Update: I’ll be bringing these same discussions to Indianapolis on May 4th, Chicago on May 5th and Downers Grove, IL on May 20th. To register for these events or to see if MSDN Unleashed is coming to a city near you, visit http://msdnevents.com/unleashed.
For the Spring tour of the MSDN Unleashed events, we are focusing our discussion around Internet Explorer 8 and Windows 7.
In the first session, we discussed the story around the new Internet Explorer 8 rendering engine and the choices that were made to make IE8 a standards-compliant browser. Web authors, developers and administrators need to be aware of these choices and how they may impact your website. Head on over to the Internet Explorer Compatibility site for more details. We continued our IE8 developer overview with a look into three features that are going to allow web applications to extend their impact beyond their own web address. These include Web Slices, Accelerators and Visual Search. We also took a look at a great enhancement for developers (and a much needed one), the Developer Tools.
Resources for Internet Explorer developers:
Our second session covered what developers need to know for Windows 7. Unfortunately, we didn’t have nearly enough time to dive into all of the details. Watch for future sessions on Windows 7 development where we will dive into the particulars.
The session started off by me stressing the point that Windows Vista is a viable option for Windows 7 development. Microsoft made a lot of architectural changes in Windows Vista. These changes were necessary to make Windows the most secure and trustworthy platform that also performs to user’s expectations. Windows 7 builds off of these changes and carries the platform forward.
Windows 7 brings Multi-touch computing to the forefront as a first-class citizen. Developers will have opportunities to extend their application user-interface paradigms into a whole new direction. The Windows 7 SDK provides the API’s to bring touch to your applications. Moving forward, the managed code developers will get touch API’s in WPF 4.
There are a number of new enhancements to the Windows 7 UI that developers can take advantage of. One of the biggest changes are the enhancements to the new Windows 7 Taskbar. The new Taskbar brings a clean and lightweight implementation that includes some great features such as Jump Lists, Thumbnails, and Icon overlays that provide information such as notifications and progress. You can find more resources on developing for the taskbar over on the Windows 7 Taskbar Developer Resource site.
We carried the discussion further in highlighting the point on how the Ribbon control born out of the Office 2007 products was to become a first-class control in Windows 7. As well as the new Explorer enhancements with items such as Federated Search and Libraries.
A few of the items we didn’t have time to touch on was how Windows 7 is going to include Web Service API’s directly in the OS to make communicating with Web Services a native part of the OS. Some other interesting new features include the new Sensors & Location platform. This provides the ability to build location-awareness into your applications. Think of the possibilities!
Resources for Windows 7 developers:
Talks
I will be speaking at the upcoming 