This has been an amazingly special week for the Windows 7 team.  We’re all incredibly appreciative of the reception of Windows 7 this week at the PDC.  Thank you!
All of us on the team have been closely watching the news reports and blogs of those who have been “kicking the tires” of the Windows 7 pre-beta.  The reception has been fantastic and we’re humbled by the excitement and enthusiasm for the release.  We know we have a ton of work ahead of us to get to beta and then the path to RTM, and the reception has definitely given us an extra special motivation (though we were already pretty motivated).
Next week is our conference dedicated to the hardware partners in the ecosystem we have talked about.  Called
WinHEC (Windows Hardware Engineering Conference), we’ll have another series of sessions and keynotes.  Jon DeVaan will be taking the lead as we dive into the details of “fundamentals” and the work we are doing with some of the many partners involved in Windows 7.  WinHEC also has a strong focus on Windows Server 2008 R2 (the server built off the Windows 7 kernel).  These sessions will all be available online as well.
So with all the shows we’re taking a short break from the blog as the folks that do the presenting are also the writers (myself included).
Below is a list of all the sessions on Windows 7 from the PDC.  Please take some time to have a look as the information is very detailed for sure.  How about using the comments on this post to ask questions of the sessions that you’d like to see more details on down the road?  That would be really helpful for us to target our posts.
Many of you have written asking about the beta and how to sign up or download it.  The best source for information on that will be the site
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7 which our product marketing team owns and will keep up to date as the beta information is available.  Also note that the Windows Vista blog which is where you will see announcements / news has been updated to reflect the inclusion of Windows 7.  This blog is now known as the
Windows Blog.
One of the very fun moments for me at the PDC was an “
Open Space” session on the floor of the “Big Room” which was an open-microphone discussion.  Channel9 captured this and might be a fun watch.  See
https://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Char...08-Open-Space/
For those of you interested in the Windows 7 APIs and what’s new for developers there is an overview document that you might find valuable.  See
Windows 7 Developer Guide on MSDN.
Thank you very much for all the emails you have sent.  I always share them with the team and really appreciate it.
Presentation URL KYN02 Day Two #1 - Ray Ozzie, Steven Sinofsky, Scott Guthrie and David Treadwell (Windows 7 starts +17:00 minutes)
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/KYN02/ PC01 Windows 7: Web Services in Native Code
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC01/ PC02 Windows 7: Extending Battery Life with Energy Efficient Applications
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC02/ PC03 Windows 7: Developing Multi-touch Applications
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC03/ PC04 Windows 7: Writing Your Application to Shine on Modern Graphics Hardware
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC04/ PC13 Windows 7: Building Great Audio Communications Applications
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC13/ PC14 Windows 7 Scenic Ribbon: The next generation user experience for presenting commands in Win32 applications.
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC14/ PC15 Windows 7: Benefiting from Documents and Printing Convergence
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC15/ PC16 Windows 7: Empower users to find, visualize and organize their data with Libraries and the Explorer
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC16/ PC18 Windows 7: Introducing Direct2D and DirectWrite
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC18/ PC19 Windows 7: Designing Efficient Background Processes
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC19/ PC22 Windows 7: Design Principles for Windows 7
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC22/ PC23 Windows 7: Integrate with the Windows 7 Desktop
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC23/ PC24 Windows 7: Welcome to the Windows 7 Desktop
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC24/ PC25 Windows 7: The Sensor and Location Platform: Building Context-Aware Applications
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC25/ PC42 Windows 7: Deploying Your Application with Windows Installer (MSI) and ClickOnce
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC42/ PC43 Deep Dive: What's New with user32 and comctl32 in Win32
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC43/ PC44 Windows 7: Programming Sync Providers That Work Great with Windows
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC44/ PC50 Windows 7: Using Instrumentation and Diagnostics to Develop High Quality Software
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC50/ PC51 Windows 7: Best Practices for Developing for Windows Standard User
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC51/ PC52 Windows 7: Writing World-Ready Applications
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC52/ ES20 Developing Applications for More Than 64 Logical Processors in Windows Server 2008 R2
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/ES20/  
See you on this blog soon enough!
--Steven