Developers! Windows 7 is coming soon and you can pre-order it now!

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Order it today at a great price

I don’t usually make myself an advertising mouthpiece but as a canny Scot I cannot pass up telling you about a good deal when I see one. If you are based in the UK you may be interested in the chance to pre-order Windows 7 now at a very attractive price.  It’s a time limited and stock limited offer and currently you can choose between Windows 7 Home Premium E and Windows 7 Professional E.

The recommended offer prices are £49.99 for Home Premium and £99.99 for Professional. But note that it is worth checking the prices offered by each retailer (hint: it really is worth checking!). Note that this gets you a full product, not just an upgrade, so you can use it to go out and build your own shiny new bare metal monster machine to install it on.

Note that with the E edition you cannot do an in place upgrade but need to install a new copy. (but it’s not always a bad thing having a nice clean copy of the OS). You also need to then install an Internet Browser of your own choosing, so make sure you have a copy at hand.

So what can I do with it once I’ve installed it I hear you ask?

Well, as a developer you’ll want to ensure your applications are compatible with it before your customers get it so you probably want to grab yourself a copy of the Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit 5.5.

In fact, as a developer you should really be doing that now using the release candidate (RC) which you can still download here. If you previously downloaded the beta, you will probably find it is rebooting every couple of hours and furthermore it will expire completely on 1st August. A very good reason to download the release candidate now. But hurry,the RC download program ends on 15th August.

You’ll probably also want to grab yourself a copy of the “Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows 7” as well, either as an ISO or a web based install.

A good page to book mark would be the “Develop for Windows 7” portal on MSDN.

There is also a “Windows 7 RC Training Kit for Developers”

HTH

Doug