Windows 7 Online Training

Windows 7 offers a myriad of new features to make it easy for you to make the most of your applications – as well as current PCs' hardware capabilities. Whether you want to improve robustness and performance or you want to boost end-user productivity and satisfaction, this kit will provide you with what you need to know about the new developer features to make your applications shine in Windows 7.

Units in this course

• Multitouch Windows 7 Touch allows developers to create new experiences that go beyond simple mouse pointing, clicking, and dragging. The new multitouch APIs support rich gestures, such as pan, zoom, and rotate. The Windows 7 Multitouch Platform also provides raw touch data inputs and advance manipulation and inertia.
  This unit explains the basics of Windows 7 multitouch and its APIs.
• Taskbar The taskbar is the access point for programs displayed on the desktop. With the new Windows 7 taskbar, users can give commands, access resources, and view program status directly from the taskbar.
  In this unit, you will learn about all the new Windows 7 taskbar features -including jump lists, thumbnails, thumbnail toolbars, overlay icons, and progress bar.
• Sensors and Location The Windows 7 Sensor platform unifies how an application interacts with ambient data.
  The sensors platform abstracts device drivers and exposes ambient data in a unified, consistent API so you can seamlessly interact with any type of sensor (such as ambient light sensor, temperature gauge, or GPS device). The new Location APIs build on this sensor data, and provides physical location information (such as civic addresses, or latitude and longitude).
  This unit provides an overview of the Sensor and Location Platform ans shows how to work with its APIs.
• Ribbon Windows 7 incorporates the Ribbon interface introduced in Office 2007 throughout the operating system, improving the platform's user interface. With the new Scenic ribbon control, developers can deliver a rich, graphical, animated, and highly familiar user interface by using a markup-based UI and a small, high-performance, native code runtime. The Ribbon control helps developers improve usability by exposing your applications most frequently accessed features directly to end users.
  This unit shows the different aspects of the Windows 7 Ribbon and provides a guide on how to incorporate the Windows 7 Ribbon into existing applications.
• Shell Libraries Windows 7 libraries provide users a single, coherent view of their files even when those files are stored in different locations. Libraries can be configured and organized by a user and a library can contain folders that reside on the user's computer as well as those that have been shared over a network. Libraries present a simpler view of the underlying storage system because, to the user, the files and folders in a library are displayed in single view, no matter where they are physically stored.
  This unit explains the basic concepts underlying Libraries, including how to make your application library-aware, how to work with libraries as though they were file system folders, and how to leverage the library system.
• Background Services Services and background processes have tremendous impact on the overall performance of a system. Reducing the total number of running services decreases the total power and CPU consumption. In Windows 7, the Service Control Manager has been extended so that a service can be automatically started and stopped when a specific system event, or trigger, occurs on the system. Trigger-start capabilities remove the need for services to start up automatically at computer startup and then poll or wait for an event to occur.
  
  This unit explains the different options available to developers for configuring and using trigger-start services.
• Instrumentation and Performance Windows 7 includes new Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) capabilities that developers can take advantage of during the development process to optimize application performance. Instrumentation has always been part of Windows, but Windows 7 includes new ETW underlying technology that makes the task of including instrumentation in your application a whole lot easier.
  This unit describes the different options for using instrumentation in Windows, including the new ETW.
• Installer Detection With the arrival of User Access Control (UAC) in Windows Vista, applications run with standard user privileges by default. Some programs, however, need to run with administrative privileges, most notably installers that need to write to privileged locations. These programs will fail with access denied errors when run as standard user. To remedy this, starting with Windows Vista, the operating system will apply some heuristics to determine whether the executable is, in fact, an installer, and if so, attempt to elevate to administrator privileges. However, sometimes these heuristics can themselves cause problems.
  This unit will explain these installer detection heuristics, and show you how to overcome common problems due to these.
• Data Redirection Beginning with Windows Vista, standard users have restricted access to certain files, folders, and registry keys. When an application is trying to write to these locations, it gets redirected to somewhere else. Most of the time this is transparent to both users and application developers, but sometimes it is not. When the redirection is not transparent, it can cause user confusion and application compatibility issues.
  This unit will help you understand what UAC Data Redirection is, and how to solve compatibility issues related to this feature.
• High DPI During install, Windows 7 automatically detects whether your screen supports High DPI. If it does, Windows 7 automatically sets the screen resolution to High DPI. If your application is not DPI aware, this may cause some display issues, including text clipping, pixilated bitmaps, layout issues, and mismatched font sizes.
  This unit will show you how to solve issues related High DPI and how to write DPI-aware applications.
• Session 0 Isolation Services that display user interface dialog boxes or communicate with user applications will run into compatibility problems in Windows 7. Without taking the necessary precautions for properly securing the communication channel with user applications, your services will fail to work properly on Windows 7.
  This unit will explain what Service Session Isolation is and how to fix an application to work under Session 0 isolation.
• User Interface Privilege Isolation In earlier versions of Windows, processes running under the same user account shared the same basic security privileges. Starting with Windows Vista, a new attribute, Privilege Level, is attached to each process. A process cannot send a message to another process with a higher privilege level, although they both may be running under the same user account.
  This unit introduces you to UIPI; and shows you how to detect and workaround issues and related to UIPI.
• Version Checking Often an application will run fine in a new OS and the only compatibility issue is a poorly written version check that is looking for an older version of the OS than the one you are running. In Windows 7, end-users and IT professionals may apply a fix to let the application think it is running on an older version of Windows.
  This unit offers ways to work around and fix version control problems in your applications.