Alex Eckelberry wrote a good post today reacting to a Microsoft white paper on misunderstood features in Windows Vista. I especially liked his comments on UAC:

UAC could certainly have been handled better. It does something the security industry has been well aware of for a long time — it creates the “cry wolf” problem of popup fatigue (people turn off or ignore the popups after awhile). Vista is more secure than XP, despite what others might say, but it still gets infected. Since over 80% of all infections are based on social engineering, the popups should focus on that weak point. If UAC targeted the key areas where people run into trouble (as opposed to harrasing the user on inane actions), it would be far more helpful and potentially make a really significant impact on infection rates.

Exactly right. A little over two years ago, when Vista was still in beta testing, I had some suggestions for Microsoft on how to improve the UAC experience. I’ve updated those thoughts in my latest post over at ZDNet:

Dear Microsoft: Please get UAC right this time

For what it’s worth, I didn’t see a single UAC prompt in Julie Larson-Green’s demo at D6 earlier this week (overshadowed somewhat by Ballmer and Gates) of multi-touch technology running on Windows 7.

New at ZDNet:

Free Sysinternals Windows utilities now available online, 24/7

A few weeks ago, I ran into Sysinternals co-founder Mark Russinovich at a technical conference, where he told me about a new Sysinternals service that was in private beta testing. Today, I can finally break the news that Sysinternals Live is now open to the public.

The new service enables you to execute the most recent version of any Sysinternals tool directly from an Internet-connected PC, without having to hunt for the executable file and manually download it first.

If you’re an IT pro or a developer, this is very, very cool stuff.

…and CrunchGear. The entire smackdown is here:

CrunchGear [claims] without a sigh of doubt these are real screenshots of Windows 7. Their followup update somehow insists a Microsoft employee has told them these are “older version of the concept renderings…” TechCrunch gives them their “seal of approval”. At the time of writing, now 925,000 RSS subscribers have been told these are “real”.

[…]

[A]ll of the images are third-party mockups except the “version screen” which is not very interesting to begin with. For an article claiming to have “a ton of … screen shots of the current build of Windows 7″ this is pretty ridiculous.

Long’s deadpan conclusion: "Some writers hold a higher level of integrity than others."

True dat.

I’ve suspected for a long time that the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles this fall will be the official coming-out party for Windows 7. Today, Microsoft confirmed that suspicion with its release of a preliminary PDC agenda that includes these four Windows 7-focused sessions:

Windows 7: Graphics Advances

Windows 7 enables you to advance the graphics capabilities of your applications while carrying forward existing investments in your Win32 codebase, including GDI and GDI+. New enhancements to DirectX let Win32 applications harness the latest innovations in GPUs and LCD displays, including support for scalable, high-performance, 2D and 3D graphics, text, and images. Also learn how to leverage the GPU’s parallelism for general-purpose computation such as image processing.

Windows 7: Optimizing for Energy Efficiency and Battery Life

A single application can reduce mobile battery life by up to 30%. Windows 7 provides advances for building energy-efficient applications. In this session we will discuss how to leverage new Windows infrastructure to reduce application power consumption and efficiently schedule background tasks and services.

Windows 7: Touch Computing

In Windows 7, innovative touch and gesture support will enable more direct and natural interaction in your applications. This session will highlight the new multi-touch gesture APIs and explain how you can leverage them in your applications.

Windows 7: Web Services in Native Code

Windows 7 introduces a new networking API with support for building SOAP based web services in native code. This session will discuss the programming model, interoperability aspects with other implementations of WS-* protocols and demonstrate various services and applications built using this API.

Lots and lots of stuff around IE8, services, and Live Mesh, too. And I expect to see several more Windows 7 topics announced as the conference date gets closer.

I’ve been planning to attend PDC and possibly the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference, WinHEC, in the same location the following week. Now, PDC is on my must-attend list and WinHEC is penciled in as well.

In the interests of balance, next January’s Consumer Electronics Show is now off my list of upcoming events. I got next to nothing out of this year’s CES except for the opportunity to meet with some friends and colleagues and to catch the worst flu I’ve suffered through in 20 years. The transportation hassles, the cost, and the lack of real news makes it easy to scratch CES 2009 off my list.

So, who else is going to PDC? WinHEC, anyone?

I’ve seen plenty of commentary today about the Steven Sinofsky interview with Ina Fried at CNET News.com. Most of it is some variation of “WTF?!”

Here are some of the best examples I found.

Jimmy Rogers, Shipping Seven:

Sinofsky, head of Windows engineering over at Microsoft, gave the most corporate, double-talking interview I have ever heard.

Chris at LiveSide:

What happens when you take the man in charge of the world’s most-used operating system and ask him to talk about the future? Not a lot when that man is Steven Sinofsky.

Paul Thurrott, Paul’s SuperSite Blog:

Here’s a recap of today’s Windows 7 stories: Nothing happened. That said, there was enough nothing to generate three different articles.

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, The PC Doctor:

CNET News interviewed Steven Sinofsky in an attempt to get some concrete information about Windows 7. The bottom line – a whole lotta nothing.

Dwight Silverman, Dwight Silverman’s TechBlog:

Written as a Q&A, it’s one of the most maddening interviews I’ve ever read. Fried, to her credit, pounds away at Sinofsky’s wall of obfuscation, but just can’t crack it.

In a nutshell, Sinofsky’s message is: We’re not talking about Windows 7 until we have something to talk about. And he says it over and over as Fried tries to find an opening that will make him spill at least a few beans.

Josh Phillips, Windows Connected:

This is the longest interview about nothing I have seen in a while. The WindowsVistaBlog has another lengthy post that amounts to nothing.

Also from Josh, via LiveSide, is this LOL translation of Sinofsky’s message:

i iz keeping it on lockdown, kthxbai.

Funny, I actually learned three things from it, as did Ina Fried, who did the interview and didn’t seem excessively frustrated by the experience:

The other thing that Sinofsky talked about at length is his approach to revealing information. He explained why things have been so quiet and (my read here) why we will continue to hear less about Windows 7 early on than we did about Vista or Windows XP.

Microsoft clearly feels it was burned with saying too much about “Longhorn” early on in development. It’s not just the bad press, Sinofsky said. By announcing plans and then changing them, he said that developers just decided to wait until Vista finally shipped to start taking it seriously. That’s a bad thing, particularly when many of Vista’s changes were the under-the-hood kind that required developer support to make them pay off.

After 15 years of hype, I really don’t object to a little mystery and a little more confidence that the demo I’m seeing will be in the final product. Let’s not go overboard, though.

Information is beginning to trickle out about Windows 7. Steven Sinofsky (who my colleague Mary Jo Foley calls Microsoft’s Chief Secrecy Officer) sat down for an interview with Ina Fried that was published today at CNET News.com. I’m glad to get validation about my opinion that the much-heralded MinWin project is not a complete kernel rewrite and that the Vista/Server 2008 platform is at the core of Windows 7:

The real areas I’ve heard a lot about are this idea of a new kernel, a minimum Windows kernel that came up in a speech, and then some stuff around new user interfaces. Can you tell us a little bit more about where those things fit in with how you guys are thinking about Windows 7?

We’re very clear that drivers and software that work on Windows Vista are going to work really well on Windows 7; in fact, they’ll work the same. We’re going to not introduce additional compatibilities, particularly in the driver model. Windows Vista was about improving those things. We are going to build on the success and the strength of the Windows Server 2008 kernel, and that has all of this work that you’ve been talking about. The key there is that the kernel in Windows Server 08 is an evolution of the kernel in Windows Vista, and then Windows 7 will be a further evolution of that kernel as well.

A companion piece is up on Microsoft’s official Windows Team blog, the first substantive post by Chris Flores, who took over that space from Nick White recently. As I noted at ZDNet last week (How much do you need to know about Windows 7 today?), Microsoft has chosen to be much less chatty about its Windows plans, and Chris emphasizes that that is a deliberate strategy:

What is a little different today is when and how we are talking about the next version of Windows.  So, why the change in approach?  We know that when we talk about our plans for the next release of Windows, people take action. As a result, we can significantly impact our partners and our customers if we broadly share information that later changes.  With Windows 7, we’re trying to more carefully plan how we share information with our customers and partners.  This means sharing the right level of information at the right time depending on the needs of the audience.  For instance, several months ago we began privately sharing our preliminary plans for Windows 7 with software and hardware partners who build on the Windows platform.  This gave them an opportunity to give us feedback and gave us the opportunity to incorporate their input into our plans. As the product becomes more complete, we will have the opportunity to share our plans more broadly.

And if you want to actually hear what Mary Jo and I have to say about Windows 7, watch this short video hosted by ZDNet editor-in-chief Larry Dignan:

http://i.zdnet.com/flash/cnb_video.swf

More reading:

How much do you need to know about Windows 7 today?

Mary Jo Foley: Windows 7: The information lockdown continues

Is MinWin really the new Windows 7 kernel?

Mary Jo Foley: What we do know about Windows 7?

Windows 7 = Vista Release 2

Cast your vote in the Windows 7 release date prediction pool

Windows 7 ship date? The crowd has spoken…

Nick MacKechnie, a Microsoftie from New Zealand, says a new beta of IE8 is due sometime before September 30. And this one won’t be just for developers:

We are encouraging site administrators to get their sites ready now for broad adoption of Internet Explorer 8, as there will be a beta release in the third quarter of this year targeted for all consumers.  To learn more and get started, please follow the step-by-step instructions located at the following link:  http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=120024 .

Strange, but I would have expected to read that news on the IE Team Blog. For what it’s worth, I’m fairly certain that IE8 and Windows 7 share that milestone. A solid consumer beta of IE8 will be a must-have for a beta release of Windows 7.

Let’s see, IE8 beta in Q3. Microsoft Professional Developers Conference a month or two later, October 27-30, 2008. Yeah, that sounds about right.

Robert McLaws has had a busy week. I believe it qualifies as unfortunate timing when you have to juggle waiting in the maternity wing and judging 31 video entries in your share of the HP-sponsored 31 Days of the Dragon contest.

You can see the three runners-up and the winner here. Like Robert, I was blown away by this entry (Robert said "after 2 seconds, I was picking my jaw up off the keyboard"). I hope that Microsoft’s new ad agency takes a good long look at what he’s done and maybe even buys it.

Very smart.

A little later: In the comments, Dave points out that Robert thinks Microsoft should hire the guy who created the runner-up. I agree that that entry was the most polished, production-wise, but it reminds me too much of other things Microsoft has done, in that it tries to tell me how useful and awesome Windows Vista is instead of showing me, which is what Nathan Hamersley of Rittman, OH did in the winning entry.

Here’s the runner-up from Dave the Dragon. You decide.

Everyone at Slashdot hates Microsoft and bashes Vista, right? Maybe not. I have my filters set pretty high at /. and all of the following comments made it through on a single thread:

I don’t really get all the Vista hatred

I bought Vista, I use Vista, and once I turned off UAC I’ve had no problems with Vista. I think the hatred for it is overstated, and largely perpetuated by people who don’t use it – the only problem I’ve had is a lack of printer drivers for a printer, and that’s because Samsung want to sell new printers rather than make new drivers for their old ones…

Wait, this is /. – I mean, uh, Microsoft suck!

The Question

I have 2 computers running Vista. Neither of them came bundled with it. I am very happy with Vista… I haven’t had any problems at all (even though I will likely be modded as such, I am not trolling).

The Slashdot Stepfords

Vista is a fine operating system. Most people hate it for the same reason they hate Paris Hilton: When the crowd speaks, you must obey!

[…]

If you are a neophyte computer user, you’ll have problems with Vista as you would with any operating system. If you’re an idiot who has only used XP, but never a secure operating system like Linux or OS X, you’ll hate UAC. If you’re just kind of slow, you won’t like how some things are now colored differently. Oh no, confusing!

Frankly, I am really, really, tired of all this Microsoft bashing. If it were real criticism, related to reality, they might benefit from it and come up with a better OS. It’s not. Basically, it’s a loud message to Microsoft: Don’t innovate, we can’t appreciate it. The color of the taskbar is more important that impovements like Start Window search, improved booting and recovery (that has saved my ass at least once), improved security, vastly polished system tools of all sorts; no, what matters is that not everything is in the some place it used to be. What matters is that there are a few geriatric scanners that nobody has released Vista drivers for. Good god, most of the people having problems with Vista shouldn’t be using computers in the first place — that’s the real crime here.

I know me…

…and I bought a copy of Vista to update a multiprocessor Opetron workstation, back a month after Vista came out.

I’ve also upgraded two recent purchases from Windows Business/Home to Windows Ultimate.

In addition to Vista, I run a few Linux systems (Gentoo, Ubuntu), some XP, and an OS X laptop. So when I say "I’m happy with Vista" is based on experience with the alternatives.

Vista is not crap. Vista, in many ways, is a significant improvement over XP. And all other OSs have their own problems and good points. I think some tech people need to grow up and stop being pedantic fanatics.

To head off the inevitable "Vista sucks" comments: The fact that some people actually like Vista and prefer it to XP does not mean your miserable Vista experience didn’t happen. It might, however, mean that your miserable Vista experience could be turned around if you’re interested in doing so.

Long Zheng has uncovered an interesting job posting at Microsoft, seeking engineers to  "bring virtualization into the mainstream." It’s one of the few (no doubt inadvertent) leaks in the Windows 7 feature set we’ve yet seen:

In Windows 7, our team will be responsible for creating, mounting, performing I/O on, and dismounting VHDs (virtual hard disks) natively.

[…]

Virtualization technology has been a great success with Virtual Server and Hyper-V. With native OS support on the horizon it will become an even greater hit. Our team is making this a reality in Windows 7. Consider the simplicity of backup using a VHD, or the portability of a virtual disk backed by a single file. These are a few reasons why this technology is poised to be one of the greatest features in Windows 7–come help us achieve this goal.

In an update, Long notes that a few people he’s talked to have "expressed their concern this may not make it to RTM."

Maybe, but it’s worth noting that support for the VHD format is in Windows Vista today, in the form of the Complete PC Backup program found in the Business, Ultimate, and Enterprise editions. (Here’s an August 2006 demo of the feature, which also mentions the capability of mounting saved VHD files.) So the operating system already has code to create and perform I/O on VHD files.

During the beta for Vista, I recall product managers talking about how they wanted to include a tool to mount and unmount those backup images but ran out of time. That was in summer 2006, around the time RC1 was declared, and presumably the teams responsible for that code continued working on it. No doubt much of the work that has gone into Hyper-V (RC1 just shipped) and Virtual PC 2007 (Service Pack 1 just shipped) could also make it into Windows 7.

Given that base, it’s a safe bet that development of this feature is pretty far along. Far enough, in fact, that whoever wrote that job posting has enough confidence to predict that "this technology is poised to be one of the greatest features in Windows 7." It might have a better chance of making it into the final release than those skeptics think .

Update: In the comments, Greg Duncan points out that Vista users can install the VHDMount utility from Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 and use it to mount/unmount VHD files, although it’s not easy. More details in his post here.

From the sidebar at Greg’s blog, I see that he has been living up to his blog’s name by working on some cool-looking Windows LIve Writer templates as well. Nice!