materials available to all registrants to help them build a great and creative Windows 7 application. We are racing toward the submission deadline of October 10th so if you’d like to compete, I strongly recommend you upload your video as soon as possible.

To enter, build an original, consumer-oriented client application that runs natively on Windows 7 (either MFC, Win32, WPF or Winforms) and addresses one or more of the following category topics:

• Simplify My Life
• More Media, More Places
• Gaming
• Work From Anywhere
• Safeguard Your Work
• Applications for a Better Tomorrow

If you want some ideas, you can check out current submissions uploaded by other contestants on the Code7 Gallery page here.

Submissions for the Code7 Contest end October 10th so whether you are a novice or expert – don’t wait until the last minute! Upload your video today at www.code7contest.com.