During PDC, I had the amazing opportunity to join a group of remarkable engineers in presenting part of the Windows 7 Boot Camp pre-con event. As I’ve reported live, the event took place on November 16th, in a room filled with 750 attendees who heard about the changes to Windows 7 and Server R2 Kernel, as well as some of the new “user-mode” APIs such as Taskbar, Libraries, touch, sensors, and DirectX.
This post (a little overdue), gives you the opportunity to see the video recordings and download the presentations and demo code. So even if you missed this pre-con you can enjoy it all from the comfort of your PC.
Mark Russinovich, Technical Fellow and the man behind SysInternals and many of the improvements in Windows 7, opened the day with a short introduction to the work done by the Kernel team and as a setup for the following two sessions. You can watch Mark’s presentation recording (time code – 00:00:00 – 00:13:45) and download his slides.
Arun Kishan, a Principal Architect for the process management components, described his work around the thread and process allocation that frees the kernel from its thread dispatcher locks and gives Windows 7 the ability to scale seamlessly to many (256) cores. Arun also talked about the new User Mode Scheduling in Windows 7 that enables quicker context switches between threads (since the threads run in user mode context), while at the same time allowing the kernel to “control” blocking threads, and thus not lose the LP to a thread outside its control. You can watch Arun’s presentation recording (time code 00:13:45 – 00:54:26) and download his slides.
The last speaker in the opening session was Landy Wang, a Distinguished Engineer in the Kernel team. Landy really drilled into the changes to Windows 7 Memory Management, and the amazing work done by the team to reduce the memory footprint, making the entire operating system run fast (real fast). Landy described the work being done to optimize the memory working sets, demystified some of the questions about the Task Manager’s main screen, and how the Task Manager shows the memory working set, along with some other useful information. You can watch Landy’s presentation recording (time code 00:54:26 – 01:50:43) and download his slides.
After lunch, we switched gears and reviewed the API for some of the UI elements of Windows 7. Jaime Rodriguez started the second part of the day with a great talk about the Windows 7 Taskbar, showing multiple ways (native and managed, using Window API Code Pack and WPF 4) to add great Taskbar functionality to your application. You can watch Jaime’s presentation recording (time code 00:00:00 - 00:44:07)
I followed with quick Windows libraries overview, focusing on the things you need to remember as developers since libraries may sometimes break your application. Here are the Windows 7 library presentation and code demos. You can watch the presentation video recording (time code 00:44:07 – 01:19:05)
My Second presentation that day was about the Windows 7 Sensor and Location Platform. I just love this platform, as it offers such great ways for developers to enable their applications respond to changes in the computer's environment. Showing the light optimizing MSDN Reader and the racing game always gets great reactions from the audience. Here is the Windows 7 Sensor and Location Platform presentation. You can watch the presentation recording (time code 01:20:04 – 02:10:43 ) and download the slides.
Next, Michael Oneppo explained the changes in the Windows 7 graphics stack. Michael's presentation is very interesting, as it describes some of the DirectX API that was down-ported to Windows 7 as a part of the Platform Update for Windows Vista and the Platform Update for Windows Server 2008. You can watch Michael’s presentation recording (time code 00:00:00 – 00:50:03) and download his slides.
Jaime was the last speaker of the day, covering Windows 7 Multitouch. Jaime explained the concept of multitouch using the native API, but switched to WPF 4.0 support for multitouch. You can watch Jaime’s presentation video recording (time code 00:53:50 - 01:34:37).
Last but not least, I want to express my appreciation and say a very big thank you to everyone who participated and helped make the boot camp a success. First to Jaime Rodriguez who made this event possible and helped set up and organize it, to the great speakers Mark Russinovich, Arun Kishan, Landy Wang, and Michael Oneppo, and for the entire crew of PDC.
See you at the next PDC! I am sure I will be there talking about Windows …
Most of the content presented during this day is based on the Windows 7 Training kit that is available from the Channel 9 Learning Center
More...
This post (a little overdue), gives you the opportunity to see the video recordings and download the presentations and demo code. So even if you missed this pre-con you can enjoy it all from the comfort of your PC.
Mark Russinovich, Technical Fellow and the man behind SysInternals and many of the improvements in Windows 7, opened the day with a short introduction to the work done by the Kernel team and as a setup for the following two sessions. You can watch Mark’s presentation recording (time code – 00:00:00 – 00:13:45) and download his slides.
Arun Kishan, a Principal Architect for the process management components, described his work around the thread and process allocation that frees the kernel from its thread dispatcher locks and gives Windows 7 the ability to scale seamlessly to many (256) cores. Arun also talked about the new User Mode Scheduling in Windows 7 that enables quicker context switches between threads (since the threads run in user mode context), while at the same time allowing the kernel to “control” blocking threads, and thus not lose the LP to a thread outside its control. You can watch Arun’s presentation recording (time code 00:13:45 – 00:54:26) and download his slides.
The last speaker in the opening session was Landy Wang, a Distinguished Engineer in the Kernel team. Landy really drilled into the changes to Windows 7 Memory Management, and the amazing work done by the team to reduce the memory footprint, making the entire operating system run fast (real fast). Landy described the work being done to optimize the memory working sets, demystified some of the questions about the Task Manager’s main screen, and how the Task Manager shows the memory working set, along with some other useful information. You can watch Landy’s presentation recording (time code 00:54:26 – 01:50:43) and download his slides.
After lunch, we switched gears and reviewed the API for some of the UI elements of Windows 7. Jaime Rodriguez started the second part of the day with a great talk about the Windows 7 Taskbar, showing multiple ways (native and managed, using Window API Code Pack and WPF 4) to add great Taskbar functionality to your application. You can watch Jaime’s presentation recording (time code 00:00:00 - 00:44:07)
I followed with quick Windows libraries overview, focusing on the things you need to remember as developers since libraries may sometimes break your application. Here are the Windows 7 library presentation and code demos. You can watch the presentation video recording (time code 00:44:07 – 01:19:05)
My Second presentation that day was about the Windows 7 Sensor and Location Platform. I just love this platform, as it offers such great ways for developers to enable their applications respond to changes in the computer's environment. Showing the light optimizing MSDN Reader and the racing game always gets great reactions from the audience. Here is the Windows 7 Sensor and Location Platform presentation. You can watch the presentation recording (time code 01:20:04 – 02:10:43 ) and download the slides.
Next, Michael Oneppo explained the changes in the Windows 7 graphics stack. Michael's presentation is very interesting, as it describes some of the DirectX API that was down-ported to Windows 7 as a part of the Platform Update for Windows Vista and the Platform Update for Windows Server 2008. You can watch Michael’s presentation recording (time code 00:00:00 – 00:50:03) and download his slides.
Jaime was the last speaker of the day, covering Windows 7 Multitouch. Jaime explained the concept of multitouch using the native API, but switched to WPF 4.0 support for multitouch. You can watch Jaime’s presentation video recording (time code 00:53:50 - 01:34:37).
Last but not least, I want to express my appreciation and say a very big thank you to everyone who participated and helped make the boot camp a success. First to Jaime Rodriguez who made this event possible and helped set up and organize it, to the great speakers Mark Russinovich, Arun Kishan, Landy Wang, and Michael Oneppo, and for the entire crew of PDC.
See you at the next PDC! I am sure I will be there talking about Windows …
Most of the content presented during this day is based on the Windows 7 Training kit that is available from the Channel 9 Learning Center
More...