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.

Last week, we announced the availability of the Facebook SDK for .NET developers. The SDK supports coding for both Silverlight and the Windows Platform (WPF, etc.). Yesterday, Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's .NET Developer Platform, took the stage for his part of the Day 2 Keynote at PDC09 where he announced Silverlight 4.

During the keynote, an out-of-browser Silverlight 4 application called SilverFace was demonstrated. SilverFace was developed using the Facebook SDK we announced last week.

SilverFace lets you do all kinds of things on Facebook directly from your Windows desktop such as update your status, upload photos, view friend’s photos and videos, and much more. This application is meant to serve as a proof point for the capabilities of Silverlight 4 in combination with the Facebook SDK and is not an actual product. You can think of this as more of a “technology showcase” and a demo of what the technology can do.

For those of you wanting to try out physical code (and is pretty cool), I’ve got something just for you.

Today, we’re making available an application for Windows 7 called Fishbowl for Facebook. This application is a sample application created by UXLabs@Microsoft that showcases the Windows Platform (when I say Windows Platform = .NET Platform) and takes advantage of key Windows 7 features.

Download: Fishbowl for Facebook Preview

Fishbowl for Facebook lets you quickly post a Status Update to Facebook, watch your Facebook News Feed, post comments, browse your friends and their photos and upload photos directly from their Windows 7 desktop. Let me take you through a few key areas of the app. I’ll start with the Windows 7 integration.

When running, Fishbowl for Facebook takes advantage of new Windows 7 features such Taskbar Previews and Jump Lists.

For example, when moving your mouse over the Fishbowl for Facebook icon on your Windows Taskbar, you get a Taskbar Preview. This allows you to quickly navigate quickly between Home (you’re News Feed), your friends list, your profile, and photos. You can also quickly go to Facebook’s homepage too.

If you right-click on the Fishbowl for Facebook, you get a Jump List that lets you see your most recent notifications. It also lets you switch to “mini-mode”.

You can upload photos to Facebook using Fishbowl for Facebook – simply by drag-and-drop!

Just put a title in, choose the album you want to add the photo to (or create a new album), and hit upload! Here I am dragging a panoramic photo I created in Windows Live Photo Gallery from my visit in September to the U.S.S. Hornet in Oakland, CA.

See the red lines under the “U.S.S.” and “SFO” text? Yeah, that’s spell check. Fishbowl for Facebook comes with spell check to help ensure you don’t accidently spell important words wrong that your friends can make fun of you for the rest of your life with. Trust me, it happens ;-)

While browsing a photo album, you can view the album in a slideshow, save photos, print photos, and zoom in and out.

And Fishbowl for Facebook supports Windows Touch too.

Ok, one last thing – when browsing your friends in Fishbowl for Facebook, you are given several ways of sorting through your friends. You can sort by name (display name or family), last Status Update, Upcoming Birthdays, or Interest Level. And you can also adjust Interest Level of individual friends by simply clicking on a friend and viewing their profile. Interest Levels let you control how much of that friend’s stuff hits your News Feed. If you have an annoying friend, just turn the Interest Level way down.

There are a lot of neat experiences you can have with Fishbowl for Facebook so give the app a spin yourself! Remember, you can download it here.

Fishbowl for Facebook will run on Windows XP and Windows Vista but requires .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 to be installed (this is not needed if you’re on Windows 7 as it’s built in). For the best experience with Fishbowl for Facebook, it is recommended you use Windows 7 to take advantage of all its features. Fishbowl for Facebook with automatically update when updates are available as well so when we make updated available, you’ll get them! But please note that Fishbowl for Facebook is meant as a sample application showing what developers can do with the Windows Platform and the Facebook SDK. This is NOT an officially supported product.

Stay tuned, Yochay from the Windows 7 for Developers Blog will be posting some behind-the-scenes geeky developer stuff shortly. For you developers out there, this will be a must-read. I can’t wait to see more applications like this for the Windows Platform.

The Windows Home Server Team is pleased to announce that Power Pack 3 will be available in all shipping languages (Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish) on November 24^th, 2009. Power Pack 3 will be made available to existing users via Windows Update. Users need to have Windows Home Server with Power Pack 2 already installed on their home server. Power Pack 3 will automatically install as part of Windows Update if Automatic Updates is enabled on the home server.

As we’ve communicated in a past post, Power Pack 3 improves the Windows Home Server experience with Windows 7 and Windows Media Center by providing new features like: backup and restore of computers running Windows 7, Windows 7 Libraries integration, enhancements for Windows Media Center, and better support for netbook computers. Power Pack 3 will enable the most optimal experience for Windows 7 users on a Windows Home Server network.

“If you've recently upgraded to Windows 7, Windows Home Server Power Pack 3 is an essential download providing enhanced integration between the two platforms and a number of cool new features. Combine library support with enhanced features for Windows Media Center, and we're really starting to see Microsoft bring together the Windows Home Server and Windows 7 client experience so that your media can be stored on your home server and enjoyed seamlessly on TV, PC and Mobile devices with little effort from the user. The bad old days of copy, paste, convert and transcode may well be behind us,” says Microsoft Most Valued Professional (MVP) Terry Walsh of We Got Served.

Microsoft MVP Alex Kuretz of MediaSmartServer.net says “Windows Home Server Power Pack 3 makes storing and accessing your media easier by bringing all the content contained on your Home Server smoothly into your Windows 7 libraries. TV Archive is also a very nice feature that has allowed me to record TV shows and move them to my Home Server to be watched at a later time.”

Here are some details on what’s new:

Windows 7 Libraries integration

When you install the Windows Home Server Connector and log on a computer running Windows 7, you can access the Windows Home Server shared folders from the Windows 7 libraries.

Windows 7 Action Center backup warning suppression

After you install the Windows Home Server Connector to enable the home server backup for your computer running Windows 7, you can suppress the Action Center warning reminding you that Windows Backup has not been set up.

Windows 7 power settings

You can configure your computer running Windows 7 to wake up at a scheduled backup time and then go back to sleep after the backup finishes.

? Console support for Windows 7

Windows 7 is properly displayed as the operating system shown in the Computers & Backup tab.

Windows Search

Windows Search 4 is included to improve query search times, indexing times, and reliability. Extended Remote Discovery increases the efficiency of searching across all your libraries running Windows Search 4. Files encrypted with EFS are now supported.

TV archive

Windows Home Server can automatically archive recorded TV by moving your recordings from a Windows Media Center computer to your home server in the format of your choice. This enables playback in the correct format for your home computers and/or portable devices.

Console view

You can view information about your home server’s storage space, hard drives, backup status, and more from Windows Media Center.

Complete details are available in the Power Pack 3 Release Documentation.

We want to thank our community for all of their testing and feedback over these past months with the Power Pack 3 Beta. You validated that Power Pack 3 was ready for release. We like to think that we are building this product together – as a passionate community.

- The Windows Home Server Team

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.

This holiday, Saks Fifth Avenue and Windows 7 are working together to bring the magic of the season to life. For the first time, the legendary Saks Fifth Avenue’s holiday windows will be powered by Windows 7. Additionally, Saks customers will have the opportunity to interact with the newly launched Windows 7 in store through PC lounges.

While this may seem an unusual pairing, the best holiday traditions are the simple ones. Windows and Saks are bringing a 60 year holiday tradition to life and celebrating the simple things that make this time of year special, spending time with family, connecting with friends and sharing good cheer. In addition, fashion and technology are hot items this holiday season and consumers today want their personal technology, like their fashion, to be as unique as they are. Just as Saks Fifth Avenue enables customers to find their personal style, Windows 7 gives customers the ability to customize their PC experience.

Saks’ holiday windows have always been about telling a heart-warming story. Windows 7 will help tell this year’s story, Twinkle, Twinkle Little Flake, with greater detail and excitement, as customers will find holiday windows enhanced through technology. Together, the two companies will share holiday cheer while entertaining New Yorkers and tourists alike in a new and captivating way. The Center 6 windows on 5th Avenue will showcase several of the book’s vibrant scenes and bring Twinkle’s world to life before shoppers’ very eyes.

In the store, customers will experience Windows 7 PCs first hand and ask Microsoft experts questions about both the hardware and software featured. 

Until now there were a couple of ways to determine if your applications were compatible with Windows 7 – you can test everything, look them up one-by-one in the Windows Compatibility Center, or inventory your production machines using the Application Compatibility Toolkit 5.5 and synchronize your inventory with hosted compatibility data from Microsoft and ISVs. For about a year, we’ve been posting regular updates to the Windows Vista Application Compatibility List for IT pros and even though compatibility between Windows Vista and Windows 7 is pretty high, there has still been huge demand for a Windows 7-specific list. If you already have a list or inventory of the applications you want to move forward in a Windows 7 deployment, the new Windows 7 Application Compatibility List for IT Professionals lets you download a spreadsheet of known vendor-supported applications so that you can query the list against your pre-existing application inventory. This list represents a sample of the total ecosystem focusing on top products as defined by customers and deployments with a public statement of support provided by the vendor.

As you can see, there is compatibility status listed for both 32- and 64-bit versions of Windows 7, plus each application’s major and minor version numbers are listed to help normalize your data queries. Since October (yes, last month) we have already collected more than 5500 applications and the list is growing every day. If you are working through a list of hundreds or thousands of applications, this list will help you validate your applications more quickly. We will be updating this list regularly, so keep checking back to avoid any unnecessary testing. Click here to download the spreadsheet and get started.

If you are in the process of testing in-house developed applications, download the Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) and use its in-box evaluators and test tools. Although we released ACT 5.5 back in April coinciding with Windows 7’s RC release, there were no changes needed to support the RTM version of Windows 7. Even though you will see an occasional “RC” in ACT’s reports, ACT 5.5 is the RTM-supporting version.

To access these and other application compatibility resources, check out the Springboard Application Compatibility Zone where we host the latest application compatibility content for Windows 7.

Jeremy Chapman
Windows Deployment