The windows7 release will so be better than vista’s

I’ve installed win7 on all my boxes now (well, except my home server box).  And I’ve finally made the move entirely to 64bit. 

Aside – I read an email that explained some ways in which having a 64 bit OS installed would increase your computer’s perf (assuming you have recent, x64 hardware, like a core2duo or later chip).  I don’t know if the difference is really noticeable, but I certainly haven’t noticed any problems, and I get access to more memory now (32 bit can only address 4 GB of ram, of which 1 GB is used by the platform, and 64 bit can address like a bajillion GB)

Anyway, I installed win7 on my home machine yesterday (the super cool one with badass graphics, etc).  Intel has already shipped two windows 7 drivers.  There was one available via windows update yesterday around 4 PM, and then a new version was released via windows update last night.

Part of the reason, at least in my opinion, that the Vista launch kinda sucked was driver availability.  Vista changed the driver landscape dramatically, moving a bunch of drivers from kernel mode (really low level, OS stuff) to user mode (application level stuff).  This was painful for device driver writers, because they had to re-write all their drivers, and had to learn how to be performant in user code (they had been in kernel mode since like win95 or so, I think, maybe earlier).  This is why XP drivers were generally faster than vista drivers when vista shipped; those drivers were like version 80+, while the vista drivers were version 1, exclusively.

In addition to changing the driver landscape, Microsoft failed in that we announced vista ship dates several times which we didn’t make.  Similar to the boy who cried wolf, when we finally did ship, we caught our hardware partners by surprise; they had grown accustomed to ignoring our ship date announcements.  This was obvious even within Microsoft.  Visual Studio (VS), one of our flagship products, wasn’t Vista compatible at ship time.  Then VS shipped SP1, and they still weren’t vista compatible.  They had to ship a QFE/windows update (called vsvista) to enable vista compatibility. This took several months after vista shipped. 

Win7 is not changing the driver landscape so dramatically.  Vista drivers continue to work with win7.  So, all your existing software and hardware should work just fine on win7 (all mine does, without exception).  The upgrade path from vista->win7 should be easy, which should drive acceptance of the product sooner, and should result in win7 having a much better image than vista does/did.

I’m really excited for win7 to ship!

Win7 first impressions

I love Win7.  I can’t wait to get it installed on all my PCs.  I am now exclusively on win7 for work, and will be moving my home pc to win7 soonish.

I really like the new taskbar, which removes the difference between a shortcut and an open window.  I have an outlook shortcut on the taskbar, but when I run outlook, the icon for the window is in the same place.

I still don’t love IE8, though I am getting used to it.  It seems like this version of IE8 auto-detects when it needs to run in compat mode, and does a pretty good job of that.  The colors in the tab group coloring are a bit too colorful for me, I wish they were more muted or more like pastels, but that’s ok.  Hopefully they are customizable, and I just haven’t found out how yet.

The window preview thing takes some getting used to.  If you mouse over an icon in the taskbar that has more than one window associated (like multiple IE windows/tabs), you can see a thumbnail from each window/tab.   Then, if you hover over that thumbnail, you see the full-sized version.  Intuitively, if you then click somewhere, you would retain that full sized version you ‘selected’ by hovering.  In reality, however, the version you hovered over goes away, and you end up back on the window you started on.  In order to select that hovered window, you have to click on it.  It’s hard to get used to, I’m still hoping I’ll get there.

Overall, a big thumbs-up for win7, though.  Drivers for vista have all worked just fine on win7, at least for all of my devices on two pcs.

I know some of this stuff is hard to visualize without pictures, but I’m lazy and haven’t figured out how to take screenshots of the preview thumbnail things.  If you want to try it out, the win7 beta is publicly available, and you are welcome to come by the house and I’ll show it to you (requires that you know where I live already, though :) ).

Windows 7 features

There's a super cool blog on windows 7 (the one after vista) that I read. Sometimes the posts are too technical for my audience here (primarily my family). Today's post, though, should be of interest to all of you.

It's about the windows 7 taskbar, and how window opening and switching is changing in windows 7. I, personally, am super excited to get my hands on win7.

Check it out: http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2008/11/20/happy-anniversary-windows-on-the-evolution-of-the-taskbar.aspx

Follow the leader

First, some disclaimers.

1. I work for Microsoft, on Microsoft Office Live
2. I do not work on C#, VB.Net, or even in Developer Division (DevDiv)

Ok, on to the point. Jeff Atwood recently posted about some frustration he's dealing with regarding the differences between C# and VB.Net. Here's the article: C# and the Compilation Tax

I noticed something when I worked at GeoAge (How's that for link love to the company that had to lay me off?). We were a VB.Net shop, and I'm pretty sure they still are. I was a C# dev at heart. One thing that I hated about using both languages was that Intellisense was a lot better in VB than in C#. Autocomplete in particular saved me thousands of keystrokes a day at work.

Then I started playing with VS 2005. Turns out that in 2005, C#'s intellisense seemed to take a huge cue from VB, and we had equivalent completion, and intellisense.

I've developed a theory. The VB team focuses a lot of energy on making developing code easier, while the C# team devotes time to making the language more powerful. I think the C# team then capatilizes (one version back) on the work from the VB team. Probably under a lot of pressure from their customers, since they see how much more productive VB devs can be.

So, I expect that in the next version or two of VS, we'll see background compilation in C#, and see the My namespace make it into C#. Those are my predictions.

Just hold on Jeff, and hopefully the C# team will make you happy. Of course, by the time they do, the VB team will have some new thing that makes their devs more productive, so you'll be wanting more from the C# team. It's a vicious cycle, but I think it makes C# a better language, and the .NET platform stronger. If you can deal with being a cycle back in productivity.

Office Live is having a contest! Win $10K

I'm not eligible, of course, even though I'm an Office Live customer, and own a small business. Guess that's just the price of being a MSFT'ie.

Anwho, here's the info on the contest:

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If you're planning to use us an excuse to visit the Pac NW, better hurry

Courtney and I made a deal about a year ago. When we decided to take the job at MSFT, we agreed that we would site down one year later, and have a conversation. This conversation would revolve around whether or not we were happy living in the Seattle area.

Moving out here was a big change for us, and a particularly tough decision for Courtney, since she's never lived farther than 45 minutes away from her parents and grandparents. Obviously, we're more than 45 minutes away now.

A couple of weeks ago, the weather here changed. The sun came back out. You wouldn't believe the difference I noticed in Courtney's happiness level. I'm sure she saw the same in me. It's not like either of us was really pissed or anything, but we were both less cheerful than we're used to. This prompted us to start our discussion a couple of weeks early.

We've decided that we don't like living in the Pac NW, and that Microsoft isn't enough of a reason to stay here. It's actually a really tough decision for us, because both of us really enjoy working for MS (me more than Courtney). Both of us really miss our family and friends back in Florida, too, though.

Not to mention the financial burden of having a household in Florida and here, and our total inability to ever afford a house here (450k for a condo, anyone?). So, we're moving.

I'm trying to work a deal with my current team to let me work remotely, from Florida. This poses some challenges, not insurmountable (we do have a team in India and one in China, after all).

We will be moving no later than December, and we're hoping to move closer to August or September. It all depends on what happens with my current team, and with the feelers I put out for jobs at other teams in MS and other companies.

I'll keep you posted.

Look ma, MSBuild is writing about me!

Check out this post: http://blogs.msdn.com/msbuild/archive/2007/04/13/recursion-and-itemgroups-inside-targets.aspx

That's all me, again.

My current 'coolest reason to work at Microsoft'

So, I've done something new. I caused a feature to be added to a shipping Microsoft product. One that almost all my friends use on a daily basis.

We had a meeting with the MSBuild team a while ago, before we started converting our existing build system over to use MSBuild. In that meeting, we told the guys (Dan & Vlad) that we were wishing for a particular thing during our conversion. We were wishing that it was possible, in MSBuild, to know what directory we had called MSBuild.exe from. There are a lot of things you can tell in MSBuild, like the directory of the current project, and a bunch of other well-defined directories. But, you couldn't tell what directory you called msbuild.exe from.

I present to you a new property. I wish it was called the Cullen property, but it's not. They're adding it to the 'Orcas' MSBuild, which is shipping with .NET 3.5, whenever that ships. I think they called it MSBuildExecutionDirectory or something like that.

I didn't even know they were adding the property, I happened to see an email on an internal alias that said something to the effect of "We added this cool property cause the guys on Office Live asked for it". That was me!

Now, when my friends start using the next version of VS, they will be using something that I asked for, and was put in the product basically just because I asked for it. What other company can you work at and do that?