A quick micro-post for everyone. Bill Gates announced today at the Government Leaders Forum – Americas that DreamSpark is available for university and high school students. (The third video in the playlist features Max Zuckerman interviewing Bill about DreamSpark.)

So, what's is this DreamSpark of which you mention?
Simple: it is a program that provides no-cost access to Microsoft's tools as well as training to high school (as of today) and college students. DreamSpark is supported worldwide and is designed to help students learn and develop skills in science, technology, engineering, math and design. Higher education students at the college or university level can verify their status directly and access the software straight from the site. High school students gain access to the software through their teachers, who verify their school and have access to the software, which they can then provide to students.

Cool! So what do students get?
Students get access to most of our development and design tools (Visual Studio 2008 Professional, XNA Studio, Robotics Studio, Expression Studio and more). They also get access to select server products (SQL Server 2008 Developer Edition and Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition) to help with development and testing. Training Resources are also provided (free eBooks, training videos, and more) to help students learn about Microsoft tools and technologies, as well as provide insights into product certification.

Wow! What do I do next?
This is a pretty amazing resource for students. Visit DreamSpark, learn more, and tell your high school administrators and science, math, computer, and physics teachers about it. Let's help our children learn about math, science and technology – and equip them to impact the future of all of us.

It may have snuck up on some of you, but Internet Explorer 8 released last week and is available for download. If you haven't had a chance to take a look at IE8, there are a host of great capabilities (web standards mode, improved tab browsing, improved accessibility features such as Caret Browsing, increased security such as InPrivate browsing, automatic crash recovery and performance improvements) and some compelling new features as well (visual search and search buttons, accelerators, and web slices to name a few). Review the rest of the readiness toolkit to see what else is available.

Developers and IT Professionals
Developers should review the readiness toolkit for developers. IE8's developer tools are quite useful, featuring the ability to view the HTML source in a color-coded view (like how Visual Studio does), script performance profiler, and source inspection tools and property sheet view. The navigation buttons (back and forward) honor AJAX calls now, too, so site debugging is easier. There are some pretty interesting capabilities "in the box" with IE8.

IT Professionals should review the readiness toolkit for IT professionals. It covers a wide range of management, administration, group policy and deployment features.

Learning More
If you'd like to learn more, there are heaps of resources for developers and IT professionals from videos to articles and more. Here are some virtual labs you may want to explore to learn more in a more hands-on style format.

• MSDN Virtual Lab: Building Web Slices with Internet Explorer 8
• MSDN Virtual Lab: Preparing for Internet Explorer 8 – Application Compatibility
• MSDN Virtual Lab: Using Accelerators and Web Slices in the Enterprise with Internet Explorer 8
• MSDN Virtual Lab: Creating Accelerators In Internet Explorer 8
• MSDN Virtual Lab: Internet Explorer 8 – Debugging and Application Compatibility
• MSDN Virtual Lab: Internet Explorer 8 Improved Programmability
• MSDN Virtual Lab: Using New AJAX Enhanced Layout Standards Support with Internet Explorer 8
• TechNet Virtual Lab: Preparing for Internet Explorer 8- Application Compatibility
• TechNet Virtual Lab: Using Accelerators and Web Slices in the Enterprise with Internet Explorer 8

I just heard from a colleague of mine, John O'Donnell and Architect Evangelist on our ISV Evangelism Team, about a training event happening next week for developers in the Chicago metro area and focused on Windows 7.

This is a multi-day training event and there is quite a broad range of topics being covered during this event. Here's the summary John shared with me. More event details are listed below and can be found on the registration site.

Windows 7 enables developers to build applications on a solid foundation; enable richer application experiences; and integrate the best of Windows and web services. The features and technologies of the Windows 7 operating system enable you to build the next generation of software applications. This event represents your opportunity to gain advance access to technical features and solution scenario information enabling you to build solutions on the new platforms. This is a special event organized specifically to share Microsoft's early, forward-looking plans with our closest partners and customers. You will have the opportunity to provide feedback directly with Microsoft product architects. A current Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) is required for this event.

Agenda

• Graphics Improvements
• Multi Touch and Ink
• Security
• Application Instrumentation, Diagnostic and Performance Tools
• Application Compatibility Overview
• Sensor Platform and Location
• Power Management
• Background Services and Process
• New Taskbar
• Open Packaging Conventions

Event Information
Wednesday, March 25, 2009 through Friday, March 27, 2009, 9:00am to 5:00pm all three days.
Register Online

Location
Directions Training Center
2625 Butterfield Road, Suite 209E
Chicago (Oakbrook), IL 60523
(630) 575-8900

The answer is: one of nearly two dozen items in my "to be blogged" folder. Last post there was only about a dozen items in the backlog, but I digress. So, what _is_ Thrive?

Thrive is a collection of resources for IT professionals (a developer version in the works) that will help you track down about three things:

• Advance your career – resources on career development and training as well as change management
• Enhance your skills – resources focused on technical topics like virtualization and desktop optimization
• Align IT with business – resources on driving cost savings as well as compliance and guidance

But don't take my very brief blog post for it. There's a TechNet webcast covering exactly what Thrive is tomorrow, Wednesday, March 11, 2009 10:00 AM Pacific Time. Yeah, it's short notice, but I only just found out myself. I'll amend my post with the on demand link after the webcast.

Join the webcast, check out the web site, and let me know what you think about Thrive. Is it useful and helpful? What do you like? What would you change?

Update: Fixed the registration links.

I actually owe a much longer post on recent readiness (nee training) options and events for developers, architects and IT Professionals, but available time prevents me from tacking the 15 or 16 items in my "to do for blog" folder. This one event, however, warrants a more immediate shout out for two reasons. First, it's a live event as opposed to an online resource, thus timeliness matters. Second, space is limited so you'll want to register soon. The event is the Build Your Skills: Best Practices for .NET Developers Events, hosted by Jeff Brand and several of our highly talented local speakers.

Since Jeff has a full blown post with all the details, I will summarize the salient points here. And remember, space is limited (and selling out fast) so register soon!

Agenda

• The Fine Art of Profiling (Go Faster) presented by Scott Colestock
• Building Loosely Coupled Applications presented by Shannon Braun
• Exceptional Development: Dealing With Exceptions in .NET presented by Jason Bock
• Introduction to Unit Testing presented by Kirstin Juhl
• Advanced Unit Testing presented by Raymond Lewallen

St. Louis Event – Register
March 24, 2009, 9:00am to 4:30pm at the Microsoft offices in Creve Coeur.
3 City Place Drive, Suite 1100
Creve Coeur, MO 63141

Minneapolis Event – Register
March 31, 2009, 9:00am to 4:30pm at the Microsoft offices in Bloomington.
8300 Norman Center Drive, Suite 950
Bloomington, MN 55437

I've just logged into the internet at my hotel in Minneapolis. It's the first trip I've taken with Windows 7 as the OS for my main laptop, and I just discovered something very, very useful. And especially useful for the road warrior.

When I plugged in the internet and Windows 7 fetched an IP address, an information tip appeared over the network icon in the Notification Area. The tip basically said that additional steps may be required to get on the internet and suggested I open my browser. Basically the OS realized that I needed to go through the hotel's portal to authenticate access.

How incredibly helpful is that?

Capping off my mini-series on Windows 7 things I like, I was alerted to 50 seriously useful Windows 7 tips By Mike Williams over at TechRadar.com. It's a really comprehensive list organized by new applets and features, interface tweaks, useful enhancements, and performance and productivity tips.

It's a really great read, so be sure to check it out.

As I was working on various tasks today (playing with VPC images, ISO files, and a few others), I stumbled across a couple of additional features of Windows 7 that I wanted to share. These are just some quick hits, presented in no particular order.

I've had a few full business days, and part of this past weekend, to work with Windows 7 some more. Along the way I've expanded my workloads some – adding applications, playing audio (I dig the new Windows Media Player), and the like – and really got into my core workloads of PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook in more depth. Hey, I'm a manager, what did you expect? (That was for you, Joe.)

With more hands-on time, I've rather quickly gotten to my next set of top features. Thus I present for your reading pleasure, my next 5 top features.

Number 6 – Jump Lists, Part Deux
I know, I know. I covered Jump Lists in my last post. But I focused on the MRU (most recently used files) feature of applications like Notepad and Excel. I hadn't yet installed an application that implemented its own Jump List. Since then I've played around with the latest Windows Live Essentials some more, specifically Windows Live Messenger. I was pleasantly surprised to find it implements a Jump List that showcases the possibilities of optimizing an application for Windows 7.

The image to the right highlights what a developer can do when implementing a Jump Menu specific to their application. I'm intrigued about the possibilities. Rather than supporting a default MRU-style menu, like Excel or Internet Explorer, it provides quick access to Windows Live and Windows Live Messenger features. You can easily toggle your status, jump to Windows Live features like your profile or inbox, or send an instant message.

I'm imaging the possibilities for some of my other favorite applications. Think of what a screen capture utility could hook to its Jump List. Or Visual Studio Team System… I really am stoked by Jump Lists. They remain my overall #2 (you can't possibly beat fast, fast, fast), but this new discovery cements Jump Lists as an unassailable #2.

Number 7 – Search
I had a love-hate relationship with Windows Vista's integrated desktop search. Thanks to some tips and tricks from colleagues over the years I really developed a knack at running searches with quotes, plus signs, minus signs and the whole nine yards. And I came to rely on Windows Vista's search – though it frustrated me, usually by returning too many results in a big list of mixed content. So I became friends with the "show only" content filters, scoping my search to just documents or email. And 99 times out of 100 I found what I was looking for in the first five hits. I was even reasonably happy with the speed of the search results and eventually built searching the desktop into my habits (though I also still hold onto my old habits of folder and file organization, even for emails).

Windows 7 has a great search, much improved. Initially I was nervous to find that my "show only" buttons were missing. I really didn't relish the idea of everything jumbled together in a big list. But Windows 7 continues to impress, and I'm coming around. Several very nice touches make it a genuinely pleasant searching experience.

The search textbox is now more usable, with a nice drop-down that recalls previous searches as well as offers some additional filtering options. This example, searching for Jump Lists, shows the ability to filter by date modified and size. Date modified pops up a calendar control-style UI with a couple of quick filter options like "yesterday", "last week", or "a long time ago". Size similarly offers some quick filter options, like 0 KB, 1 – 10 KB, and other sizes. Nice, quick touches to help further filter my results.

Speaking of results, you get some new display modes; the image below is content view, though you also get the traditional icon views (multiple sizes), details (my usual favorite, quickly being replaced by the new content view), and the usual others. But what I really like is the highlighting in the results list. Another very nice touch. There's also a preview mode that in my very unscientific efforts seems noticeably faster to use and more friendly.

And did I mention search results seem to populate faster, too?

Number 8 – Libraries
Initially I recoiled against Libraries. They look like folders, but they feel and taste different. And that difference made me uncomfortable. I guess I'm too old and like my insane folder organization approach too much.

But I'm coming around to them. I'm realizing they are sort of like "super search" structures. By default you get four Libraries: Documents, Music, Pictures, and Videos. These libraries include, by default, the public and user-specific folders for documents, music, pictures, and videos. Makes sense, right?

But they become more interesting when you create a custom library for, say, PowerPoint decks, that includes all the folders with slides in them – spanning multiple physical directories across physical drives, presenting the collection of folders as a single "Presentations" library. Now I get some much-needed sanity for my insane folder organization approach.

Give Libraries a try, a really sincere try, before you go back to the folders you're comfortable with. You may just like the layer of organization they add to the mish-mash of hard drives and attached storage devices you have orbiting your computer.

Number 9 – Network Connection and Management 
This almost made my first top 5 (and initially was at the top of my second top 5), but it continually got beat out by other features. I finally forced myself to include it here.

The entire networking experience is streamlined. When you click the network icon in the Notification Area a new new window pops up; it's basically the same as the Vista "Connect to a Network" window but it's more accessible. If a wireless connection is broadcasting in the area, you see it in the list and all you need to do is click it.

Connecting to my corporate wireless network a breeze – in just two clicks (click the network icon, click the network name) I had added the corporate wireless connection to my list. Even though my home SSID isn't broadcasting, manually adding my home network was more intuitive. Easier networking is definitely worth liking.

Number 10 – The Menu Bar
I know, it's almost a silly feature to tout as a top 10 feature. But it's the little things that reduce clicks and increase productivity that make me happy. The menu bar is more context aware, with a Preview button changing options based on the file type selected.

In my running Jump List search example from #7, I have a JPEG selected (the Windows Live Messenger Jump List image from #6). The Preview button knows it's a JPEG and offers you quicker access to the five installed programs that understand the format, and also offers the ability to choose the default program for it. The other buttons (Save Search, Burn, View, etc.) are all carried forward from Windows Vista, with the Preview Pane button surfaced onto the menu itself (much better than being hidden on a menu cascading off the Organize menu). I toggle preview on and off a lot, leaving it off most of the time.

Other folder types offer similar nice features surfaces to the menu bar. In Libraries and folders, you get the option to "Share With", a drop down that quickly allows you to create (or remove) a network share for the folder or Library in question. In regular folders, you can quickly access "Include in library" to add that folder to an existing Library or to create a new Library containing that folder. Plus you still get the nice context aware button to open or act on files, create new folders when nothing is selected, and so forth. Explorer is more usable now… and so is Windows.

That's it… for now!
I'm five days into using Windows 7, and I find myself pretty excited (and I wasn't even one of the people standing in line for Windows 95 back in the day). Sure, I've run into – and filed – a few bugs, but overall Windows 7 is pretty polished for a beta. It's fast, hasn't really cratered to speak of, and pretty stable. And the little touches are really adding up to be something nice. I may take another run at more top features post in the coming days as I uncover more nice things that make me happy about my OS.

Bolstered by the strong recommendations and positive experiences that my colleagues had shared with me I finally decided to dive into Windows 7 Beta. In the spirit of full transparency I should be clear I've only been running the beta on my production box for three days, but… Wow! This has truly been a _great_ experience!

Now, being a manager, I will admit it took me over a week to get the environment full set up – though that had very little to do with Windows 7 and a lot do to with the amount of time I had available to get everything installed and configured. In fact, that leads to my first top 5.

Number 1 – Fast, Fast, Fast
I am completely serious, this OS is all sorts _fast_. And it started with the install. After blasting the drive partitions with the nice GUI-based FDISK-like utility and rebooting to a "fresh" machine (yeah, I'm OCD like that), the installer laid down the initial OS in what couldn’t have been more than 10 or so minutes.

While I have a decent little laptop here, it's no power machine. It's one of those little (PRODUCT) RED™ Dell XPS M1330 small footprint laptops (that I hosed with the heavy 9-cell battery, but I get 5 hours, so I suffer through it). It's got a decent ESATA drive running at 7200RPM, solid data transfer rate, a decent bus, and a nice 8x +R/W slot-drive, and a T7500 Intel Core Duo clocking at 2.2GHz. So, decent but not blindingly fast.

And the install really completed in just about 10 minutes, give or take. And that's not the only speedy thing about Windows 7. Quite literally _everything_ is fast. Boot up time? Maybe 20 seconds. Launching and shutting down Outlook 2007? Noticeably, visibly faster. Internet Explorer 8? Much, much faster (though that's probably a combination of the improvements in IE8 over IE7 plus the Windows 7 enhancements). Launching Visual Studio 2008? Yup, quicker. Shut down? My favorite; when I'm ready to go home or grab a beer with the gang, I just do not want to wait – and Windows 7 hits a home run. Don't believe me? See Denny Boynton's post on his first 24 hours with Windows 7. Where I just have a gut feel this thing is faster (and it's only a beta; performance tuning is still around the corner), Denny actually times the differences between Vista and Windows 7.

Not to speak heresy here, but I think my Windows 7 install on a "manager's laptop" outperforms the big machine running Windows XP at home.

Number 2 – Jump Lists
I was there in LA and I saw the demo at PDC. I thought, "That's interesting." But I didn't really quite get them at the time. Now I've played with them and I have to say, killer feature. Jump Lists are basically MRUs (most recently used menus, like the last files opened in Word) integrated into the new taskbar.

A picture of the Windows Live Writer Jump List is to the right. The Jump List is easily accessed by right-clicking the program icon on the taskbar. You see a couple of options. At the bottom of the menu is the option to close the current app. Above that is to pin the program to the taskbar, which adds the application icon permanently to the taskbar – sort of like the Quick Launch toolbar in Windows XP and Windows Vista, but with more powerful capabilities. Next up is the ability to launch a new instance of Live Writer. Finally you see the Live Writer file MRU. This is a list of the recent files you've saved (you see this post in draft). What I love about this is that I can actually manage my MRU. I can pin the files to always appear on the list, I can view the properties of the file, and I can remove the file from the list (I wish the Office MRU had that feature).

Jump Lists also appear in Start Menu as a fly-out menu, exposing the file MRU and offering the same access to file properties and the ability to pin or remove the file from the list. Just click the arrow and the Jump List flies out over the right side of the Start Menu. Love this feature!

Number 3 – Taskbar
Initially I rebelled against the taskbar. Not because the taskbar wasn't functional, useful, and powerful, but because my beloved Quick Launch Toolbar is gone (more on _that_ below). But I've come to not only respect but love the taskbar.

These are the icons you right-click to get at the application's Jump List. You can see multiple running instances of the application with the little outlines to the right of the icon. Windows 7 give you information about the application through the icons – for example, if you're downloading a large file a green gradient progress bar-style "fill" progresses across the IE icon on the taskbar giving you a constant update on long-running tasks without you needing to swap to the window with the progress bar on it. And in a vast usability improvement over XP/Vista, if you hover over or click the icon of a running application, you get a much improved preview of each of the windows of the running application. And in the case of IE8 (and possibly other applications), you see a preview of each _tab_ in the browser:

You can instantly close a window associated with that application with the close button. And as an added little bonus (and there are loads of them; again, see below), if you hover over one of the open windows, the OS hides everything on the desktop except the running instance that you're looking at. This feature has definitely had a positive impact on my productivity… and I don't even miss the Quick Launch Toolbar as much anymore (again, see below for a pleasant side story on the Quick Launch Toolbar).

Number 4 – Location Aware Printing
This may be one of the smaller features, but it's made it to my top 5. Location aware printing simply means that the default printer changes depending on the network. When I am at home my default printer is my HP Color LaserJet 2840. When I am at work, it is the big dog HP LaserJet M9050 printing/copying/scanning/faxing behemoth. This is a really great little productivity feature; no more Ctrl+P to bring up the print dialog – just click print and the document spools to the right printer every time. w00t!

Number 5 – Spiffed Up Apps
I'm a sucker for eye candy. I like the enhancements to Paint and WordPad. Both now have Office 2007-style ribbons that make features more discoverable.

Paint	WordPad

I honestly didn't realize Paint had those capabilities, and I am both surprised and impressed that WordPad supports a variety of file formats now, not just RTF or text. You can now open and save Word 2007-compatible Office Open XML files as well as the OpenDocument specification that IBM and Sun have proposed.

More Goodies
I am sure there will be a number of "Top 5s" that I come up with as I dig into Window 7 more deeply. Despite "going over to the dark side" (management), as my friend Joe Healy often accuses (I still love ya, Joe), I still fancy myself a Windows power user. I am really looking forward digging into the internals of Windows 7 and learning all the nooks and crannies.

And if you would like to learn about some of those nooks and crannies from an expert on the subject, Tim Sneath posted a stellar article, The Bumper List of Windows 7 Secrets, listing his 30 favorite hidden Windows 7 features and capabilities. It's a great article with wonderful nuggets of goodness (such as how to restore the missing-by-default Quick Launch Toolbar). Read it, get hold of a copy of Windows 7 Beta, and try it out for yourself.