Event : TechNet MSDN Technology Summit

Yup! I just received news that the TechNet MSDN Technology Summit is back, details are as below:

Date: 15/01/09
Time: 9:00 am – 5:30 am
Venue: Kuala Lumpur Convention Center, Malaysia

To register find out more about the event, check out the the TechNet MSDN Technology Summit event page with additional details like the available sessions. Do note that the current agenda is still subject to change (especially the keynote).

IMO, the main highlight of the event would be a sneak preview of Windows 7, coool!

Live Mesh, the future of synchronization

I believe most of you have heard of Live Mesh, which could very well be the key and best service offered by Windows Live so far. In a nutshell, it allows you to synchronize your files and applications across all your devices.

To find out more about it, read the articles by Techcrunch, Mary Jo Foley (All About Microsoft), and Ryan Stewart (The Universal Desktop).

And of course, sign up now at mesh.com.

Some User Experience Guidelines

This article on MSDN may not be that new, but its top notch!

Find out how to create the best user experience for your applications by Dax Pandhi, you’ll be shocked on that by applying some simple tricks and sticking with some guidelines, you could shape your applications into much richer and intuitive applications for both the desktop and the Web.

Vista SP1 due at first quarter of 2008, but will it "deal" with UAC?

Microsoft has finally announced that the final release of  Windows Vista SP1 will be scheduled around the first quarter of next year.

Pretty quick, for an update, seeing that its been about 3 years since Microsoft released Windows XP SP2, and Windows Vista has just be released about half a year ago, but it won’t be anything major, just fixes to enhance the performance, security etc of Vista.

I’m just hoping they get rid of UAC (User Account Control) feature, it totally kills people who do not know how to configure their PC, its far too troublesome, and definitely not the solution to account privilege issues, thankfully, it seems that they’re bending to the will of users (and other companies….like Google ), by approving a third-party app that deals with the troublesome UAC.

UAC ain’t user friendly, look at this post from A List Apart, that evaluates on the usability of elevated confirmation windows….I hate them, yes they are needed for certain scenarios, but popping up when I open almost anything is downright annoying.

And yes, I disabled UAC just a day after Vista was installed. No turning back.

Windows Seven, some information

After Vista, the next Windows client, codenamed “Vienna”, will be the 7th version of Windows shipped by Microsoft, which has more recently been renamed to Windows Seven or Windows 7, targeted to release after 2 or 2 and a half years after Windows Vista, which is year 2009 or 2010.

For more information on Windows Seven, the next version of Windows, check out these:

• Paul Thurrott’s FAQ on Windows Seven
• ZDNet’s All About Microsoft post
• Wikepedia

Based on the these sources, Windows Seven will not a major release, like Vista, but will be somewhat like an update of Vista, with the following version, a major release, released 2 years after.

Some features that are mentioned would be the inclusion of the Ribbon user interface of Office 2007, better mobile connectivity capabilities, “Intelisense” typing features (something like auto-complete, maybe based upon Windows Powershell).

One thing I noticed is that not all the information in these sources are consistent, where Paul Thurrott’s FAQ states that Windows Seven will ship in only 64-bit, as part of Microsoft’s x64 migration schedule, but in the more recent post on ZDNet, it mentioned that it will be released in both 32-bit and 64-bit.

On which one is correct, I have no idea, but since Windows Server 2008 (codenamed Longhorn), will be the last Windows Server to have support for both 32-bit and 64-bit, it its quite possible that Windows Seven will be 64-bit only, but according to this, Microsoft themselves have no decided yet.

Definitely looking forward to more news on Windows Seven!