Ars Technica’s review of Windows 7 is extensively detailed and contains a lot of good information. But one piece jumped out at me, and that was this paragraph on the last page : If Vista had gotten the reception it actually deserved, and become a brand worth keeping, it seems highly likely that the name would have been retained. And Microsoft knows it, which is why internally, Windows 7 is only version 6.1 . Sure, the company has made specious claims that this is to avoid breaking applications with bad version checks, but the logic doesn’t really hold; many of those applications are just as broken by “6″ as they would be by “7,” and if that were such a concern then the minor version wouldn’t change either. This might make sense to a lay person on a cursory reading, but as usual with software development, reality is full of subtle but important complexities. Pop quiz Consider the following rather common version checking mistake: // Our app is designed for XP (5.1) and later if (majorVersion >= 5 && minorVersion >= 1) { // Succeed } else { // Fail } Given the returned version values from Windows XP (reports 5.1), Windows Vista (reports 6.0), and Windows 7 (reports 6.1) – which OSes will this program succeed on?
As of today, Windows 7 is officially the latest commercially available operating system from Microsoft. That’s a pretty cool thing for me in several ways. First of all, when discussing Windows 7 over the last few months I’ve had to add the caveat “and it’ll be available toward the end of October.” On several occasions I’d come close to forgetting that Windows 7 wasn’t already released since my work on it has largely been done for a while and all the people I work with have been running it for months (if not longer). At last I can tell people not only how excited I am about Windows 7, but also that they can go check it out or buy it right now . That’s pretty cool. Another thing that’s pretty cool is realizing how fast it all seemed to happen. When I first joined the Windows Experience team at the beginning of Windows 7 I was a bit nervous about working on such a large project with a timeline that seemed near to an eternity . I feared that I’d get bored or that the work would drag on and on, and that in the end I’d just be dying to be done . Instead, the time flew by and it was fun . What’s more, our team planned and executed the release so well that it never felt like we needed to scramble to meet a deadline. We even somehow managed to avoid another common pitfall of always wanting to add “just one more thing.” Instead of feeling like it took too long or that we ran out of time to do everything I wanted, this release feels pretty darn close to “just right.” And the experience has given me unending optimism for the work our team will do going forward. Anyway, what does this all mean for you? Well, for starters you can… Visit your local computer store like Best Buy or Fry’s and check out dozens of awesome new Windows 7 PCs. Buy Windows 7 or Windows 7 PCs from the new Microsoft Store . Check out amazing new machines like the Dell Adamo XPS Read LifeHacker’s complete guide to all things Windows 7 Have you tried Windows 7 yet? Will you be buying an upgrade or a new Windows 7 PC this holiday season
Today Microsoft announced the official line-up of Windows 7 editions that will be made available. Ed Bott does a nice job covering the announcement. The main changes, which I am very happy about, are: Two main Editions for consumers. Home Premium, and Professional. Professional now contains Media Center and everything else in Home Premium, as well as the traditional Pro feature set (Remote Desktop, domain support, etc).
Long Zheng of iStartedSomething.com has taken it upon himself to enable users to leverage my Windows 7 feature, called Search Federation, to search their Flickr photos from inside the Explorer. It looks like a work-in-progress, and since his service works as a proxy to talk to Flickr, performance isn’t what it would be if Flickr had a native implementation. But for something he threw together over the last night or two I’m impressed! We’ll be talking more about Search Federation on the Engineering Windows 7 blog soon, and will have much more to share when we deliver the upcoming Windows 7 beta release.
