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8月29日 Performing Windows 7 - Making it BetterSteven Sinofsky talks about the Windows Team's efforts with this new release of Windows to make it a release that lives up to all users expectation when it comes to performance in all categories, CPU Utilization, Disk I/O, Disk Foot Print, Memory Usage and more. Quote: 'Performance is made up of many different elements. We could be talking about response time to a specific request. It might mean how much RAM is “typical” or what CPU customers need. We could be talking about the clock time to launch a program. It could mean boot or standby/resume. It could mean watching CPU activity or disk I/O activity (or lack disk activity). It could mean battery life. It might even mean something as mundane as typical disk footprint after installation. All of these are measures of performance. All of these are systematically tracked during the course of development. We track performance by running a known set of scenarios (there are thousands of these) and developers can run specific scenarios based on exercising more depth or breadth.' Personally, I believe a lot Windows Vista's performance issues relates to how it is setup and what it is setup on. The OS tries to scale this according to how powerful a computer is. For instance, if you have little RAM, with an insignificant shared memory Vista will give a lower tier UI called AERO Basic, since using AERO Glass would be too strenuous performing on such system. Even if you have certain model discrete video card and certain amount memory, Vista will consider what's best for you to give you the best experience. Hopefully this will be improved in Windows 7 in a way that they can get the most out of their system. Because regardless, Vista tries to make the system acceptable, the added application equation often makes the system performance less powerful and unproductive. Quote: We have criteria that we apply at the end of our milestones and before we go to beta and we won’t ship without broadly meeting these criteria. Sometimes these criteria are micro-benchmarks (page faults, processor utilization, working set, gamer frame rates) and other times they are more scenario based and measure time to complete a task (clock time, mouse clicks). We do these measurements on a variety of hardware platforms (32-bit or 64-bit; 1, 2, 4GB of RAM; 5400 to 7200 RPM or solid-state disks; a variety of processors, etc.) Because of the inherent tradeoffs in some architectural approaches, we often introduce conditional code that depends on the type of hardware on which Windows is running. This something I have particular issue with, especially how the system rates your performance. For instance, I have Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit installed on a system with the following specs:
Yet my Windows Experience Index rating stands at 2.3. Personally I believe at least a respectable 3.5. So, there needs to be a delicate and better way to rate a users components. Regardless of all of this, my system handles Vista beautifully especially with the recent Service Pack 1 update. Read the entire article here 8月20日 Windows Development - does size matter? There has been a lot of discussion this week stemming from the article over at the E7 blog about the size of the Windows 7 development team. Persons are saying, Windows 7's human resources are just too big and hard to manage. Microsoft (Steven Sinofsky) response to that is, its the scope of the project that determines how many persons are allocated to developing the product. The Windows Team is divided into 23 + Development Teams. Some of the main feature teams for Windows 7 include (alphabetically):
Microsoft Distinguished Engineer and Windows Server Architect Mark Lucovsky told me. "Now there are 5000 member of the Windows team, plus an additional 5000 contributing partners, generating over 50 million lines of code for Windows Server 2003. It's the biggest software engineering task ever attempted. There are no other software projects like this." Thats 10,000 developers depending on how you look at it. Considering that Windows 7 consist of both client and server and the approximation of Developers is around 2,500 it doesn't spectacularly amazing about the size of the Development Team in this release. For Windows 2000, Microsoft noted a higher amount of developers worked on the project than is now allocated to Windows 7, if todays estimates are correct: "Microsoft has invested more than $1 billion in the development of Windows 2000, and more than 5,000 employees worked on the new platform, Gates said". Microsoft Presspass: Windows 2000 Now Broadly Available So, the enthusiast communities astonishment is a bit strange in my opinion, a project like Windows as Mark Lucovsky said is huge, taking into account the audience and segments of the market. Windows is not the Windows of 90's or early 2000's, this project that has changed dramatically over the years and continues to grow in features and yes, size. E7 Blog: Maginitude of the Windows 7 Release From Engineering Windows 7 Steven Sinofsky blogger and head honcho of the Windows 7 Project took the time out today to discuss Windows 7's significance in terms of being a major upgrade or minor release, a huge topic in the blogs this week. Here is a snippet of what he had to say: Quote: When we started planning the release, the first thing some might think we have to decide is if Windows 7 (client) would be a “major release” or not. I put that in quotes because it turns out this isn’t really something you decide nor is it something with a single answer. The magnitude of a release is as much about your perspective on the features as it is about the features themselves. One could even ask if being declared a major release is a compliment or not. As engineers planning a product we decide up front the percentage of our development team will that work on the release and the extent of our schedule—with the result in hand customers each decide for themselves if the release is “major”, though of course we like to have an opinion. On the server blog we talked about the schedule and we shared our opinion of the scale of the releases of Windows 7 client and server. Our goal is about building an awesome release of Windows 7. Across all customers, there is always a view that a major release is one that has features that are really the ones for me. A minor release is one that doesn’t have anything for me. It should then be pretty easy to plan a major release—just make sure it exactly the right features for everyone (and given the focus on performance, it can’t have any extra features, even if other people want them)! As engineers we all know such a design process is really impossible, especially because more often than not any two customers can be found to want exactly opposite features. In fact as I type this I received sequential emails one saying “[N]obody cares about touch screen nonsense” and the other saying “[Win7 needs] more advanced/robust ‘touch’ features”. When you just get unstructured and unsolicited input you see these opposites quite a bit. I’m sure folks are noticing this on the blog comments as well. Read the entire article here Steve went on to discuss the different categories of users the release of a product tends to target, Consumers, IT Professionals and Developers. My understanding and interpretation about this release of Windows is that major or minor is really in the eye of the beholder. But I wish the E7 Blog could have given a clearer understanding of the significance of this release. For instance, is it an upgrade that all Windows Vista users upgrade to or just Windows XP users? Right now, the only major feature we have become aware of in Windows 7 is Multi-Touch and to be honest, its cool, but not a must have for me in particular I will save final thoughts until I have experienced it. Lets stay tuned in. All About Microsoft: You say major; I say minor - Windows 7From All About Microsoft Mary Jo has been investing Microsoft's recent decision to call Windows Server 7, Windows Server 2008 R2. This to many is indicating it as a minor release and is also reflecting on the client version of Windows 7 as a minor release. Here is a quote: Over the past couple of years, both the Windows client and Windows server teams have been structuring their releases to alternate between major and minor ones. (On the server side, the Softies have been rolling out a major
release followed by a minor update (known as Release 2, or R2) every
two years. On the client side, the timing has been off, but the major/minor cadence has been pretty similar.)Starting with Windows 7, however, that logic and naming structure
that Microsoft has worked to establish for Windows seems to breaking
down.
Is Windows 7 really just version 6.1?Its Official - Windows Server 7 to be a Minor ReleasePC World: Microsoft Sends Up Trial Balloons for Windows 7From PC World Quote: "Windows Vista hasn't fared so well since its debut. Its generally low reputation among customers has led one Forrester analyst to dub Microsoft's latest OS "the New Coke of tech," while some studies have suggested that nearly a third of customers who buy a PC with Vista pre-installed may actually be downgrading those machines to XP.
Still
other customers seem to wish the whole thing will just go away. They
don't want to hear about Vista at all -- they'd rather hear about
Windows 7, the upcoming OS from Microsoft that will be Vista's
successor. And given the dismal consumer reaction to its latest attempts to market Vista, Microsoft seems willing to oblige." This conclusion that Vista is not great or better comes from a lack in understanding and not using the OS enough to really see the obvious benefits out of the box. My brother upgraded to Windows XP in summer of 2002, loved it, you could say he is an earlier adopter and continued using the OS on various machines, including a Dell Inspiron he purchased in June of 2006 (XP Home). My brother jumped on the early Windows Vista adopter bandwagon in January of 2007. He loved it! Yes, the things that 'wowed' him was Vista's visual appeal, it looks darn great. And PC World would be surprised, a lot of people love the richness, the transparency and realness of the OS. AERO is a bold, serious yet inviting look and many people I ask, new to Vista, previous XP or 2000 users, novices, lab techs, love Vista. A lot of negativity about Vista has been intensified by a number of things. Things that we have been acquainted with from previous versions of Windows or any other platform...device drivers and application compatibility. It just was not there for many in early 2007, but it has improved tremendously and has reached the same level as XP or better. You would be hard pressed to find most modern hardware released in the last 2 to 3 years incompatible with the OS, not to mention applications that are probably in their second to third generation of full compatibility with Vista. XP's reception faced many compatibility and hardware issues, I remember some clearly, like Roxio and printer and scanner hardware not being supported. But they eventually were, Roxio did update version 5 to support XP and the problems died. But because XP was released in a time where the Internet, blogging and the spotlight was not on Microsoft and Windows in a scrutinizing way like it is today. In addition to Microsoft's transparency and openness during the Longhorn project, it set a tone and perception in addition to things that happened during the project like reset and drop of features. Those are the irrelevant things that are still etched in the minds of many who covered the OS during its development. Vista in its current form is well accepted, but some lingerings still remained and being revived and utilized by people who have never used Vista, don't use Windows and is being articulated in a way to make Windows out into a platform that is not desirable, these include the voice of Open Source, small resurgence of Apple, Justin Long vs PC and many other insignificant events in the past few years. But it still does not hide the fact that people are accepting of Vista's improvements, whether its developer wise, business or consumer wise. Search, collaboration, ease of setup, security, Backup, organization, true hardware and application support, clean interface and just the plain likability of the OS, people see it and are proving it everyday with the millions of licenses that come pre-installed on new PC's or deployed. Talking about "Windows 7" appears in WSUSFrom Living in Athens via All About Microsoft Just saw this interesting screenshot of Windows 7 support in the WSUS list on Living in Athens. Is this a sign that the first Developer Previews or BETA's of Windows 7 are imminent? Quote "Windows 7" appears in WSUS 8月19日 Ed Botts Early Windows 7 Hopes From Ed Bott's Microsoft Report Quote: I thought it might be interesting to arrange the feature teams into groups and discuss what I believe the real challenges of each group are. It’s important to remember that this development team is working on business, consumer, and server products, all of which will be built on the Windows 7 code base. THE GUTS Feature teams: Fundamentals; Kernel & VM; Security; Deployment and Component Platform Don’t be distracted by predictions that Windows 7 will have a new kernel. It’s going to be an evolution of the kernel shared by Windows Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008. I’ll be especially interested to see whether some form of the Hyper-V virtualization platform appears in Windows 7. If it does, I expect it will be in the enterprise version. The security challenges for Windows 7 are well known as well: refining User Account Control and hardening the kernel against new forms of attack. Read the entire list here I personally am looking for improvements to the Networking User Experience in Windows 7, its just too much in terms of the amount of networking related UI's. Here is a quote from the Networking Section of the ActiveWin Windows Vista Review I did in 2007: I love the centralization of Network and Sharing Center, in prior builds I was badly disappointed by networking overall in Vista, here is what I had to say about it: The networking wizard looks and feels clumsy. Common links are all over the place making the layout difficult for users to understand. You have these wizards with huge title bars that make you wonder why? It’s just not well thought out, and I wish there was more focus on consistency and ironically simplicity. I believe most of the functions first introduced in XP could remain the same and some could be slightly improved. For example, the Local Area Connection properties should be an Explorer instead of this same old dialog I have been seeing since Windows 95. Its just too much clicking, I had to open Network Center then click Manage Network Connections, right click the connection, click Properties, its a chore really. The primary focus has been lost and I think networking in Windows Vista has taken a definite step back and in some areas remains primitive. Come on, five to six windows for networking? Networking is still possible in Windows Vista and it can be accomplished with careful thought and planning. I was able to join a domain and network both my laptop and desktop using the traditional methods that we have known since prior versions of Windows dating back to Windows 95 which takes more than three clicks and seems very out of place with the changes to explorer. Windows 7 Team Speaks From Engineering Windows 7 Quote: It is pretty easy to think of the Windows team as one group or one entity, and then occasionally one specific person comes to represent the team—perhaps she gave a talk at a conference, wrote a book or article folks become familiar with, or maybe he has a blog. Within Microsoft, the Windows product is really a product of the whole company with people across all the development groups contributing in some form or another. The Windows engineering team “proper” is jointly managed by Jon and me. Jon manages the core operating system, which is, among many things, the kernel, device infrastructure, networking, and the engineering tools and system (all of which are both client and server). I am part of the Windows client experience team which develops, among many things, the shell and desktop, graphics, and media support. One other significant part of the Windows product is the Windows Media Center which is a key contribution managed along with all of Microsoft’s TV support (IPTV, extenders, etc.). Read the entire article here A very informative post that goes into the intricacies of building Microsoft Windows, Steven has really given a good perspective on the people who are responsible for delivering the features and building the platform that both end users/developers can use to build products and be productive from. Steve pointed the irony of what so many people seem to despise about Windows its size, its too big, too big to manage, yet the amount of comments and request seem to reflect the growing need based on customer demand for more to be added to Windows. Relevant issues the Windows 7 Team have discussed based on what users are asking about is to make Windows even faster, and it is indeed a challenge, but I am glad to see it become a priority in this release. 8月18日 Its Official - Windows Server 7 to be a Minor Release Well, what an interesting turn of events, Microsoft has confirmed that Windows Server 7 will be a minor release, which is rather confusing to me. The NOS will beer a similar name to the now on the market Windows Server 2008 only with a slight addition 'R2'. What was so hard in going with Windows Server 2009 or Windows Server 2010? The out of date naming scheme would to me reflect badly on the products marketing and significance to those interested in upgrading. Quote: "Microsoft said on Monday that the server version of Windows 7 will not be a major release and will bear the name Windows Server 2008 R2. The move is surprising, given that in the past, Microsoft has
used R2 monikers to signify a product with a few new features, as
opposed to major changes to a product. Microsoft declined to discuss what will be in Windows Server 2008 R2,
but a spokesman confirmed that it is the server version of Windows 7.
The release is due sometime in 2010, Microsoft said." Read more here I am confused to be honest with you, but as Microsoft continues to build this thing, it seems that there will be more confusing turns along the way. My understanding and I hope this is it, but it seems the features in Windows 7, client and server will reflect version 7. I want the next release of Windows to clearly reflect meaning to the end user, I just don't want it to be some release that is edging on almost sounding like a glorified Service Pack. Is Windows 7 really just version 6.1?Mary Jo's recent realization of the miscommunication about the future of Windows Server releases unearth some new information about the versioning. An anonymous tipster informed MJ that Windows 7 (server and client) are actually version 6.1 and both products will RTM at the same time (ETA January 2010). What could this mean for Windows 7 both client and server? Don't be confused though, Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 will share the same code base, meaning an NT 7 the kernel is still somewhere out in the future. Here is what that person had to say: “Furthermore, Windows 7, despite it’s rather pretentious sounding code name (a result of Sinofsky’s like of big round numbers) is NOT Windows NT 7, but rather 6.1(current builds are numbered 67xx as a direct continuation of the longhorn codebase). Put simply, it is not a big jump as a codebase revision and the new changes, on both the client and server, will be focused on user features, not core OS components. The big core OS changes are WDDM 2 and a kernel scheduler update to remove the simple bitmask enumeration of processors so that the OS can schedule more than 64 concurrent threads." Thoughts? I don't believe it for one sec! Remember the Eric Traut video, the guy working on MinWin? Well he asked why Windows 7 is called Windows '7'. Then he began to list all the versions of Windows "NT" based operating systems. This would conclude that Windows 7 is indeed NT version 7, regardless it is considered evolutionary. If you look back at even the release of Windows NT 4.0, it was a minor update that just added the Windows 95 shell, yet it was still given a whole version number, both kernel version and release wise. We won't know whats going on, and all of this from my perspective is really just discussion for now. Lets stay tuned to the Engineering 7 blog and hope we get more concrete info as the months lead up to PDC 2008 and WinHEC 2008. Update: No Windows Server 2008 R2 - Windows Server 7 FTW! From All About Microsoft Mary Jo has a great scope about Microsoft's future Windows Server platform: "Microsoft’s Windows Server division has veered from its regular schedule to eliminate — at least in name — the minor “R2″ update of Windows Server 2008 that was slated to arrive in the next year or two. The result: The next version of Windows Server that Microsoft will ship will be named “Windows 7 Server.” Read the entire article here The change of plans is not that surprising, but at the same time its good to see some clarity on the road map although most assumed Windows Server 2008 R2 would come in 2010 followed by 7 Server in 2011 or after. 2010 looks to be a big year of major product releases from Microsoft. In some ways it proves that Microsoft has improved in their development processes although Windows Server 2003 R2 focused on releasing Out of Band technologies together with the OS since some did not make it in the initial iteration of Windows Server 2003. Information about Windows 7 Server has been rather scarce compared to the client, then again, Windows Server 2008 was just brought to market in February of this year. Its good to see information is slowly but surely coming out about Microsoft's next moves with Windows. The latest build of Windows Server 7 available to the public right now is: 6608.winmain_win7m2.080511-1400, which an assumed Microsoft employee posted rejoicing the Windows Server Teams success promoting the first Windows Server 7 build as a Domain Controller. A Cached copy of that post can be found here. Windows Server 7 is expected to be a 64 bit release only, while the client is expected to continue with a 32 and 64 bit release. UPDATE: Looks like there was some misinformation sent to Mary Jo about Windows Server 2008 R2 and its successor Windows Server 7, there is indeed a 'Release 2' update of Server 2008 still in the works. Read about it here. 8月16日 11 Best Sites for Windows 7A crescendo is slowly beginning to build for the next release of Windows and as I begin to develop my own interest in the OS, I thought it would be best to create a list of sites, that I personally consider to be the best when it comes to resources, reviews, news, updates and progress of the OS in addition to insider info. Its not in any specific order. I will continue to update the list as great sites appear:
Teching It Easy of course will be at the center of it all to provide reviews, perspectives and discussion with you the readers to help make this release the best version of Windows yet. In a future post I will give a little bit of info on each site. Stay tuned! Technorati tags: Windows 7, Websites, Resources, PDC, WinHEC, BETA, Software, Operating Systems, Enthusiast, Windows Community Congratulations Usain Bolt!This is a great day for my country, Jamaica. Usain Bolt has proven to the world what an amazing athlete and individual he is. Clocking a world record 9.69 at the Beijing Olympics in China easily taking the Gold for 100m with confidence and pride.
Usain Bolt - Gold Medal 100m World Record Olympic Champion Congratulations must also go to Trinidad and the USA who both took the Silver and Bronze respectively. Technorati tags: Usain Bolt, Olympics, China, Beijing, Lightning, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, USA, Asafa Powell, Michael Frater, Gold, 100m, 2008, Summer, August, Beijing Olympics 8月15日 Windows 7 Engineering with Steven Sinofsky and Jon DeVaanFrom Windows 7 Engineering MSDN Blog The Windows Team is building momentum towards the next major release of Windows, "7" which is expected sometime in early 2010. The blog will focus on engaging with Microsoft Partners and Customers in addition to enthusiast and bloggers. Teching It Easy will be there all the way, recreating the experience first started with 'Windows Longhorn'. Here is a quick quote: "Welcome to our first post on a new blog from Microsoft—the Engineering Windows 7 blog, or E7 for short. E7 is hosted by the two senior engineering managers for the Windows 7 product, Jon DeVaan and Steven Sinofsky. Jon and Steven, along with members of the engineering team will post, comment, and participate in this blog. Beginning with this post together we are going to start looking forward towards the “Windows 7” project. We know there are tons of questions about the specifics of the project and strong desire to know what’s in store for the next major release of Windows. Believe us, we are just as excited to start talking about the release. Over the past 18 months since Windows Vista’s broad availability, the team has been hard at work creating the next Windows product. The audience of enthusiasts, bloggers, and those that are the most passionate about Windows represent the folks we are dedicating this blog to. With this blog we’re opening up a two-way discussion about how we are making Windows 7. Windows has all the challenges of every large scale software project—picking features, designing them, developing them, and delivering them with high quality. Windows has an added challenge of doing so for an extraordinarily diverse set of customers. As a team and as individuals on the team we continue to be humbled by this responsibility." Read more here I couldn't think of a better way to start this conversation. The team is focused on delivering accurate information and really present what's real and what's possible with this release of Windows. I personally believe in the focus on under promising and over delivering and that's definitely what I believe we can expect this next major release. Yes, during Vista's development there were promises and some disappointments along the way and the Windows Team is trying avoid that as much possible and I applaud them for the effort. This early part of the conversation is targeted at developers and hardware engineers of course, and most persons interested will be able to get there first experiences with the OS this fall at the Public Developers Conference 2008 (PDC) and the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference 2008 (WinHEC). Technorati Tags: Windows 7,Steve Sinofsky,Jon DeVaan,Windows Vista,WinHEC,PDC,Operating Systems,2010,Office 14,Microsoft,Software 8月2日 Summer 2008 - How its been so farHi Readers, I haven't kept up with my promise of resuming blogging on a regular basis, but studies at school and upcoming exams have held me back a bit. The status right now is to focus on my studies and finish my exams which will come to a close by the end of August. The next step is job hunting for the fall. So, my summer has been well occupied with my education and future work life. Still I have gotten some free time and its mostly dedicated to relaxing. Internet issues at home have presented problems with keeping up with what's going on in the world of technology. The summer it seems have been mostly boring tech wise except for the launch of the iPhone 3G. Hopefully the fall will bring new products to test, (I see that Internet Explorer 8 BETA 2 is coming soon and the IE Team are looking for testers. I haven't even looked at the BETA 1 release because you know what and I missed out on reviewing other products like Windows Server 2008 (which I have become familiar with over the past months) (Bob, I promise to get that to you as soon as possible). I hope your summer has been well and I hope to be back blogging full time and presenting my thoughts on the Windows platform going forward. Thanks, Technorati tags: Summer 2008, Education, Personal, Work, Job Hunting, Technology, Blogging, Microsoft, Andre Da Costa Test PostTest Post |
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