TechDays: Anthony Vranic on Optimizing Your Application for the Windows 7 User Experience
My photos from Anthony Vranic’s session at TechDays, Optimizing Your Application for the Windows 7 User Experience, are a bit dark because I used a different camera; my main camera was on video recording duty. I’m including them anyway, because I’m trying to keep a complete record of TechDays.
The original version of this presentation from TechEd North America is somewhat different – its target audience was C++ developers, and TechDays is more of a managed code audience. Since the original TechEd presentation, Microsoft released the Windows API Code Pack for the .NET Framework , and Anthony added it to his presentation.
The Windows API Code Pack for .NET gives managed code access to a lot of features, including some new ones introduced in Windows 7, such as:
- Windows 7 Taskbar Jump Lists, Icon Overlay, Progress Bar, Tabbed Thumbnails, and Thumbnail Toolbars
- Windows 7 Libraries, Known Folders, non-file system containers
- Windows Shell Search API support, a hierarchy of Shell Namespace entities, and Drag and Drop functionality for Shell Objects
- Explorer Browser Control
- Shell property system
- Windows Vista and Windows 7 Common File Dialogs, including custom controls
- Windows Vista and Windows 7 Task Dialogs
- Direct3D 11.0, Direct3D 10.1/10.0, DXGI 1.0/1.1, Direct2D 1.0, DirectWrite, Windows Imaging Component (WIC) APIs -- (DirectWrite and WIC have partial support)
- Sensor Platform APIs
- Extended Linguistic Services APIs
- Power Management APIs
- Application Restart and Recovery APIs
- Network List Manager APIs
- Command Link control and System defined Shell icons
- Shell Search API support
- Drag and Drop functionality for Shell objects
- Support for Direct3D and Direct2D interoperability
- Support for Typography and Font enumeration DirectWrite APIs
Watch this blog – I’ll posting some example code for the Windows API Code Pack for .NET in the coming weeks!
[This article also appears in my personal tech blog, Global Nerdy.]