In late February, the Windows Engineering Team offered a little sneak peek at upcoming changes with the Windows 7 RC based off on the amazing amount of feedback we’ve received (and continue to receive) from the Windows 7 Beta. Today they are offering another peek at some more changes coming with the Windows 7 RC. These 2 blog posts represent only some of the changes coming for the Windows 7 RC and as Steven notes in his intro – this is not an exhaustive list.

Hi, Mike Nash here. I had the opportunity to deliver the Windows 7 keynote yesterday at the annual Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Global Summit here in Seattle. Every year we have the privilege of hosting over 1,400 members from our MVP community in a multi-day summit where we do deep drill downs on our products and get very direct feedback from them. This year the product and engineering groups hosted 700 sessions across 70 Microsoft technology areas, presenting over 140 sessions focused on Windows 7, IE8 and Windows Live expertise areas.

MVPs are independent technical experts and early adopters of Microsoft technologies who voluntarily share their knowledge and experiences in offline and online technical communities to help other technology users to solve problems, discover new capabilities and get the most from their technology investments.

Our MVP community as a whole, represents more than 90 countries, speaks 30 different languages, and covers more than 85 Microsoft technologies.

We have thousands of MVPs around the world, with hundreds who are specifically focused on the Windows Desktop Experience, Windows System and Performance, Internet Explorer, Digital Media, Media Center, Printing and Imaging, Tablet PC and more. We rely on them heavily to be our critics and infuse our conscience with how customers are experiencing the Windows client operating system while sharing insights into how we can continue to improve our products and most importantly the customer experience.

Our MVPs have been very engaged in testing and reviewing the Windows 7 Beta, since our first pre-release build was made available at PDC and our feature complete beta that was released at CES in January. MVPs have provided support by contributing to over 40,000 posts on the Windows 7 Beta Forum where technical enthusiasts can find answers to questions with MVP subject experts contributing to an 85+% answer rate during the beta timeframe. More importantly, MVPs are the one group that has an official feedback channel to file their bugs and input feedback directly to the product and engineering teams.

To date, our MVP community has provided great feedback from their voice of the customer perspective to help us deliver on the next milestone of Windows 7.

I want to say THANK YOU to ALL our MVPs for their hard work in helping us to fine tune Windows 7 and put the final fit and finish on the product as we march to our next milestone of a release candidate.

In closing, we had a bit of fun at the MVP Summit producing an “I’m a PC” MVP video with the keynote audience with myself and Steve Ballmer. Have a look.

MVP "I'm a PC" Video

- Mike

Our MDOP customers have told us that they want to see Windows 7 Support for Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) so that they can move ahead with their application testing for enterprise deployments of Windows 7 early on. We heard you loud and clear. Today we are announcing the availability of App-V 4.5 CU1 with support for the Windows 7 Beta.

All subscribers of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) can head on over to Microsoft Connect and register to download the update. This release will have access to the new technology for free as part of their current licenses.

For more information, see this blog post over on the MDOP Blog which also includes roadmap information around App-V 4.6.

MDOP is part of the Windows Optimized Desktop. A few weeks ago, Gavriella Schuster highlighted the value of the Windows Optimized Desktop for businesses and announced specifics for the Windows 7 Enterprise SKU, which is an Optimized Desktop offering. For further guidance of Windows Deployments in your environment, see Gavriella’s blog post on the Windows for your Business Blog here.

Speaking of Virtualization, have you seen Microsoft’s brand new website on Microsoft.com? Check it out.

I wanted to take a brief moment and highlight a post by Windows Engineering Team today discussing just some of the more visible changes coming with the Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) based directly off feedback from *you*. You should definitely give the post a read if you haven’t already.

Yesterday, Steven Sinofsky posted about the amazing amount of feedback we’ve received since the release of the Windows 7 Beta and how the Windows Engineering Team is digesting that feedback to raise the level of quality of Windows 7.

Microsoft released a comprehensive update for Windows 7 Beta Tuesday aimed at plugging numerous compatibility and reliability holes in Internet Explorer 8.
The comprehensive update patches an array of stability problems that include crashes, hangs and memory issues on Windows 7 Beta caused by IE as well as third-party components such as Adobe Flash, Adobe Acrobat and others. The patch also fixes glitches in PDF file printing and includes a change that improves cookie management.

Microsoft researchers said that the update was prompted by user feedback, which brought attention to existing problems with IE8 and other applications running on Windows 7.

"We found that approximately 10 percent of customers who had downloaded the Windows 7 Beta had experienced some type of reliability problem in IE," said Herman Ng, Microsoft program manager, in an IE blog post. "We also found that a small number of users were experiencing crashes on a more regular basis and that about 1.5 percent of all Internet Explorer sessions had encountered a crash."

Altogether, about 50 percent reported reliability problems stemmed from 17 unique issues. Ng said that IE was responsible for about 40 percent of the reliability problems, while 60 percent were caused by third-party components.

Ng said that Microsoft worked with its third-party partners to address many of the issues, either by working around the problem inside IE or preventing the third-party application from loading.

"Because users generally have lots of toolbars and extensions installed, it's common to see this many third-party components at the top of our failure curve," Ng said.

The newly released update is available via Windows Update, and also can be downloaded via Microsoft Update.

A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to visit the Windows Media Center Team here at Microsoft and shoot some videos of the new features that are currently in the Windows 7 Beta. I’m a fairly heavy user of Windows Media Center and know many of our readers are too. This post highlights many of the the changes and new features that people can enjoy for themselves as they try out the Windows 7 Beta.

In the first of several videos I shot, Windows Media Center Program Manager Noah Spitzer-Williams takes us through the new Pictures + Videos features in Windows Media Center.

Windows Media Center Picture and Videos Features in the Windows 7 Beta

In the above video, Noah demos the following new Windows Media Center features and changes in Windows 7 (in the order of appearance in the video) to the Pictures + Videos experience:

• Changes to the way videos are displayed in Video Library to include Thumbnails AND Names for each video.
• Support for H.264 Video - no 3rd party codecs are required to play H.264 content.
• Video Play-All Option (think of it as a “Video Slide Show”) with ability to navigate between each video.
• Developers can take advantage of the new Import API for Windows Portable Devices. The new API enables photos AND videos from portable devices to be imported directly within Windows Media Center.
• Ability to create Slide Shows (new Slide Show pivot) with your pictures and can contain pictures or music or both.
• New On-screen Keyboard (Touch-enabled).
• Improved Rating Controls within Windows Media Center UI.
• New Ratings Pivot for quick access to your favorite content.
• Play Favorites feature with new Slide Show style.
• Auto Slide Show feature acts as a screensaver for Windows Media Center.

You may have caught PowerPlaylist in the Windows Media Center menu in the video. PowerPlaylist is an application originally released by the Windows Media Center Team for Windows Vista and can be downloaded here via CodePlex. The Windows Media Center Team is revising PowerPlaylist for Windows 7 and an early copy was installed on the PC running the Windows 7 Beta in the video. They plan to release an updated version to CodePlex soon. I’ll be covering that soon as well.

Expect more videos to follow shortly!