Delivering a new release of Windows includes a major effort to insure that applications continue to function as well on the new release as they have on the previous release. At the PDC we talked about some of the new areas of Windows Vista that reduced this level of compatibility, such as changes we made around the OS security model. With Windows 7 we renewed our engineering efforts to maintain compatibility....

It should be no surprise but the Release Candidate for Windows 7 will have quite a few changes, many under the hood so to speak but also many visible.  Some have asked if the featureset is "frozen" then what will we change–we change a lot of things in the beta based on feedback and we try to do so in a systematic manner with the focus on the goals for the release.  The goal of having...

This blog post discusses some of the platform innovations in Windows 7 and how Windows 7 applications have adopted and showcased these innovations. This post details some of the platform features that developers and partners can expect in Windows 7 and how Windows 7 programs have showcased these innovations. This post also discusses how applications have been given a facelift both in terms of their functionality...

For more information on the beta, please stay tuned to http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7 which is where we will post information about participation. This post is about a Windows 7 feature that covers a lot of territory—it is about networking, user interface, sharing, media, printing, storage, search, and more.  HomeGroup is a way of bringing all these features together in a way that makes it...

We’ve talked some about performance in this blog and recently many folks have been blogging and writing about the topic as well. We thought it would be a good time to offer some more behind the scenes views on how we have been working on and thinking about performance because it such an interesting topic for the folks reading this blog. Of course I’ve been using some pretty low-powered machines lately...