Engineering Windows 7

Welcome to our blog dedicated to the engineering of Microsoft Windows 7

The Windows 7 TaskbarNovember 20 2008

Happy Birthday Windows!  Given all the interest in the most used user-interface of Windows we thought it would be good to take a look back and see how we got to Windows 7.  --Steven

We were very excited to unveil elements of the Windows 7 desktop at this year’s Professional Developers Conference (as seen in the Welcome to the Windows 7 Desktop session, among others). In previous posts (User Interface: Starting, Launching, and Switching and Follow-up: Starting, Launching, and Switching) we looked at the history, anatomy and areas for improvement of the taskbar. In this post, we will continue the conversation. Don’t let looks fool you though—the UI may feel new to Windows for some of you or old hat for some of you, but rest assured it represents a careful evolution that strives to address customer feedback while retaining its familiar Windows DNA.

It was 23 years ago on November 20, 1985 when Windows first shipped. As it just so happens, this first Microsoft graphical shell actually holds relevance to this post as it surfaced one of the industry’s first taskbar-like concepts.

Back from the PDC…next up, WinHECNovember 1 2008

This has been an amazingly special week for the Windows 7 team.  We’re all incredibly appreciative of the reception of Windows 7 this week at the PDC.  Thank you!

All of us on the team have been closely watching the news reports and blogs of those who have been “kicking the tires” of the Windows 7 pre-beta.  The reception has been fantastic and we’re humbled by the excitement and enthusiasm for the release.  We know we have a ton of work ahead of us to get to beta and then the path to RTM, and the reception has definitely given us an extra special motivation (though we were already pretty motivated).

Next week is our conference dedicated to the hardware partners in the ecosystem we have talked about.  Called WinHEC (Windows Hardware Engineering Conference), we’ll have another series of sessions and keynotes.  Jon DeVaan will be taking the lead as we dive into the details of “fundamentals” and the work we are doing with some of the many partners involved in Windows 7.  WinHEC also has a strong focus on Windows Server 2008 R2 (the server built off the Windows 7 kernel).  These sessions will all be available online as well.

So with all the shows we’re taking a short break from the blog as the folks that do the presenting are also the writers (myself included).

Below is a list of all the sessions on Windows 7 from the PDC.  Please take some time to have a look

Engineering 7: A view from the bottomOctober 15 2008

Aka: A developers view of the Windows 7 Engineering process

This post is by Larry Osterman.  Larry is one of the most “experienced” developers on the Windows team and has been at Microsoft since the mid 1980’s.  There are only three other folks who have worked at Microsoft longer on the entire Windows team!  Personally, I remember knowing about Larry when I started at Microsoft back in 1989—I remember he worked on “multimedia” (back when we used to host the Microsoft CD-ROM Conference) and he was one of those people that stood up and received a “5 Year” award from Bill Gates at the first company meeting I went to—that seemed amazing back then!  For Windows 7, Larry is a developer on the Devices and Media team which is where we work on audio, video, bluetooth, and all sorts of cool features for connecting up devices to Windows. 

Larry wrote this post without any prodding and given his experience on so many Windows releases these thoughts seemed really worthwhile in terms of sharing with folks.  This post goes into “how” we work as a team, which for anyone part of a software team might prove pretty interesting.  While this is compared and contrasted with Vista, everyone knows that there is no perfect way to do things and this is just a little well-informed perspective.

So thank you Larry!  --Steven

Thanks to Steven and Jon for letting me borrow their soapbox :-).

I wanted to discuss my experiences w

Windows Desktop SearchOctober 13 2008

One of the points of feedback has been about disabling services and optionally installing components—we’ve talked about our goals in this area in previous posts.  A key driver around wanting this type of control (but not the only driver) is a perception around performance and resource consumption of various platform components.  A goal of Windows is to provide a reliable and consistent platform for developers—one where they can count on system services as being available, as well as a set of OS features that all customers have the potential to benefit from.  At the same time we must do so in a way that is efficient in system resource usage—efficient enough so the benefit outweighs the cost.  We recognize that some percentage of customers believe solving this equation can only be done manually—much like some believe that the best car performance can only come from manual transmission.  For this post we’re going to look into the desktop search functionality from the perspective of the work we’re doing as both a broadly available platform component and to provide the rich end-user functionality, and also look at the engineering tradeoffs involved and techniques we use to build a great solution for everyone.  Chris McConnell, a principal SDE on the Find and Organize team, contributed this post.  --Steven

Are you one of those folks who believes that search indexing is the cause of your drive light flashing like mad? Do you believe this is the reason

User Account ControlOctober 8 2008

We promised that this blog would provide a view of Engineering Windows 7 and that means that we would cover the full range of topics—from performance to user interface, technical and non-technical topics, and of course easy topics and controversial topics.  This post is about User Account Control.  Our author is Ben Fathi, vice president for core OS development.  UAC is a feature that crosses many aspects of the Windows architecture—security, accounts, user interface, design, and so on—we had several other members of the team contribute to the post. 

We continue to value the discussion that the posts seem to inspire—we are betting (not literally of course) that this post will bring out comments from even the most reserved of our readers.  Let’s keep the comments constructive and on-topic for this one.

FWIW, the blogs.msdn.com server employs some throttles on comments that aim to reduce spam.  We don’t control this and have all the “unmoderated” options checked.  I can’t publish the spam protection rules since that sort of defeats the purpose (and I don’t know them).  However, I apologize if your comment doesn’t make it through.  --Steven

User Account Control (UAC) is, arguably, one of the most controversial features in Windows Vista. Why did Microsoft add all those popups to Windows? Does it actually improve security? Doesn’t everyone just click “continue”? Has anyone in Redmond heard the feedback on users and revi