Windows 7 : Where is the future heading?
Windows 7 is all the rage these days. With Microsoft PDC 2008 just around the corner with the eyes of all third party developers, anti-trust lawyers & fan boys set on it as Microsoft will give the first Beta 1 release to its partner companies to start developing applications & drivers for it.
When Vista was released & Windows 7 start to make noise as some people for no apparent reason declared Vista a failure without even using it, I predicted something that with Windows 7 Microsoft doesn’t need to start fresh to make an OS. What many users don’t realize that Microsoft makes Windows as a platform on which third party developers develop & sale applications. With Vista, Microsoft gave the developers & for the first time, designers a lot of power when it comes to developing & designing applications for Windows.
With .Net 3.0 & now .Net 3.5, developers & designers find it very easy to make applications for Windows. I can’t say about development side as I am a Designer but from my point of view visually designing an application with Visual Studio 2008 SP1 & Microsoft Blend is much better then what we had in past. Microsoft has given WPF, WDDM, WCF. WWF & a plethora of technologies inside Vista due to which at least I don’t call Vista a failure.
Before Vista it was hard to design an application for Windows with good native & fast look & UX but now it is very easy. WPF brings Vector based, resolution independent, GPU accelerated UI to Windows due to which that powerful GPU installed in most of the people’s computer won’t be sitting idle when using just the OS to do something & not playing games. This brings more efficiency to the computing environment when heat & electricity are becoming a growing concern rapidly.
GPGPU is the next big thing & right now the time is absolutely right to make a career in GPU programming. nVidia has already shown with CUDA what level of performance and scalability a GPU can reach if applications are coded with GPGPU support. ATI demonstrated it long back with there AVIVO Video converter which converted H.264 in fraction of time which it usually used to take with CPU based encoding. It won’t be surprising to see Microsoft supporting GPGPU in DirectX 11 or Visual Studio’s next version using which even Software vendor like Adobe can make Photoshop apply filters faster then before because as we all know, a GPU is simply a processor which can do lots of calculations like a CPU as calculation power of a GPU is more then a CPU. It is actually a good thing as right now we have CUDA API only for nVidia cards & ATI’s own Firestream API. With Support from Microsoft in Visual Studio or DirectX, developers can make one code which will run same on both AMD & nVidia hardware instead of coding for 2 APIs.
WPF & Microsoft Blend are already making lots of noise. Designing an application using WPF is easy & fast, also they look cool. I really love that for the first time since the beginning of Windows, Microsoft is paying attention to the user experience & interface making it easy for people to do things on there computer.
.Net 3.5 & soon .net 4.0 will sure be making head turn the Microsoft way. Due to the native code generation & MSIL support, the applications can be made really fast by JIT when installing. Now just imagine the flexibility of .net CLR, the speed JIT brings, the look & feel WPF brings, the secure environment of Managed code & it’s not hard to believe that the future of Windows foundation is upgrading itself to be more solid.
Some people will sure say that Microsoft is going the Linux or Apple way, well…here is the thing. There are only some ways of doing something & Linux/Apple did it before Microsoft, so is it wrong for Microsoft to copy something good? Well, it is copying for sure but to make something better & I myself say….”Redmond start your photocopiers.”
With Windows 7 Microsoft doesn’t need to make a completely new OS. They just need to optimize the code & polish the features of Vista. Even if it is like Windows Vista R2, even then it will be big because with Windows 7, Microsoft will give all those features & speed it ones promised with Vista but wasn’t able to. The foundation technologies are already there in form of WDDM, WPF, Aero, WCF, WWF, Office Technologies, Windows Live Services….they don’t need to code anything new, they just have to optimize what they already have & tweak it.
The reason for the success of Microsoft in the past was that it integrated things & made it easier for the hardware & software developers to work together. As an example, before DirectX we had many 3D API from many different GPU hardware vendors. 3DFX had glide, nVidia/ATI had OpenGL & all of them were not compatible on the same hardware. Now a developer can’t code a game in Glide for 3dfx & then again code it in OpenGL for the rest of the GPU. Microsoft solved this problem with DirectX due to which today it is the de-facto standard when making games for Windows. The developers were now able to make the game in DirectX be assurance that if it runs on Windows, it will run across a wide range of GPU. Microsoft is doing the same thing with Windows 7 & the technologies it gave in form of DirectX 10, XNA & those mentioned above.
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