Archives for posts with tag: Windows

The How-to-Geek stumbled across a hidden menu in the beta version of Windows 7: the expanded “Send To” menu. As you already know, when you right-click on any item, one of the options that displays is the “Send To” menu. In Windows 7, you can choose to send that item to a Compressed (Zipped) Folder, your Desktop (create shortcut), Fax or Mail Recipients, or to your CD/DVD drive. However, when you hold down the SHIFT key and right-click, a whole new menu appears with a lot more options.

The expanded menu includes all of your User folders like Contacts, Desktop, Downloads, Favorites, Links, My Documents, My Music, My Pictures, My Videos, Saved Games, and Searches.

Here’s an extra tip, too: to add any items to your regular “Send To” menu, type shell:sendto and then drag shortcuts to the folder which appears.

Thanks, How-to-Geek!

The Fault Tolerant Heap (FTH) is a subsystem of Windows 7 responsible for monitoring application crashes and autonomously applying mitigations to prevent future crashes on a per application basis. For the vast majority of users, FTH will function with no need for intervention or change on their part.

Principal Development Lead and rock star developer Silviu Calinoiu is the mastermind behind FTH. Here, we go deep into how FTH works and why it’s designed the way it is.

The Fault Tolerant Heap is another example of the low level efficiency built into the system: FTH automatically corrects memory faults that cause applications to crash which has the pleasant side effect of preventing future crashes. How does FTH work, exactly? What types of memory problems does it address, specifically? How do developers monitor FTH events and can they override FTH’s behavior? What does this all mean to the average user?

FTH, as an autonomous monitoring and correction system, represents a step in the right direction for the evolution of a more homeostatic general purpose operating system. Simply, Windows is getting smarter in the sense that it’s increasingly becoming better at self-regulation and self-healing. Yes, there’s a very long way to go, but we’re making real progress.

You will continue to learn about recoverability in Windows over the coming months here on C9.  

Tune in.

This week Brian Keller and Amanda Silver review the week’s top developer stories including:

 

-          IE8 most secure browser according to NSS labs

-          Unix turns 40 (here and here)

-          Riviera: Windows Azure reference application

-          Azure Platform Training Kit

-          Complete and searchable list of Windows 7 keyboard shortcuts

-          STM.NET – Who. What. Why.

-          PDC Classics: 2001

-          Free SQL Server DBA eBook

-          Introduction to the SQL Server 2008 Profiler by Pinal Dave

-          IT scripts galore at the TechNet Script Center

-          Physics Helper 3 adds WPF support!

-          Sketchflow Viewer for DotNetNuke

-          SWF to Silverlight converter

 

 

Amanda’s pick of the week: MakeOfficeBetter.com

Brian’s pick-of-the-week: The Lessons of Microsoft Bob

The Windows Sensor and Location platform, new for Windows 7, enables your computer and applications to adapt to their current environment. Previously, we introduced the Windows 7 Location Platform Overview; in this video, we take a deep dive into the Location Platform architecture and APIs. Join Alec Berntson and Yochay Kiriaty as they explains why location gets a special set of APIs and what makes the Location Platform such an amazing platform for developers.

In the Windows 7 Developer Kit you can find Hands On Labs and additional content on Windows 7 Sensor and Location.

You can find additional information about the Windows 7 Sensor and Location Platform in the:

At the PDC, we typically have some additional “pre conference” workshops which provide very indepth and hands on access to a few select technologies. Chris Auld, Director of Strategy for Intergen, is preparing a workshop that will be diving deep into the capabilities of Windows Azure. In this episode of The Knowledge Chamber, he shares with me some of the details off what he is planning on covering and why he is so excited about Windows Azure.

You can find more details about this workshop on the PDC09 website here:

Since Chris is still working on the content, you have a chance to let him know things that you’d specifically like to see featured. If you’re planning on attending his workshop, please drop a note in the comments and let him know what you’d like to see.

As of today, Windows Live Movie Maker is officially out of beta and available to download for FREE as part of the Windows Live Essentials suite.

Victor Santodomingo, Windows Live Movie Maker Engine Development Lead, joined me in the studio to demonstrate the new Movie Maker in action and to discuss how his team developed a brand new engine that processes in 3D space to take advantage of Direct X capabilities and GPU effects.

If you have any comments or questions about the new Windows Live Movie Maker please leave then in the comments section below and we will follow up with Victor and his team. 

More Info: http://windowslive.com/Desktop/MovieMaker
More Info: http://windowslivewire.spaces.live.com/
Download: http://download.live.com

Meet Doug Hauger, Azure General Manager. Doug owns the business side of the Azure Platform equation. How was the pricing determined? Are there different plans for “garage innovators” versus large enterprise customers? What does it all really mean? Would we be able to finish the converstion in under 15 minutes (hard for me to do, as you know…:))? Of course, the complexity of the Azure business model would determine the time it takes to explain it (and the thinking behind it). Well, as you can see by the length of the interview, apparently the Azure people constructed a pricing model that is greatly simplified compared to some of our other business pricing models from years past. The overall simplicity of the plan is impressive.

Tune in. Meet one of the key minds behind the Azure business model and learn about some of the reasoning used in constructing the official plan:

Windows Azure, SQL Azure and .NET Services will be commercially available at the Professional Developer Conference 2009 and we hope you will continue building on the Community Technology Preview (CTP) at no cost today.    

Upon commercial availability we will offer Windows Azure through a consumption-based pricing model, allowing partners and customers to pay only for the services that they consume.

Windows Azure:
Compute @  $0.12 / instance hour
Storage @ $0.15 / GB / month stored
Storage Transactions @ $0.01 / 10K
 
SQL Azure:
Web Edition – Up to 1 GB relational database @ $9.99 Business Edition – Up to 10 GB relational database @ $99.99 

.NET Services:
Messages @ $0.15/100K message operations, including Service Bus messages and Access Control tokens

One of the central engineering and design themes of Windows 7 is efficiency: efficiency in user experience (things work as and when expected, reliably), efficiency in processing, execution, diagnostics, performance, scheduling, window managment, graphics, desktop search, etc. Well, not surprisingly, Windows 7’s audio system has been engineered to provide very efficient user experience (when you plug your headphones in the system streams music to your headphones as expected. When you remove them Windows will switch the stream to flow into your speakers - this is known as real time stream switching – but how does it work, exactly?). What, exactly, is new in the Windows audio system? What’s been improved since Vista? What is sound, really? (Yes, we talk about this at the end of the interview – interesting stuff indeed). You first learned about some of the updates to Windows audio in an interview with Larry in September ‘08. We dig into more detail here (whiteboard included plus we discuss a few things you probably do not know about…)

Here, Architect Elliot H Omiya, Principal Software Developer Larry Osterman and Principal Software Developer Frank Yerrace take us through the details of Windows 7 audio, including some history, some design decisions, some hard problems and overall a great conversation about how Windows makes noise (or music – it’s all relative :) ).

Enjoy. Lots to learn here. Elliot, Larry, Frank and the Windows audio team have done excellent work in this iteration of Windows. Find some time (I know. It’s hard.) Get comfortable and learn all about the innerworkings of Windows 7’s audio.

PerfTrack is the feedback and monitoring system inside of Windows 7 that performs measurements on, well, all things related to the overall performance of the OS, especially as it relates to system responsiveness to user actions. So, when you click on something (an icon, a folder name, etc…), how long does it take for the user to receive an expected reaction from the system? What are the bottlenecks that lead to a poor experience (user-observable latency) when using some feature in Windows? Is the root problem in the design of the feature itself or with the underlying OS? Enter PerfTrack.

Here, Development Manager David Fields and Group Program Manager Bill Karagounis share their wisdom and experience in the world of OS performance analysis. David and Bill explain how PerfTrack works and we digress into an interesting conversation about power management.

PerfTrack is an example of a technology that provides incredibly important real-world information to Windows engineers that can be used to solve performance problems in Windows.

Enjoy!

To help prepare your applications for Windows 7, download the Windows 7 Training Kit for Developers. The kit includes code, videos and labs for both native Win32 C++ developers and .NET developers covering the new features available in Windows 7.