Hi, I am Sridhar Madhugiri a Developer on the WinC++ team. I have worked in different areas of Visual C++ including Libraries, Code Gen and most recently on the IDE. In this blog entry, I will highlight development resources for new features in Windows 7. Integrating these features in your application can light up your application when run on Windows 7.

Application Experience. You can enhance the Application experience through the new features in Windows 7 by adding new input capabilities, new UI elements and animations, or using some of the new features in Taskbar and shell integration that improves discoverability and usability. MFC with VS2010 automatically allows your application to add some of these new features easily.

Direct 2D: Allows you to render your 2D graphics with higher visual quality and better performance.

Native Sensor API: Windows 7 exposes a native API for Sensors so you can easily integrate these devices into your native application.

Windows Web services API: Windows 7 exposes a native API for working with web services. These APIs allow integrating data from Web Services in native apps as well as writing web services in native code.

Above is a summary of the features. The following are good starting points to explore these and other APIs that are new to Windows 7.

1.       Windows Developer Center: As I started using MSDN to find information, the first place that seemed to come up often was the Windows Developer Center (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dd433113.aspx). This is a good starting point to get a summary of the new features and trying to decide which features make sense to add to one’s application. It has links to more detailed documentation for each of the features.

2.       Windows 7 for developers Blog: The next location I found very useful is this blog. A number of new features and their API’s are discussed on this blog. http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/developers/default.aspx

3.       Windows developers is now on Facebook: Become a fan and stay abreast of the latest news on the Windows platform. http://www.facebook.com/pages/Windows-Developers/275596740826

4.       Windows 7 Developer guide: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Win7DeveloperGuide

5.       MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/default.aspx

6.       Visual C++ Development Center: Another useful resource to find out what is happening with VC++. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualc/default.aspx

Of course you need the new SDK to get these new API’s. VS 2010 should ship with the latest SDK but in the meantime you can get the latest version from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/bb980924.aspx. In addition to the SDK you can find a number of samples that illustrate using the new features.

I am looking forward to more and more apps that light up on Windows 7! If there is a specific area you need more information or details, feel free to post and I can research more information on the specific area and get back to you. Or we can address some of these topics in later blog posts.