Jason Hedges’ Blog

Microsoft is helping developers get started with Windows 7 development by providing the Windows 7 Developer Guide. The Windows 7 Developer Guide provides a high-level overview of Windows 7 development and summarizes the advances in Windows 7 for developing rich application experiences.

Here a few of the areas that looked interesting:

• Windows PowerShell 2.0: PowerShell is a complete .NET managed scripting language. Find further information on what’s new at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd367858.aspx or follow the MSDN PowerShell blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/PowerShell/.
• XPS Documents: Windows 7 provides the new XPS Document APIs for Win32 developers to reduce the amount of work required when working with XPS. You can find XPS Document Programming Samples at http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/xps/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=2034.
• Jump Lists: See Janae’s post on Windows 7 Taskbar and Jump Lists at http://fusionovation.com/blogs/janae/archive/2009/05/08/windows-7-taskbar-and-jump-lists.aspx.
• Gadgets Platform: See Janae’s post on the Windows 7 gadgets platform at http://fusionovation.com/blogs/janae/archive/2009/05/28/windows-7-gadgets-platform.aspx.
• Scenic Ribbon: Windows 7 features the Ribbon interface from Office 2007 throughtout the operating system. Templates and markup authoring are available to developers for rapid development and integration of Ribbon functionality. Check out Scenic Ribbon developer resources at http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/ScenicRibbon.
• Windows BranchCache: Clients can retrieve data from other clients in their own branch that already downloaded data instead of having to retrieve the data over remove servers. You can find the BranchCache Early Adopter’s Guide at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=A9A1ED8A-71AB-468E-A7E0-470FD46E46B3&displaylang=en.