New Efficiency Review
A few months ago I was notified of a free Microsoft event for Windows 7 called the New Efficiency in which they were giving away free copies of Windows 7 Ultimate. So without too much thought I sent my registration in and yesterday morning I awoke very early (4am) to catch the 5am bus out of Portland to Boston to see what the New Efficiency was all about. Registration started at 7:30 after which we were provided breakfast. The event was split into two sessions, the morning for Developers and the afternoon for the IT guys. I only attended the morning session so my comments and thoughts (abuses) will be limited to that session. The whole event was geared towards introducing some of the new features in Windows 7 along with a few code examples. All the presentations were done by Microsoft Evangelists, (people who go around talking about the latest and greatest from Microsoft), I can’t remember the last presenter’s name, but the first was Chris Bowen who talked about some of the new features and how to take advantage of them from a developer’s perspective, the second presentation was by Bob Familiar who touted the new graphics stack and the new sensor technology, and the last presentation was on the new touch capabilities that Windows 7 supports.
The whole third presentation was devoted to introducing us to the new Touch capabilities built into Windows 7. It started with the presenter spending about ten minutes teaching us the gestures to use, “this is a click”, as he touches the screen, “this is how we zoom in” etc… Really? A room full of supposed developers and geeks and you feel the need to teach us this? I suppose they were right since there were a lot of people ooing and aahhing over it all. Oh and the control panel now has Search capabilities. Let me get this straight. Instead of making it easier to navigate and to find settings, you just put in search capabilities? Awesome. I hope it works better than finding files on Windows Vista.
The best piece of news that I heard through it all was the reduction in the Desktop Manager’s memory. I haven’t verified this yet since I have not had a change to install Windows 7 (planning on tomorrow night), but I would be very happy with the 30% reduction that they said they have gotten due to the new graphics stack. On Vista my CPU gets pegged quite frequently while switching windows a lot and the highest amount of memory being consumed is usually by the Window Manager.
One thing that really surprised me was the lack of .NET support for Windows Touch. To take full advantage of it in a .NET application you need to dip down into unmanaged code land and interface with COM. I thought that from pushing .NET so much that they would make sure the latest new technology was integrated. Supposedly it will be coming very soon, but next year’s .NET update will make it all seamless and fully integrated.
Overall, I thought the whole thing was a bit lackluster. It felt a bit short and even though it was a free event I wished that some of the features were explored a bit more since I am interested in them and I am sure we will see applications taking advantage of them in new ways, especially if they are considered from a mobile computing standpoint. For example, Bob Familiar showed an example of how an application on a mobile device could interface with a light sensor and change the resolution, font sizes, contrast or anything else it wanted to make the display easier to read when someone moved from a lighter to a darker area or if they were standing in a lot of sunlight.
Would I go to this event again if it happened next year? Sure, I did meet a couple of new people in the Boston area and if there was going to be a free operating system at the end.
“Go Be One With 7″