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?
Ed Bott 
I am thinking WinHEC….hope to see you there.
Interesting, I’m curious why they’re pushing SOAP in native code when it’s already fairly easy to do, plus a lot of people really looking for REST-based API’s these days. Hopefully they’ll be putting the session notes online afterwards.
Have fun at PDC and let us all know how it goes 🙂
so it’s not worth coming to ces to hang with me, eh? fine, I get the hint. no more free booze and hookers for you, my friend.
dt
ps to judy: just kidding about the hookers and booze.