The announcement that European customers would only be able to purchase Windows 7 E, that is Windows 7 without the Internet Explorer browser, has put software developers and administrators into an awkward position. They now have to test their software, services and functionality in both versions of Windows 7 to make sure that it works with and without Internet Explorer. The Windows Team blog has published an extensive question and answer post about the best practices for developers concerning Windows 7 E.

Probably the best tip offered is to simulate a Windows 7 E version by disabling the Internet Explorer component. That’s the only way to test applications and services at this moment as there is no Windows 7 E version provided by Microsoft publicly yet. The post is quite extensive and a good read for software developers, system administrators and everyone else who has to make sure that software and services work in both Windows 7 and Windows 7 E.

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A recent screenshot posted on a Russian news portal (via Download Squad) suggests that Microsoft is already working on the first service pack for Windows 7. That should come as a surprise considering that they have not released the operating system yet. The screenshot shows a control panel window that is listing the Windows edition as Windows 7 Ultimate Service Pack 1.

The build string in the lower right corner contains removed and censored information. Readable are part of the buidl string which begins with Build 7138.winmain_win. Someone edited some of the information on the screenshot which could mean that the information about the service pack have also been added by the user.

It does make sense from a business perspective to begin working on the Windows 7 Service Pack at this time if the resources are available. Microsoft could use it to add new features to the operating system that did not make it into the final product.

The public relations perspective on the other hand looks grim. News about the service pack will without doubt spread fast to all corners of the Internet. This could convince some users to wait for the Service Pack release before they purchase the operating system.

Windows 7 is on the other hand a fairly stable well designed operating system that should run fine even without the service pack.

What are your thoughts about the Windows 7 SP1 development?

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The Windows 7 Developer Guide is available as a docx document or xps electronic paper format on the Microsoft website. The developers guide contains descriptions about features and technologies of the Windows 7 operating system. The guide contains 44 pages currently which contain information about various aspects of the Windows 7 operating system including system security, the User Account Control, the Windows troubleshooting platform or Open Packaging Conventions.

The Windows 7 Developer Guide is available for direct download. It has a size of about 1.7 Megabytes.

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The second video about Windows 7 that has been released by Channel 9 shows an interview with Mark Russinovich about the technical aspects of the Windows 7 operating system. It should be interesting to software developers and users who are interested in the Windows 7 Kernel.

Mark Russinovich: Inside Windows 7 was posted on Everything Microsoft - Latest Microsoft News, Guides, Reviews & Themes. If you are not reading this content in an email newsletter, it is being used without permission.

Just as Microsoft has intended it to be the Windows 7 blog run by two key figures of the Windows 7 development team has become one of the central information for information about the upcoming Microsoft operating system. The regular posts give insight into the development process, the development team and decision process but fail to deliver new information about the operating system itself.

It could be seen as a clever ploy by Microsoft to keep the news hungry blogosphere and crowd at bay by taking control of the Windows 7 news flow. Today’s post over at the blog is entitled Windows 7 Approach to System Performance, a much smaller article than the previous ones. Steven Sinofsky is again explaining theoretical and practical concepts that played a role in the Windows 7 development without mentioning any system requirements of the upcoming Windows 7 system.

It is nevertheless a good read from an engineering standpoint. He lists some of the metrics that the Windows 7 team is tracking during development including memory usage, cpu utilization and boot / shutdown / resume / standby times. He mentions criteria that they apply at the end of the milestones before they go into beta which have to be met and that they won’t ship the product if those criteria are not met.

We have criteria that we apply at the end of our milestones and before we go to beta and we won’t ship without broadly meeting these criteria. Sometimes these criteria are micro-benchmarks (page faults, processor utilization, working set, gamer frame rates) and other times they are more scenario based and measure time to complete a task (clock time, mouse clicks). We do these measurements on a variety of hardware platforms (32-bit or 64-bit; 1, 2, 4GB of RAM; 5400 to 7200 RPM or solid-state disks; a variety of processors, etc.) Because of the inherent tradeoffs in some architectural approaches, we often introduce conditional code that depends on the type of hardware on which Windows is running.

He also mentions that some users, usually the technical inclined prefer choice and customization, that some users want more eye candy while others prefer to go back to a Windows 2000 like experience.

..there are limits to what we can provide and at the same time provide a reliable “platform” that customers and developers can count on and is robust and manageable for a broad set of customers. But of course within a known context (within your home or within a business running a known set of software) it will always be possible to take advantage of the customization and management tools Windows has to offer to tune the experience

In conclusion Steven manages to provide some insight into yet another area of development while at the same time failing to provide any factual information about Windows 7.

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A few days ago we mentioned the new blog called Engineering Windows 7 which was run by two core members of the Windows 7 development team who promised to update the general public on Windows 7 news. Most likely in an effort to reduce the amount of rumors circulating the Internet and getting more control on the news flow.

Steven Sinofsky published a very long post today which contains interesting information about the Windows 7 team structure of the development team.

Microsoft is using so called feature teams of which there are 25 currently contributing to the development of Windows 7. The teams average about 40 developers which would mean a core development crew of around 1000 developers for Windows 7.

In general a feature team encompasses ownership of combination of architectural components and scenarios across Windows. “Feature” is always a tricky word since some folks think of feature as one element in the user-interface and others think of the feature as a traditional architectural component (say TCP/IP). Our approach is to balance across scenarios and architecture such that we have the right level of end-to-end coverage and the right parts of the architecture. One thing we do try to avoid is separating the “plumbing” from the “user interface” so that teams do have end-to-end ownership of work (as an example of that, “Find and Organize” builds both the indexer and the user interface for search).

He goes on to describe the exact composition of a feature team:

A feature team represents three core engineering disciplines of software development engineers (sde or dev), software development engineers in test (sdet or test, sorry but I haven’t written a job description externally), and program managers (pm)….

We talk about these three disciplines together because we create feature teams with n developers, n testers, and 1/2n program managers. This ratio is pretty constant across the team. On average a feature team is about 40 developers across the Windows 7 project.

This means that to the 1000 developers 1000 testers and 500 program managers are working on Windows 7. Now those are numbers calculated from the numbers given in the article. Those are also only the development numbers.

Several core members work across the entire product, those are the writers that create the documentations, manuals and websites related to Windows 7, members who do customer research and select features, designers who produce a consistent design and members who perform research and usability tests.

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Windows 7 News! There is finally a sign of life, an official that is, from Microsoft about Windows 7. Microsoft kicked of the Engineering Windows 7 blog which is run by two senior engineering managers for the Windows 7 product. The interesting aspect of this specific Windows 7 blog is that it is maintained and run by Microsoft employees that are deeply involved in the creation of Windows 7 and that it aims for a two-way communication instead of just reports without interaction.

We strongly believe that success for Windows 7 includes an open and honest, and two-way, discussion about how we balance all of these interests and deliver software on the scale of Windows. We promise and will deliver such a dialog with this blog.

Two events for developers have been mentioned in their initial blog post where Microsoft will provide “in-depth technical information about Windows 7″ and that the blog will inform interested users with regular posts about behind the scene developments. The two events mentioned are PDC (Professional Developers Conference) on October 27 and WinHec (Windows Hardware Engineering Conference) a week later. Seems we have to wait two more months before we finally get detailed information about the Windows 7 plattform.

The last paragraph is especially interesting and comments on the flow of news since the first announcement of Windows 7. Microsoft is trying to gain control of the discussion and communication about Windows 7 which is understandable. Rumors have been filling the void space that Microsoft left by not talking to anyone outside about Windows 7 and it’s time to control the information flow as we are slowly seeing the finish line in sight.

They also mention that they want to “make sure not to set expectations around the release that end up disappointing you” which was a major error Microsoft made during Windows Vista development.

Engineering Windows 7 was posted on Everything Microsoft - Latest Microsoft News, Guides, Reviews & Themes. If you are not reading this content in an email newsletter, it is being used without permission.

Microsoft has once again confirmed that Windows 7 is right on track and that they are still aiming for a release date that comes close to three years after the deployment of Windows Vista. Bill Veghte, Senior Vice President, Online Services & Windows Business Group, said on Thursday that Windows 7 remains on track according to an article published over at Cnet.

The article was updated lated on with a statement made by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer who did not reveal any new – and exciting – details about the upcoming Microsoft operating system. He did mention however that Windows 7 will look great and that it will be quite compatible which once again confirms that Microsoft will not implement any revolutionary changes in Windows 7.

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