Microsoft have changed tack with the development of Windows 7 by keeping it very low key. No sneak previews and few hints about what will be inside the next release. After all the hype that went with ‘Longhorn’ I guess that’s not surprising. Few of the ’Longhorn’ promises actually shipped in Vista and this really burnt the reputation of Microsoft to deliver on promises.
About the only concreate information we have is that Surface like functionality will be added to the OS and some of the standard apps, such as Paint, will have the Fluent UI (a.k.a Office 2007 style Ribbon).
All that is about to change with the upcoming PDC2008 that starts on the 28th October. If you are lucky enough to be attending the PDC then you will get a 160GB external USB hard drive with lots of goodies. One of those is going to be a pre-beta version of Windows 7. Assuming that the new OS does not actually require 160GB of space I assume there are plenty of other interesting bits of software included.
I hope that the PDC follows the same pattern as recent Microsoft conferences such as MIX where the sessions are recorded and then placed online. If not then I can always reply on the Krypton community to post me some screenshots of user interface innovations in the pipeline.
UPDATE:
You can see some Windows 7 screenshots on the web but I have no idea if they are geniune so you have to be careful what you believe.
