Happy New Year! Windows 7 Beta is here!

Hello and Happy New Year!

Windows 7 Beta is here!!!

· Get the Windows 7 Beta: Download the Windows 7 Beta from the MSDN site.

· Test for compatibility: Ensure your new applications are compatible with Windows Vista; that is the best way to prepare for Windows 7.  For ISVs already compatible with Vista, encourage your local application developers to begin testing their applications on the Windows 7 Beta bits. Check out the Windows 7 Application Quality Cookbook to help with this.  Early application testing will ensure a smooth migration. Help them learn more about Windows 7 using the Windows 7 Developer guide, and optimize performance using the Windows Performance Toolkit.

· Innovate with Windows 7: Increase awareness regarding what’s possible with Windows 7 and encourage your customers and partners to innovate and get logoed.

So now you are able to easily start trying out Windows 7, and in coming months  there will be sensors on market to use with Sensor and Location Platform. Expect to receive SDK shortly :)

Other news

Materials from Microsoft Tech.Day 2008 @ MSU are posted to live site!

As you know we (Microsoft Russia folks) with help from Redmond Windows Product Group (PC|3) talked about Windows 7, it’s Sensor and Location Platform and how they can together enable you to write cool new Context-Aware applications, at Microsoft Tech.Day at MSU last year in December.

So the page was updated and materials were posted :)

here you go: https://microsoft.cs.msu.su/events/Pages/TechDay2008.aspx (warning: Russian language!)

Few interesting posts to read about Sensor and Location Platform in Windows 7

and, btw, found a very interesting article on our lovely Windows Sensor and Location Platform (again in Russian) here:

https://ko-online.com.ua/node/39327

also you might find it interesting to look onto these posts (both are in English):

Point for Discussion: Privacy for Windows 7 Sensor and Location Platform

And if you are thinking about Privacy and critics of how it was implemented in Windows 7 for Location Platform check out this post: https://www.aclunc.org/issues/technology/blog/location_tracking_in_windows_7.shtml

I think it is important here to comment:

in Windows 7 we tried to make Sensor and Location Platform a system that will consider all information coming from sensors as PI (Personal Information). This leads to fact that user should be in control for usage of this information. Thus by default if you insert a new sensor into your Windows 7 PC it will be disabled and if any application will want to access it Windows will ask you if you want to enable this application to access this sensor or no. But, the implementation is that you can control if sensor will work or won’t work. You do not have granularity of kind when you can control access to sensor data by apps. This might be considered as a huge problem, but

THERE IS NO WAY TO IDENTIFY THAT APP WAS NOT REPLACED BY VIRUS. THERE IS NO WAY TO IDENTIFY IF APP THAT YOU GRANTED ACCESS TO SENSOR DATA WAS NOT CHANGED.

It’s where simplicity of creating new apps for Windows makes it also impossible to easily track all apps in the system, IMHO.

What do you think? How would you implement such a system?