WinInsider

At PDC 2008, Microsoft took the wraps off Windows 7 and showcased its new dock-like Taskbar. But the revamped Taskbar isn't in the pre-beta build distributed to attendees, so we went hunting for more details on Windows 7's most prominent new feature.First up, Quick Launch is officially dead. Microsoft will be leaving the Quick Launch folder in Windows 7 for backwards compatibility, but any shortcuts stored there will never show up. Deskbands still exist in Windows 7, but must also support rendering on the transparent Glass UI.

Microsoft and Yahoo have formed a group with two other partners to give law enforcement a hand in stopping bogus lottery scams and educating Internet surfers.

Microsoft and Yahoo have seen increasing amounts of e-mail using their brand names to convince unwitting users they've won a lottery. The scammers then instruct victims to pay fees in order to collect their winnings, a scam known as advance fee fraud. Joining those companies is the African Development Bank, whose brand is also abused, and Western Union, whose wire transfer services are frequently used in the scams.

The 3.0 version announced today enhances secure connectivity, with Wi-Fi integration, USB support, SSL and support for a FAT32-compatible file system. Both touch and gesture support has been added to user interface options. The .NET Micro Framework is designed for embedded systems, extending the .NET platform to handheld devices and smaller. Developers working with .NET MF can utilize higher level programming languages to control resource-limited devices.

In February, Microsoft added Web service support to the .NET framework with the version 2.5 release. The development at that time was .NET receiving DPWS.

The new taskbar in Windows 7 represents the most obvious visual change in the operating system since Windows 95. It will demand a little more interaction on the part of users who operate fewer applications at one time. However, that's a rapidly declining minority; and the text that appears to the right of running apps in the current taskbar is becoming, for most users, more obstructive than informational.

That said, it's not very pretty, at least not yet. In the interest of making the desktop prettier, the Windows 7 engineers have taken a cue from Excel, by adding a "live preview" option. For instance, when selecting a new wallpaper, you can see the choice you're considering on the desktop, prior to finalizing your choice.

Microsoft today released the first beta of its federated identity services framework aimed at simplifying the way enterprises deploy authentication services.

The company's Geneva framework is aimed at bringing claims-based federated identity management that extends to individuals, enterprises and online services.

The framework allows organizations to deploy various standards-based identity protocols -- including SAML, WS-Federated, WS-Identity and OpenID -- and provides a common exchange across various gateways and security token services.

Microsoft on Monday offered a software development kit for its tabletop computer to about 1,000 people at its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, opening the door to a variety of new applications for the table. Most people I talked to at two Seattle hotels that have Surface computers would probably agree that's a good thing.

The first one I stopped in, Hotel 1000, had a sleepy lobby, where just one person sat quietly reading a book at 11:30 a.m. on Monday. When I sat down to play around with the Surface, a hotel employee wandered by to comment on how cool it is and to say that it has limited apps now but that should change. She said it is quite popular with guests and that she tries to stop by when she sees people using it to make sure they've got the hang of it.

How about a 64-bit operating system with that 64-bit processor? The 64-bit version of Windows Vista is not new. It arrived when Vista did. But making it standard on a crush of new consumer laptops being sold at Best Buy is a recent change.

HPs new Pavilion HDX model ships standard with 64-bit Vista.(Credit: Hewlett-Packard) All PCs now ship with Intel or Advanced Micro Devices 64-bit processors. Until recently, however, most consumer laptops have come with a 32-bit version of Vista. There are many reasons for this, two of the biggest being a lack of driver support and the larger memory requirements for the 64-bit OS.

David Treadwell, Microsoft's corporate VP of the Live Services Platform, announced the new Live Framework during a Tuesday keynote that addressed Windows 7 and other tools and technologies that will comprise the front-end infrastructure of the company's unfolding Software plus Services strategy.

The Live Framework is described as a "uniform" way for developers to program against Live Services, which are integrated with Microsoft's Live Mesh platform. The new framework, released as a community technology preview on Monday, is designed to support multiple programming languages, devices and platforms.

Just two weeks after releasing Windows Embedded Standard 2009 based on Windows XP, Microsoft said Tuesday that the next version -- code-named "Quebec" -- will be built atop the Windows 7 code base. The news is significant, because it indicates that Microsoft is serious about making Windows 7 capable of running on devices with limited power. During the PDC keynote Tuesday, Microsoft Windows head Steven Sinofsky showed the audience a netbook (or sub-notebook) running Windows 7. Most netbooks currently ship with Windows XP or Linux.

As developers began to get their hands on Windows 7 Tuesday, they offered varied reactions to the Microsoft operating system update.

Windows 7 arrived in various forms here at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference. Windows VP Steven Sinofsky showed its key features on stage, the OS appeared on PCs throughout the convention center, and developers also got their own copies to take home with them.

Attendees to PDC 2008 received pre-beta copies of Windows 7 on DVD, as well as a 160GB Western Digital portable hard drive packed with code.