Highlights from the Microsoft Build conference KeyNote delivered on Sept 13 2011:
- Less memory than Win7 (281 MB vs 403 MB); dropped 3 processes
- New WinRT – Windows Runtimes
- Graphics, transitions, effects built-in
- Supports multiple languages on top
- Visual Studio 11 – really smart!
- Cloud
- Integration built-in
- E.g. no need to download a photo from web-services and store it locally before uploading it to another web-service
- New Windows App Store
- Can publish apps to store directly from Visual Studio 11
- UI
- “Fast and Fluid” vision and execution
- Hardware accelerated graphics
- Hardware:
- Fast boot!
- Signature-checking on boot
- Can boot from a 256 TB drive (in comparison Win7 can boot from upto a 2 TB drive)
- Lots of work on supercool devices like sensors, 3G cards, etc. including protocols (e.g. USSD support)
- Experience measurement, remote desktop
- New task manager
- Windows Assessment Console that runs benchmark tests
- Metro style remote desktop
- Virtualization
- New Hyper-V integrated into Windows 8
- Mount ISO’s, mount VHD’s!
- Desktop
- New tile-based start screen
- Ribbon-based UI
- Quick access toolbar (if you use Office 2010 you’ll know what this is)
- New multi-monitor support
- Search built-in start screen – just start typing and go
- IE10
- Hardware acceleration support
- Social integration (context)
- LiveID login – can connect a PC to Live
- People application (from Windows Phone 7)
- Photos application (local HD, Skydrive, FB, Flickr)
- Other applications open from same context as social apps (e.g. mail app from photos app when you share via e-mail)
- Live API’s for SkyDrive
- Sync across PCs and phones
- Can create your own SkyDrive store - this looks like a killer proposition along with cloud integration and linking capabilities!
Some cool things demoed:
• Wrote a photo-doodle app that grabs pics from a content
store and allows doodling on it with “58 lines of code”
• A demo system started up faster than my TV!!!
• USB 3 support built-in – showed a speed comparison
between USB2 and USB3
• Tap to share through NFC!
• Samsung developer preview PC
