Thushan Fernando Uncut

Almost missed this one, Paul Thurrott of WinSuperSite fame has previewed Windows 7 Beta 1 a day before Christmas - he must have been an ultra good  boy in that case.

Well, the waiting is finally over. What you’re looking at here is the eagerly awaited Windows 7 Beta, the pre-release version of Microsoft’s next operating system that will ship publicly by mid-January. As promised, there are no new features exposed in the Beta: Instead, Microsoft has tweaked all of the existed features that were announced at PDC 2008 and provided a build that is capable of day-to-day use. I’ll be reviewing the Windows 7 Beta soon.

Whilst most will have to wait a tinsy bit more before they get their hands on the ‘official’ Beta 1 release - tagged v6.1.7000.0 (winmain.win7beta.081212-1400).

Paul gives us a run down of the installation (part1, part2), first boot (part1 - with Windows Media Player, IE amongst the shots, part2 - Control panel applets, wireless, desktop UI changes).

If that wasnt enough, NeoWin also has a thread from a forum member of the leaked pre-release. Wow, is this not the best Christmas EVAR for l33tle geeks around the globe?

Developer, Operating Systems, Windows, Windows 7, software fivestar, fivestarvip, microsoft, neowin, operating system, paul, vista, win7, winbeta, Windows, windows 7, winmain.win7beta.081212-1400

If you like discussions about deep internals you’ll most definately have subscribed to the Going Deep series on Channel 9. Today they just released a fascinating interview with Kernel Guru, Mark Russinovich - of Sysinternals fame, who is now a Technical Fellow at Microsoft. One of my favourite books would have to be Windows Internals 4th Edition, and reference it quite frequently. Cant wait for the 5th edition!!!

One very important change in Windows 7 kernel is the dismantling of the Spin Lock Dispatcher and redesign and implementation of its functionality into separate components. This work was done by Arun Kishan (you’ve met him here on C9 last year). The direct result of this great work is that Windows 7 can scale to 256 processors and enabled the great Landy Wang to tune Windows Memory manager to be even more efficient than it already is. Mark also explains (again) what MinWin really is (heck, even I was confused. Not anymore…). MinWin is present in Windows 7.

There are some really interesting topics covered in this video, especially the content behind the scheduler and the thread dispatcher.

Channel 9 Going Deep: Inside Windows 7

Download Offline versions: WMV | WMV HD | MP4 (iPod) | ZUNE

.NET / CLR / C#, Developer, Kernel / Internals, Operating Systems, Security, Windows, Windows 7, software contention, cores, dispatcher lock, internals, Kernel, lock, mark russinovich, minwin, multicore, multiprocesser, scheduler, sleep, spin lock, spinning, thread, threading, wake, win7, Windows, windows 7

Unless you’ve been living under a rock under the Apple tree you would have heard that a little company in Redmond WA has been working on a new version of Windows dubbed Windows 7 (which is what it will actually be called for once!).

At PDC today, Microsoft finally unveiled the much-anticipated release of Windows 7 and handed out pre-beta bits to atendees (tagged 6801.winmain_win7m3.081020-1655). They demonstrated a newer build which was tagged 6933.winmain.081020-184 during PDC which unfortunately was not given out. Unfortunately I couldn’t go due to work constraints, but in case your in the same boat I’ve collected some of the best sources of info out there for you to browse through.

First and foremost, some pretty pictures of the glassy new desktop UI.

Some interesting articles out of the many out there that are recommended reading:

• PC Magazine’s Inside Windows 7 Pre-Beta - Probably the first thing you should read.
• Extreme Tech’s Why Windows 7 Will Suck Less Than Vista - Offers a comparison between Vista and 7

For the pretty screenshots, see galleries here and here. More information and probably a bit more discussion will follow soon.

EDIT:
ArsTechnica have got an updated build reviewed which goes into bit more depth too and NeoWin has posted a nice gallery walkthrough of the Win7 UI and details about Vista SP2.

.NET / CLR / C#, Developer, Operating Systems, Tools / Products, Windows, hardware, software apple, beta, bill, longhorn, microsoft, operating system, pdc, pre-release, redmond, seven, sp2, steve, vista, vista sp2, win7, Windows, windows 7, winmain