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There's been a lot that's come out regarding the next version of Windows, code-named Windows 7. Let me try to summarize what I've seen...
When it Will Release
First, let me touch on the release date, since that's been heavily debated. The initial speculation was that Windows 7 would be released in 2010. Later, rumors of a 2009 release cropped up. It wasn't too long until Microsoft released comments stating that Windows 7 would take three years to develop. Speculation from the field translated this to 2011 release. Of course, that was coupled with some doubt. As if that wasn't enough, Bill Gates recently stated that the team is targeting first quarter 2010. I'm sure the Windows team is slapping their heads wondering why he shared this, but it's too late, now. I believe the team has been purposefully quiet about the release for two reasons: (1) to ensure the release was on time; and, (2) to lessen the impact on Vista sales. I don't blame them. If you ask me, I think we'll be looking at an early 2010 release with hopes that it'll be ready in 2009. Of course, I have nothing to back that up, so it's merely a blind prediction.
How it Will Release
Microsoft has had a vision of releasing components of Windows independently for the past 6+ years. This was mainly related to the server operating system, but it's still a great feature for the client. With the software+services push, some are speculating there will be a piece-meal release methodology. I don't expect us to see this with Windows 7, but it's coming. There have also been rumors of subscriptions, which is another area Microsoft has been interested in for years. In my mind, this is more of an issue with society, than Microsoft. If the community would grasp the concept, Microsoft would definitely go there. I don't know if we'll see that in the next release or not, but it's another thing I see coming eventually.
What it Will Include
A while back, there were some hints to what was going to be included in Windows 7, but it now lookse the release is picking up a new set of pillars focused on design and usability: specialized for laptops, designed for services, personalized computing, optimized for entertainment, and engineered for ease of ownership.Taking it all in, the core concepts seem to be around ease of use, connected computing, and security -- pretty much taking the next step after Vista. I see this being evolutionary, as opposed to the revolutionary version of Windows I hoped this was going to be. I guess I can hold onto those hopes for the next release.
With an increasingly mobile workforce and consumer population, tuning the OS for laptops is going to be a big win. With this, they'll be looking at data security, responsiveness, touch/tablet interfaces, wireless connectivity, "on demand" access to all your information, and power management. Most of these are pretty obvious. The only one I had to take a second look at was "on demand" access. This is basically about either storing your information in the cloud or ensuring access to it, no matter where it may live. Windows Live is how we're going to get there. This pretty much says that Windows 7 will definitely have some Windows Live integration. I can already see the EU beckoning for "justice."
With the "on demand" component of the last pillar, we have a good transition into the second, designed for services. This one's obvious as well. Windows will focus on remaining up-to-date (as in with patches), worry-free upgrades, Windows online , help and community, family-friendly web experience, gadgets, and in-box application improvements. We already have most of what's here. I think the pillar is mostly about providing a more integrated experience. I am curious how Microsoft plans to achieve "worry-free upgrades." That's going a long way. Apple has that today, so it's not entirely out of the question, but I think Apple gets it thru customer confidence, not by technical prowess. Lastly, I'm interested in the application improvements. I've been using custom apps like Notepad2 and Paint.NET for a while now and it'd be nice to have something better than what was delivered in Windows 95 built-in. I heard about upgrades to these apps last year, but haven't seen what's come of that. The AeroExperience website posted these images. I hope this isn't it, tho. This is a bit minimal.
 
Personalized computing is something that will really bring Windows back to the consumer. To achieve this, Microsoft will target customization, internationalization, access anywhere, secure roaming, and home network management. Again, these are pretty self-explanatory.
The next pillar is about high definition graphics, media streaming, better playback, TV on Windows, and audio improvements. This is another area that is pretty much just enhancing what we already have today. I'm mostly interested in the TV on Windows scenario. This is already available, but very limited today. I consider this to be part of the Media Center vision, but Microsoft seems to have a few different products in the area. I hope there will be some consolidation here, but that may not make complete sense.
The last pillar is about ownership. Microsoft will put a strong emphasis on diagnostics and data recovery, lessening the fear of new applications by decreasing the need for administrative access, improved upgrade experience, administrative productivity and security enhancements, devices that "just work," quick/clean out-of-the-box experience, reduced management time/cost, and improved data security. We've seen a lot of improvements in this area with Vista and there's still some room to grow. If you haven't jumped on-board with Vista, you're in for a vastly improved experience and it looks like Windows 7 will be even better.
Someone stopped by my desk yesterday and informed me of some interesting news: IBM has been banned from receiving federal contracts in the US. Apparently, this is due to questions behind how they obtained an EPA contract. This is a huge deal for IBM and I can't see it sticking for too long. I find this very interesting, because IBM has a huge footprint in the US federal space. I also can't help but wonder, if this does stick around for any significant period of time -- even just a few months -- that's not only going to hurt IBM, but it will most likely boost MCS engagements, which is what really touches home, for me.
Despite the fact that there's no love lost for this, it reminds me of a comment someone made about how corporations don't lay off people, people lay off people. I hate when I see stuff like this because you know... or, at least you hope the company isn't stupid enough to have some sort of policy to mandate illegal or unethical practices. I feel the same way about governments: governments aren't evil, people are. It drives me crazy when people make blanket statements about groups of individuals without recognizing they are, in fact, individuals.
Curious about the status of the ISO vote on Open XML? Check out the unofficial ISO Vote website. At the time of this post, things aren't looking so good, but most of the votes aren't in yet. The current assumption is that the votes won't change from the previous vote. I feel like this won't be the case, but we'll just have to wait and see. If you want something more up-to-date or just with more detail, check out Open Malaysia's Last Lap post.
Permanecer Hasta la Fecha con Open XML
En Español
¿Curioso sobre el estado del voto de la ISO en Open XML? Mira el website no oficial del voto de la ISO. Ahora, no pasará, pero no tienen los todos votos todavía. La asunción actual es que los votos no cambiarán del voto anterior. No pienso que éste será el caso, pero apenas tendremos que esperar y ver. Si quiere más información, mira un poste sobre el voto del Open Malaysia.
I've always been interested in the idea of using a server OS as my desktop OS. This is mainly because of the fact that I'm a developer and do a lot of developer work. I have a desktop on Windows Server 2003 and have noticed a number of issues when using it for personal things. For instance, the latest version of Windows Media Player isn't supported on Server 2003. Now that the desktop and server OS's are running the same code-base, things may be much easier. Vijayshinva Karnure  posted a list of steps he had to perform to run Windows Server 2008 as a client OS. I'm not convinced, based on the number of tasks he had to do, but I might take a look at it for a machine I need to do some cleanup on. I still plan on holding off for my laptops, tho.
I'm excited about Surface, that's for sure. Powered by WPF, it's a great platform for some very cool apps. Despite the fact that other vendors are looking to dig into the space, nothing has really happened since Surface was initially announced. Things may be changing, tho. There's been a huge demand from the field and apparently Microsoft is looking to release Surface to consumers sooner than the 5 year estimate initially estimated. I can't say I'm surprised, but what that will really mean isn't very clear. If I had to guess, I'd say the first consumer version of Surface would arrive in 2010. The biggest blocker to getting it out sooner is the cost of hardware necessary to produce the large-scale graphics and touch capabilities.
Surface en la Casa
En Español
Me excitan sobre Surface. Accionado por WPF, es una gran plataforma para algunos aplicaciones muy buenos. A pesar de que se busquen otros proveedores para cavar en el espacio, en realidad nada ha ocurrido desde que se anunció Surface inicialmente. Cosas pueden estar cambiando. Hay una gran demanda y aparentemente Microsoft puede publicar Surface a consumidores antes que la estimación de 5 años. Estoy no se sorprenda, pero el mensaje no es muy claro. Si tuvieran que adivinar, diría que la primera versión de consumidor de superficie llegarán en 2010. El Bloqueador de elementos más importante para conseguir fuera antes es el costo del hardware necesario para generar los gráficos a gran escala y tocar las capacidades.
I've started playing with scripts to enhance my online experience the past few weeks and, with that, have been getting more and more annoyed with the prompt to copy/paste content on websites. I like the idea of this, but hate how often it asks me. Every time you load a page and try to copy/paste text, you'll be prompted again. I'd rather it only ask once per session. To get around it, I tried adding a site to the Trusted Sites list, but that didn't work. I admit, I'm glad because a trusted site can't be in the same window as non-trusted sites. This is ridiculous, if you ask me; especially when sites in the Local Intranet zone don't. So, what'd I do? I added my personal site to the Local Intranet zone, which doesn't prompt me by default. Of course, I wouldn't do this with just any site. I'm fine with the prompt in most cases, it's really just the sites I use it constantly, like my own site and the Windows Live Translator.
By the way, the setting that disables the prompt is buried in the zone's security settings: Scripting > Allow Programmatic clipboard access. For now, I'll stick with keeping these two sites in Local Intranet. Not quite correct, but it's better than the horrid experience Trusted Sites gives me.
I just downloaded IE8 and have to say I'm liking it so far. I was pretty concerned that it was going to be a horrid experience, but it hasn't been. Of course, the next thing I did in this self-centered world of ours was check my website. Being built on DotNetNuke, which is notorious for non-standard HTML, I was concerned. I was happy to see no problems. I'm sure there will be some, but at least I'm looking good so far. I guess all that work I did trying to keep tables out of my design was well worth it.
My only real disappointment has been the fact that web slices have to be explicitly coded into web content. For some reason, I was thinking we could simply select a portion of the age and tell IE to create a web slice from it. I guess not. Maybe I was just thinking of Dapper.
I wrote this a month ago, so it may seem a little out of date. I figured I'd go ahead and post it anyway. If you haven't been following IE8 much, it'll still seem like new 
Standards compliance has never really caught on with the vast majority of web developers. Since Firefox hit the streets, more developers have started to pay attention to the ideals behind web standards, but they still don't seem to be doing the work to achieve compliance. Admittedly, a lot of the problems were brought on by IE's acceptance of bad practices, but the root of the problem truly lies with developers. IE7 resolved a number of standards compliance issues, but unfortunately, it broke a number of sites built specifically for IE6 at the same time. IE8 tries to resolve this problem. Today, we can opt-in to standards by specifying a DOCTYPE, which indicates what version of what standard the developer intends for a page. The problem is that no browser to date implements any standard completely, so there's still a chance your page will render differently in browsers that "support" the desired standard. IE8 fixes this problem. How? By allowing developers to write pages for specific rendering engines (i.e. IE6, IE7, IE8, FF2, or FF3). I love this idea, for obvious reasons.
With IE8 and Firefox 3 both passing the Acid2 test and Acid3 on its way, I think we're in very good standing. While I don't expect huge leaps and bounds between IE8 and 9, I think we're well on our way to some form of nirvana on the web. Hopefully, IE9 will come in the Win7 time frame, which I expect to be in 2009 or 10.
While working with the developer VM I started a year ago, group policy settings were inadvertently changed, causing the network connections service to fail. I also noticed a problem where the VM thought the admin account wasn't an admin. These were both strange problems that we nailed down to bad domain group policy settings. Of course, the VM should have never been joined to the domain, but that's another story. Either way, both problems were fixed by reverting group policy settings. This wasn't hard, but I wanted to share the fix for later, in case something like this happens again.
- Reset settings: secedit /configure /db reset /cfg "c:\windows\security\templates\setup security.inf" /overwrite
- Delete policy: del c:\windows\system32\grouppolicy\machine\registry.pol
- Reboot
I ran both of these on Windows Server 2003 R2 and everything worked great. The only thing you need to do is note the changes you made to the policy before it was corrupted. One I made was to disable the reporting when you shutdown/restart the server, which is annoying on a dev build. Thanks to Jason for the blog post.
Cambiando Política de Grupo a los Ajustes Iniciales
En Español
Mientras que trabajaba en la VM para los desarrolladores, los ajustes de política de grupo fueron cambiados inadvertidamente, causando las conexiones de red mantenga para no comenzar. También noté una problema que eso hizo Windows piensa la cuenta del administrador no era administrador. Los dos problemas fueron con política de grupo de dominio. El VM debe nunca haber sido ensamblado al dominio antes de syspreping y de distribuirlo. Ambos problemas eran fijados cambiando a los ajustes iniciales de política de grupo en el VM. Esto no era duro, pero quise compartir el arreglo para más adelante, en caso de que suceda algo similar otra vez.
- Reajuste los ajustes: secedit /configure /db reset /cfg "c:\windows\security\templates\setup security.inf" /overwrite
- Política de la cancelación: del c:\windows\system32\grouppolicy\machine\registry.pol
- Reinicialización
Hice esto en el Windows Server 2003 R2 y todo trabajó grande. La única cosa que usted necesita hacer es observar los cambios usted realizó a la política antes de que fuera corrompida. Uno que hice era inhabilitar la información cuando usted parada/recomenzar el servidor, que es molesto en una estructura del revelador. Gracias a Jason por el poste del blog.
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