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.

Most developers have experienced the intellisense window popping up and hiding code you still need to see or reference. In the past, you had to close the intellisense window to see your code but Visual Studio 2008 has added a nice feature that lets you temporarily hide the intellisense window. Now when the intellisense window pops up you can press the Ctrl key to temporarily set the opacity to 10% on the intellisense window so you can see your code behind it. When you release the Ctrl key, the intellisense window opacity goes back to 100%.

Intellisense window showing as normal.
 

Intellisense window hidden while Ctrl key is pressed.