The second day of the PDC just started, and the first session is the keynote by the president of Windows and Windows Live division in Microsoft, Steven Sinofsky, which was focused on Windows 7.

Developing Windows 7

Steven started with a review on what Microsoft has learned during the development process of Windows 7 including maintaining a strong connection with the community, improvements performed in collecting telemetry data from users of the beta and RC releases of Windows 7 and a lot of usability research performed on regular users. A surprising example of telemetry collection and analysis is that as it turns out, 55% of users use a 1024×768 resolution, while only less than 0.5% of users use full HD (1900×1200) resolution (!), and this allowed the development team to focus their efforts.

Later on, some nice demos of Windows 7 features such as touch support, DirectCompute, Energy Efficiency and more were given.

Windows 7 PDC Laptop

It was just announced that an Acer multi-touch laptop would be given for free to every PDC attendant! I obviously like that very much!

Development of Internet Explorer 9

Internet explorer 9 is three weeks into development, and the main areas of focus during development are:

• Standards Progress – HTML 5 and ACID compatibility improvements.
• Performance Improvements – Improvements to the IE 9 rendering engine. Special notice should be given to IE 9’s rendering engine ability to use hardware acceleration by default on standard HTML pages. For example, an animation would be animated using Direct2D by default, thus allowing much improved and smooth rendering.

The Bottom Line

We got a free laptop! Hooray!