Windows 7 is to quote one Microsoft person “A lot closer than most people imagine”… in fact they just announced that general availability (ie. boxes on the shelves) will occur on 10/22/09.  Of course this was old news 5 minutes after it was posted and refers to general availability – not the Release To Manufacturing (RTM) date that really represents when the software will be done and start being available for download if you have an MSDN subscription.

However the focus of this post since I installed a few copies (or more) and since I’m using it on a few machines, are my three (yes only three, and in no particular order) top features and have some notes on using one of them.  (OK actually they are ordered inverse to how much I’m going to write about them…)

The first is the boot to VHD feature.  As I noted you need to ensure you’ve enabled hardware virtualization on your PC, but this feature rocks.

The second which I’m only just starting to work with is the backwards compatibility XP host support.  The idea is that there are several older apps which for a variety of reasons will not run on Vista/Windows 7 natively.  For example old Access applications which leverage the MS Grid OCX stop working when you move beyond XP.  To resolve this, while preserving the core security of the new environment, the Windows team created a compatibility mode which essentially uses a Windows XP VPC in the background, but allows these applications to ‘seem’ to run on the newer system.  The idea sounds like a good way to bring these two opposing needs (I need this old application, and I need all the newest security and capabilities on my computer) together.

My third feature is pinning.  Windows 7 makes it easy to add new items to the Start Menu and to the Windows Task Bar.  The feature makes it easy to keep the most frequently used lists from betraying you.  However there is a way to really leverage this feature better than the default.  You’ll note in the image below I’ve placed both Visual Studio 2008 and Windows Explorer on my start menu. 

By default Windows Explorer comes on the task bar in the RC and I’ve gone to the trouble of moving it.  The reason has to do with how the different locations behave.  When I click on an item pinned to my Start Menu, I get a new instance of that item, even if an instance is already running by default.  To be honest whether copying from one folder to another folder on my local machine, to a USB device or across the network there are a lot of times that I want 2 instances of Windows Explorer.  Similarly I often open two instances of Visual Studio, I’ll be working on one solution and want to review how I did something or examine some sample solution, or access one of my junk test code projects where I quickly test some code… the result is I’ve pinned these items to the start menu.

On the other hand items pinned to the Task Bar do not by default open a second instance of that application.  Thus you’ll note I’ve placed Outlook, Virtual PC, the Snipping Tool, Windows Sticky Notes, and although not shown in the image below SQL Management Studio.  In each of these cases I only need a single instance.  Yes I can ask for a second instance by right clicking on the icon and then selecting the application from the context menu – but creating a second instance isn’t the default and is thus more involved, and in the case of most of my choices isn’t really the desired behavior.

My suggestion to you as you might guess is consider where you want to pin items.  Keep in mind that when something is on the Start Menu not only can I open multiple instances, I can pin target documents/folders from the most recently used selection into the context menu next to that item. 

You also may not I skipped Internet Explorer in my list above.  I’m still deciding – for now I’m trying it on the taskbar on separate instances plus tabs.

Finally however, I have a request with regard to the task bar…. I know it won’t be a change to Windows 7 but let’s talk about icons vs. icons and description on the task bar.  When I pin a program to the task bar, you add the icon which is good.  However, For things which aren’t pinned to my task bar I like the description.  As noted above things I pin to the taskbar only typically have one instance – as a result I don’t really ever need to see the label associated with that icon.  On the other hand items like Visual Studio on the task bar show the name of the current project in the label, which is useful.  Yes I realize I can just hover over that item and you’ll give me pictures of what each instance contains – but if you are familiar with Visual Studio you know that isn’t the most useful way of recognizing which is which – on the other hand I can look down at the task bar and know which instance I want even before I can move the mouse to it when it’s labeled.  This isn’t to say I’m not willing to stack similar task bar items when I run out of space – just that if we could keep the items pinned to the taskbar as icons I would have more space for those items where the label is actually useful to me.