New Post on Windows 7 for Developers

Remember – we Moved to a new location.

There is a new post on Windows 7 for Developers - Windows 7 .NET Interop Sample Libraries

Windows 7 Blog for Developer Is Moving!

That’s right folks, we are moving to a new location, becoming part of  The Windows Blog. As part of The Windows Blog, we will join the greater Windows messaging community and will be better able to ensure developers are up to date with both the latest news on the Windows 7 Development story and the Windows 7 User Experience story. The Windows Blog hosts several “satellite” blogs, including:

· Windows Vista Team Blog – to stay updated with news about Windows Vista

· Windows Experience Blog –to read about the amazing user experiences you can have with Windows 7

· Windows 7 Team Blog – to learn about all the important Windows 7 news and announcements

· Windows Security Blog –to become aware of all the things that go into having a secure Windows environment

· Windows for your Business – to discover ways Windows 7 benefits commercial customers

And, of course, the new Windows 7 for Developer Blog, which is our Windows 7 developer-focused blog. Our focus here will remain on topics of special interest to the Windows 7 developer community and we will continue to provide both native and managed code examples and insights.

I will still post to this blog, but about more general topics and ideas.

See you all at the new blog location - http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/developers/default.aspx

Make sure you update your RSS feeds to the new blog RSS feed.

Properly Back Up the Registry

Learn how to properly backup the registry in Windows 7.

Create a Windows 7 System Repair Disk

Learn how to create a system repair disk that is used to boot a broken Windows 7 computer and attempt to recover it or restore your computer from a previous image.

Windows 7 .NET Interop Sample Libraries

We’ve got .NET sample libraries and example for managed code developers to target Windows 7 new APIs!

Windows 7 offers new functionality that developers can exploit in their applications to provide enhanced experiences and productivity for their end users. Included among these new features is the ability to add custom Tasks to the Taskbar Jump Lists, support the new Libraries and make your application Library aware, allow enhanced user interaction with Multi-Touch, and extend the application to “react” to its surroundings by adopting the Sensor and Location platform. You can read about these and many more new Windows 7 features in the Windows Engineering blog, Channel 9 videos, in earlier posts, and on The Windows Blog.

The Windows 7 Beta SDK is a great source of documentation and examples for using these new sets of APIs. However, most of the examples are written in native code similar to Windows 7 APIs which are all native C, C++, and COM APIs, which makes the life of managed code developers a bit hard. For that reason, Microsoft created the Windows Vista Bridge project that makes it easier for managed code developers to use Windows OS-specific APIs such as those described above. The current version of the Window Vista Bridge, version 1.4 contains many useful “Windows Vista” features such as  Restart and Recovery, Search, Power Awareness and other Shell integrations. However the current version doesn’t include any Windows 7 features. It will support key Windows 7 APIs in the near future, but until then, we have developed an intermediate set of solutions for supporting managed code developers who wish to target Windows 7 Beta today and not wait for the time the Windows API Code Pack for the .NET Library (the new name of Windows Vista Bridge) will be available.

NOTE: It is important to be aware that these solutions are not the “official libraries”; they come with no support or any sort of warranty — in other words, use them at your own risk!

With that caveat in place, we can go ahead and introduce some new managed code wrappers that will allow managed code developers to use the Windows 7 Taskbar, manipulate Libraries, add Multi-Touch support for WinForms or WPF 3.5 SP1, and enable Sensors and Location in their applications.

Taskbar

The Taskbar Sample .NET Interop Library allows developers to:

• Create and manipulate JumpLists including tasks and items
• Display Dynamic Overlay Icons, Thumbnail Toolbars
• Use the Taskbar progress bar
• Control Custom Thumbnail Preview, and custom Preview also known as – AeroPeek

The Windows 7 Taskbar Sample .NET Interop Library is available for download and include 4 demos showcasing all the Taskbar features.

Libraries

Libraries are new in Windows 7 and provide a logical representation of the user’s data on  his local computer and on remote computers. With Libraries, the user can define which physical folders are mapped to which library and achieve better search quality and easier “maintenance” of his content. In Windows 7, it is important for developers to

enable their applications to become Library-aware by supporting Libraries. This will integrate the user’s application and Windows experiences and maintain the integrity of your applications in various scenarios

The Windows 7 Library Sample .NET Interop Library allows developers to:

• Manipulate and control the libraries in Windows 7 including create a new library or delete an existing one
• Add or remove physical locations to a Library
• Set an icon for each library
• Enumerate the contents of a given library’s physical location (the actual folders) to track down and map all the items in that library

The last point is very important since the Library root (that is the Library itself) is not a real  directory (there is no “c:\Libraries” or anything similar); it is just a logical location. In order to get to the actual items within the Library, you need to enumerate the contents through the listed physical folders.

The Windows 7 Library Sample .NET Interop Library is available for download, and we will provide a series of posts and Channel 9 Screencasts showing how to use the Libraries and Taskbar in Managed Code applications.

Sensor and Location Platform

The Sensor and Location platform provides a new and unified set of APIs for sensory inputs, for example Accelerometer, Light Sensors, or Location GPS are just few examples of sensors. This unified set of APIs makes it easy to consume sensory inputs and simplifies the Windows developer’s life.

The Sensor and Location .NET Interop Sample Library provides an abstraction of the native Sensor and Location API and provides strongly typed objects for specific sensors and for its Sensor Data Report. For example, a Light Sensor has a strongly typed LightDataReport object.

With the Sensor and Location .NET Interop Sample Library, developers are able to create strongly typed custom sensor objects as well as use three built-in sensors: Accelerometer3D Sensors, Light Sensors, and Touch Array Sensors. These sensors are part of the Windows 7 Sensor Development kit.

This library also provides a unified location API for asking the common question of, “Where am I?” The nice thing about the Location platform is that developers can use the same APIs regardless of the underlying technology that is actually providing the answers, such as GPS, Wi-Fi triangulation, or IP Resolver.

The Library also includes a few demos like a light-aware MSDN Reader that changes the way the content displays according to the amount of light picked up by the Light Sensor.

The Sensor and Sensor and Location .NET Interop Sample Library is available for download, and make sure to read the prerequisites.

Multi-Touch

One of the most popular features in Windows 7 is Multi-Touch support. As was presented during PDC 2008, Windows 7 Developing Multi-Touch Applications, the current API is native and in the near future Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) 4 will include full support of Multi-Touch in Windows 7. However, for the time being, the Multi-Touch Sample .NET Interop Library provides developers with full Multi-Touch functionality for both WinForms and WPF 3.5 SP1. The library includes few demos for reference, including detailed samples showcasing Multi-Touch gestures support, Manipulation and Inertia for both WinForms and WPF.

You can download the Multi-Touch Sample .NET Interop Library from.

A small and friendly reminder: These are just sample code; they are not supported and are based on the Windows 7 Beta SDK, which means they WILL CHANGE by RTM time. Make sure you stay alert for updates on the Windows Bridge status for the official Managed code libraries supporting Windows 7.

Welcome to the Windows 7 for Developers Blog!

Hello everyone and welcome to the first post of the updated Windows 7 for Developers blog. My name is Yochay Kiriaty and I am a Technical Evangelist on the Developer and Platform Evangelism Team, mainly focusing on the developer story for Windows 7. As Technical Evangelist, I get to work a lot with the product group as well as with our partners - that is, you developers. This enables me to become very familiar with the product, its engineering and APIs, and at the same time gain an understanding of the needs of the Windows 7 application developer community.

This blog will focus mainly on the developer aspects of Windows 7 and provide valuable content for developers. We want to make this blog a “one stop shop” on the road to getting yourself familiar with what Windows 7 has to offer for developers and how you can “Light-Up” your application by using Windows 7 features.

With your help, this blog should evolve to become a sort of Windows 7 developer content index. Down the road, if you want to write some code using one of Windows 7 new features and APIs, we hope that you will be able to find some reference to that topic in this blog. If you don’t find it, please feel free to comment and we’ll pick up that subject as quickly as possible. In case you have content you want to share, ping us so we can write a post and reference your content.

You can also expect this blog to have lots of code samples, and cool demos showcasing some of the new Window 7 features. You can also expect this blog to include webcasts with the Windows development group. For examples here are some links to already existing Channel 9 webcasts on Programming Windows 7 Taskbar and Ribbon, and other Windows 7 webcasts on Channel 9

Finally, this blog is part of an effort to highlight the Windows 7 developer story, a story that for some reason got lost with Windows Vista. The Windows 7 Developer and Platform Evangelism Team hope that together with you and the rest of the developers in the development community, we will be able to create an open and direct conversation about developing for Windows 7. 

You can read more about Windows 7-related entries posted on our previous site.

Laptop Hunters: Real People Find Windows PCs A Better Fit For Their Lives

 

Today we’re introducing the next chapter in the ongoing Windows Brand Campaign - an exciting new series of ads called Laptop Hunters. These new ads trace real people as they go on a hunt for a new laptop. For many people looking to buy a new computer today, it is likely that if they make purchase it will be a laptop. Laptop sales increased more than 20% last year.

The Laptop Hunters are not told they are taking part in an ad campaign by Microsoft. Instead, they think they are participating in market research. Each participant set their own budget for a laptop to meet their own unique needs. We then provide the participant with cash and sent them out to find and purchase a laptop – all in a single day. We followed them with a camera crew throughout the course of their hunt and recorded their experiences. Everything is completely unscripted. Once the participant finds and purchases their perfect laptop – we inform them out in the parking lot that it’s actually Microsoft and this was part of our Windows brand campaign. The participant can of course decline to be part of the ad series if they so wish.

In the ad making its debut today, we’re introduced to Lauren who is on the hunt for a new laptop under $1,000, a budget she set herself. She is out to find a laptop that has “speed”, a comfortable keyboard and a 17” screen. Here is Lauren’s hunt:

Laptop Hunters #1 - Lauren

Lauren’s hunt is a good example of real people finding Windows PCs a better fit for their whole lives with the right value.

We define the right value as simply benefits + cost. Windows PCs offer more “bang for the buck”. Competitors offer laptops that often cost quite a bit more, even though they have less powerful hardware, and can’t offer technologies such as Blu-ray, HDMI, eSATA, and 3G wireless broadband connectivity. When buying a laptop, after all, purchasing a laptop is an investment right?

The current state of the economy is forcing people to cut costs and save as much as they can, which means that people are looking for laptops with the most value at the lowest cost possible. According to NPD data as of February 2009, 74% of people looking at buying a new computer rated price as their most important purchasing factor.

Windows PCs have the benefits people want at the price point they like. They also offer choice and flexibility. If a person is a gamer, they can get a gaming PC for example.

In the coming weeks, you can expect to see more from Laptop Hunters as we follow real people on the hunt for a laptop.

Be sure to check out the Laptop Hunters website on Windows.com too!

Touching Windows 7

We’ve come a long way in engineering Windows 7 since we first provided an engineering preview of Windows 7 and the work we are doing to support the touch interface paradigm back at the D: All Things Digital conference.  We chose to kick-off the discussion about engineering Windows 7 with touch scenarios because we know this is a long-lead effort that requires work across the full ecosystem to fully realize the benefit.  For Windows 7, touch support is engineered by building on our advances in input technology we began with the TabletPC work on Windows XP.  Touch in Windows 7 requires improvements in hardware, driver software, core Windows user experience, and of course application support.  By having this support in an open platform, consumers and developers will benefit from a wide variety of choices in hardware, software, and different PC form factors.  Quite a few folks have been a little skeptical of touch, often commenting about having fingerprints on their monitor or something along those lines.  We think touch will become broadly available as the hardware evolves and while it might be the primary input for some form factors (such as a wall mounted display in a hospital, kiosk, or point of sale) it will also prove to richly augment many scenarios such as reading on a convertible laptop or a “kitchen PC”.  One of my favorite experiences recently was watching folks at a computer retailer experience one of the currently available all-in-one touch desktops and then moving to another all-in-one and continuing to interact with the screen—except the PC was not interacting back.  The notion that you can touch a screen seems to be becoming second nature rather quickly.  This post is our first dedicated blog on the subject. This is a joint effort by several people from the touch team, mostly Reed Townsend, Dave Matthews, and Ian LeGrow. -Steven

Windows Touch is designed to enhance how you interact with a PC. For those of us that have been living and breathing touch for the last two years we’re excited to be able to deliver the capability to people using Windows 7. In this blog we’re going to talk about what we’ve done to make Windows touchable. We approached this from a number of different directions: key improvements to the core Windows UI, optimizing for touch in key experiences, working with hardware partners to provide robust and reliable touch PCs, and providing a multitouch platform for applications.

Making Windows Touchable

With Windows 7 we have enriched the Windows experience with touch, making touch a first-class way to interact with your PC alongside the mouse and keyboard. We focused on common activities and refined them thoughtfully with touch in mind. You will have the freedom of direct interaction, like being able to reach out and slowly scroll a web page then flick quickly to move through it. With new touch optimized applications from creative software developers you will be able to immerse yourself as you explore you photos, browse the globe, or go after bad guys in your favorite games.

While providing this touchable experience, we made sure you are getting the full Windows 7 experience and not a sub-set just for touch. We’ve been asked if we are creating a new Touch UI, or “Touch Shell” for Windows – something like Media Center that completely replaces the UI of Windows with a version that is optimized for touch. As you can see from the beta, we are focused on bringing touch through the Windows experience and delivering optimized touch interface where appropriate.  A touch shell for launching only touch-specific applications would not meet customers’ needs – there would be too much switching between “touch” mode and Windows applications. Instead, we focused our efforts on augmenting the overall experience so that Windows works great with touch.

We took a variety of approaches – some broad, and some very targeted to support this goal:

• Touch gestures: Windows 7 has a simple set of touch gestures that work in many existing applications. These include the basics of tap and drag, as well as scroll, right-click, back, forward, zoom, and rotate. More details on how gestures work is described later.


• Improved high DPI support: Windows 7 has improved high dpi support (see High DPI blog post). The broad benefit to touch is that UI elements are rendered closer to their intended size – usually larger – which makes small buttons, links, and other targets easier to access with touch.


• Improved window management: The updated taskbar and windows arranging features go a long way towards making Windows easier to use with touch. There have been several subtle but critical touch optimizations:
  
  
  
  • The taskbar buttons and thumbnails are ideally sized for pressing with touch, and specific behaviors are tuned for touch input. For example, the Jump Lists can be accessed with a simple drag up from the taskbar, and when opened with touch, the shortcuts in the Jump Lists are drawn with extra vertical spacing to make them easier to select.
  
  
  • Aero Peek has been tuned to work with touch – the show desktop button is twice as wide (the only visual sign you are on a Windows Touch PC) and instead of hovering (which you can’t do with touch), a press-and-hold on the button activates Aero Peek.
  
  
  • Sizing and positioning windows is easy with Aero Snap – just drag a window to a screen edge. Furthermore, this was tuned with special touch thresholds so that you don’t have to drag to the absolute edge of the screen – a better balance for touch usage.


• Refinements to key experiences: The top browsing and media activities were refined to provide an optimized touch experience. IE8 includes support for the core touch gestures (scrolling, back, forward, zoom) as well as an optimized address bar that opens by dragging down, and extra spacing in favorites and history lists when opened with touch for easy selection. In Windows Media Player, the transport controls (play, pause, etc) have larger clickable areas even though they still look the same size – so that they are easier to touch.


• Touch keyboard: The on-screen keyboard has been optimized for touch with glow key feedback that’s visible when your finger is covering the letter and multitouch support for natural typing behavior and key combinations. It’s designed for quick usage, like entering a URL.

Overall, the Windows Touch features are designed to work together to deliver a great end-to-end touch experience. For example, the goal with IE8 was to deliver a seamless touch browsing experience, this includes the panning, zooming, URL entry, and several interface enhancements. For this reason, all the new touch features require the presence of a multi-touch digitizer – more on that further down.

Gestures

The Windows Touch gestures are the basic actions you use to interact with Windows or an application using touch. As we noted above, because the gestures are built into the core of Windows, they are designed to work with all applications, even ones that were never designed with touch in mind.

Our mantra with gestures has been “Predictable + Reliable = Habits”. To be predictable the action should relate to the result – if you drag content down, the content should move down. To be reliable, the gesture should do roughly the same action everywhere, and the gesture needs to be responsive and robust to reasonable variations. If these conditions are met then people are far more likely to develop habits and use gestures without consciously thinking about it.

We’ve intentionally focused on this small set of system-wide gestures in Win7. By keeping the set small we reduce misrecognition errors – making them more reliable. We reduce latencies since we need less data to indentify gestures. It’s also easier for all of us to remember a small set! The core gestures are:

• Tap and Double-tap – Touch and release to click. This is the most basic touch action. Can also double-tap to open files and folders. Tolerances are tuned to be larger than with a mouse. This works everywhere.


• Drag – Touch and slide your finger on screen. Like a dragging with a mouse, this moves icons around the desktop, moves windows, selects text (by dragging left or right), etc. This works everywhere.


• Scroll – Drag up or down on the content (not the scrollbar!) of scrollable window to scroll. This may sound basic, but it is the most used (and most useful – it’s a lot easier than targeting the scrollbar!) gesture in the beta according to our telemetry. You’ll notice details that make this a more natural interaction: the inertia if you toss the page and the little bounce when the end of the page is reached. Scrolling is one of the most common activities on the web and in email, and the ability to drag and toss the page is a perfect match for the strengths of touch (simple quick drags on screen). Scrolling is available with one or more fingers. This works in most applications that use standard scrollbars.


• Zoom – Pinch two fingers together or apart to zoom in or out on a document. This comes in handy when looking at photos or reading documents on a small laptop. This works in applications that support mouse wheel zooming.


• Two-Finger Tap – tapping with two fingers simultaneously zooms in about the center of the gesture or restores to the default zoom – great for zooming in on hyperlinks. Applications need to add code to support this.


• Rotate – Touch two spots on a digital photo and twist to rotate it just like a real photo. Applications need to add code to support this.


• Flicks – Flick left or right to navigate back and forward in a browser and other apps. This works in most applications that support back and forward.


• Press-and-hold – Hold your finger on screen for a moment and release after the animation to get a right-click. This works everywhere.


• Or, press-and-tap with a second finger – to get right-click, just like you would click the right button on a mouse or trackpad. This works everywhere.

For touch gestures, seeing them in action is important so here is a brief video showing the gestures in action:

 

In order to make the gestures reliable, we tuned the gesture detection engine with sample gesture input provided by real people using touch in pre-release builds; these tuned gestures are what you will see in the RC build. We have a rigorous process for tuning. Similar to our handwriting recognition data collection, we have tools to record the raw touch data from volunteers while they perform a set of scripted tasks. We collected thousands of samples from hundreds of people. These data were then mined looking for problems and optimization opportunities. The beauty of the system is that we can replay the test data after making any changes to the gesture engine, verifying improvements and guarding against regression in other areas.

This has led to several important optimizations. For example, we found that zooms and rotates were sometimes confused. Detecting zoom gestures only in applications that don’t use rotation has resulted in a 15% improvement in zoom detection.

Further analysis showed that many short gestures were going unrecognized. The gesture recognition heuristics needed to see 100ms or 5mm worth of data before making a decision about what gesture the user was performing. The concern that originally led to these limits was that making a decision about which gesture was being performed too early would lead to misrecognition. In fact, when we looked at the collected user data, we found we could remove those limits entirely – the gesture recognition heuristics performed very well in ambiguous situations. After applying the change and replaying the collected gesture sample data, we found zoom and rotate detection improved by about 6% each, and short scrolling improved by almost 20%!

Supporting Gestures

Gestures are built into the system in such a way that many applications that have no awareness of touch respond appropriately, we have done this by creating default handlers that simulate the mouse or mouse wheel. Generally this gives a very good experience, but there are applications where some gestures don’t work smoothly or at all. In these cases the application needs to respond to the gesture message directly.

In Windows, several experiences have been gesture enabled. We’ve spent a considerable amount of effort on IE8 – ensuring scrolling and zooming are smooth and that back and forward are at your fingertips. Media Center, which is a completely custom interface ideally suited to touch, added smooth touch scrolling in galleries and the home screen. The XPS Viewer has gesture support that will could become a model for many document viewing apps. Scrolling and zoom work as you would expect. When zooming out beyond a single page, pages start to tile so you can view many at a time. When zoomed out in that fashion, double tapping on any page jumps back to the default view of that page. A two-finger tap restores the view to 100% magnification. These predictable behaviors become habit forming quickly.

Working with the Hardware Ecosystem

A major benefit of the Windows ecosystem is diversity – PCs come in all shapes and sizes. To help ensure that there is a great Windows Touch experience across the many different types of PCs we have defined a set of measurements and tests for Windows Touch that are part of the Windows Logo. We’ve been working with touch hardware partners since the beginning of Windows 7 to define the requirements and ensure they are ready for launch.

Our approach has been to provide an abstraction of the underlying hardware technology. We’ve specified a requirements for the quantitative aspects of the device, such as accuracy, sample rate, and resolution, based on the requirements to successfully enable touch features. For example, we have determined the necessary accuracy values for a device so people can successfully target common UI elements like close boxes, or what sample rate and resolution are required to ensure quality gesture recognition.

The requirements form the basis for the Windows Touch logo program. For consumers, the logo tells you that the PC and all of its components are optimized for Windows. Component level logo, which is what we grant to Touch digitizers helps the OEMs choose a device that will deliver a great touch experience.

Based on the quantitative requirements, we built an interactive test suite that includes 43 separate tests, all validating the core requirements under different conditions. There are single point accuracy tests at various locations on the screen, including the corners which are often harder for accuracy but critical to Windows. There are also several dynamic tests where accuracy is measured while drawing lines on the screen – see the screenshot below of Test 7. In this test, two lines are simultaneously drawn using touch along the black line from the start to the end. The touch tracings must remain within 2.5 mm of the black line between the start and end points. The first image below shows a passing test where the entire tracing is green (apologies for the fuzziness – these are foot long tracings from a large screen that have been scaled down).

 

  Figure 1: A passing line accuracy test from the Windows 7 Touch logo test tool

Not all devices pass the tests. Below is a screenshot of a device that is failing. This one has some noise – notice the deviation from the line in red. These errors need to be resolved before it would receive the logo. Errors like this can result in misrecognized gestures.

 Figure 2: A failing line accuracy test from the Windows 7 Touch logo test tool

To ensure repeatability of the tests, we’ve built a set of plastic jigs with tracing cut-outs, see photo below. This particular jig is used for 5 of the tests and measures accuracy while tracing an arc.

Figure 3. Plastic jigs with tracing cut-outs for testing.

The testing tool is available to our partners now, we’re working closely with several of them to help tune the performance of their devices to meet the requirements and deliver a great touch experience. We have set-up an in-house testing facility that will be testing every device submitted for Logo.

With the Release Candidate, OEMs and IHVs will be able to finalize the logo process for systems designed for Windows 7. Today we already have several hardware partners that have provided us with devices and drivers for testing.

Windows Touch for Software Developers

We also want to talk a little about the touch platform for software developers.  Windows 7 provides a rich touch platform for applications. We’ve already mentioned gestures, there’s also a lower level platform that gives developers complete control over the touch experience. We think about it in a Good-Better-Best software stack.

Good

The “good” bucket is what touch-unaware applications get for free from Windows 7. Windows provides default behaviors for many gestures, and will trigger those behaviors in your application in response to user input. For example, if someone tries touch scrolling over a window that is touch-unaware, we can detect the presence of various types of scrollbars and will scroll them. Similarly, when the user zooms, we inject messages that provide an approximation of the zoom gesture in many apps. As a developer you can ensure that the default gestures work just by using standard scrollbars and responding to ctrl-mouse wheel messages.

Better

The “better” bucket is focused on adding direct gesture support and other small behavior and UI changes to make apps more touch-friendly. For instance, there is a new Win32 window message, WM_GESTURE (preliminary MSDN docs), that informs the application a gesture was performed over its window. Each message contains information about the gesture, such as how far the user is scrolling or zooming and where the center of the gesture is.

Applications that respond to gestures directly have full control over how they behave. For example, the default touch scrolling is designed to work in text centric windows that scroll primarily vertically (like web pages or documents), dragging horizontally does selection rather than scrolling. In most applications this works well, but if an app has primarily horizontal scrolling then the defaults would have to be overridden. Also, for some applications the default scroll can appear chunky. This is fine with a mouse wheel, but it feels unnatural with touch. Apps may also want to tune scrolling to end on boundaries, such as cells in a spreadsheet, or photos in a list. IE8 has a custom behavior where it opens a link in a new tab if you drag over it rather than click it.

In addition to gestures, there are subtle optimizations applications can make for touch if they check to see if touch is in use. Many of the subtle touch behavior optimizations in Windows were enabled in this manner. Larger Jump List item spacing for touch, larger hot spots for triggering window arranging, and the press and hold behavior on the desktop Aero Peek button with touch are all features written with the mouse in mind, but when activated via touch use slightly different parameters.

Best

Applications or features that fall into the “best” bucket are designed from the ground up to be great touch experiences. Apps in this bucket would build on top of WM_TOUCH – the window message that provides raw touch data to the application. Developers can use this to go beyond the core system gestures and build custom gesture support for their applications. They can also provide visualizations of the touch input (e.g. a raster editing application), build custom controls, and other things we haven’t thought of yet!

We also provide a COM version of the Manipulations and Inertia APIs from Surface. The Manipulations API simplifies interactions where an arbitrary number of fingers are on an object into simple 2D affine transforms and also allows for multiple interactions to be occurring simultaneously. For instance, if you were writing a photo editing application, you could grab two photos at the same time using however many fingers you wanted and rotate, resize, and translate the photos within the app. Inertia provides a very basic physics model for applications and, in the example above, would allow you to “toss” the photos and have them decelerate and come to a stop naturally.

Showcasing Touch

We’ve previously demonstrated, Microsoft Surface Globe, an interactive globe done in partnership with the Surface effort. Spinning the globe works as you would expect from a real-world globe, but with a touchable globe you can grab and stretch the view to zoom in, rotate, and move the view around. Interacting with the globe and exploring the world is the majority of the UI, and it is exceedingly easy to use with touch. Other features like search and adding markers to the map have also been designed with touch in mind.

Here’s another video to get an idea of what we’re talking about:

 

We’re eagerly looking forward to seeing new touch-optimized user interfaces and interactions. If you’re thinking about writing touch applications or adding touch support to your existing app, you should start with the MSDN documentation and samples.

What Next?

We’ve noted several touch updates in the RC. If you have the Windows 7 Beta you can experiment with touch using a PC that supports multiple touch points. Please note that the multitouch PCs available today were developed while the Windows 7 requirements were also defined, so while we believe they can support Windows 7’s requirements, only the maker of the PC can provide the logoed drivers for Windows 7 and support the PC on Windows 7. Keeping that caveat in mind, today there are a few multitouch PCs on the market:

• HP TouchSmart All-in-One PCs (IQ500 series & IQ800 series)


• HP TouchSmart tx2 Tablet PC


• Dell Latitude XT or XT2 Tablet PC

To enable multitouch capabilities on these PCs running the Windows 7 Beta you will need to make sure you have the latest multitouch beta drivers. Remember these are pre-release drivers and are not supported by Microsoft, Dell or HP. And again, they still need to pass through the Windows Logo process we described above before they are final.

• For HP TouchSmart All-in-One PCs: The pre-release driver is available from Windows Update. After you have installed the Window 7 Beta, open Windows Update from the Start menu. You might have to click the “Check for Updates” link on your left so it will find the driver, it is Optional right now so you’ll have to select it before it will install. Alternatively you can download it from the NextWindow website.


• For the Dell Latitude XT, XT2 and HP TouchSmart tx2 Tablet PCs: the drivers are available on N-Trig’s website. N-Trig is the company that makes the digitizer in these PCs (you should read the release notes, there are some limitations, like no pen support – that will be fixed by RC – you should be aware of and how to switch between Windows Vista and Windows 7).

We often get asked about single-touch PCs. Will they work with Windows 7? There are many types of hardware available for touch and many screens and PCs can provide single touch (usually based on resistive touch technology).  A single-touch PC will have the same functionality on Windows 7 as it does on Vista, but this functionality will not be extended to the Windows 7 capabilities. As we noted earlier, Windows Touch in Windows 7 is comprised of a collection of touch enhancements, several of which require multitouch, that work together to deliver a great end-to-end touch experience.

As form factors change and the demands of our user interfaces change, input methods change and grow as well. We’re excited about the unique benefits touch offers the user, and the new places and new ways it enables PCs to be used.  We expect PCs of all form factors and price points to provide touch support and so it makes sense that these PCs will be able to take advantage of the full range of Windows 7 capabilities.

Windows 7 is designed to provide efficient ways to use multitouch for the most common and important scenarios, while being a natural and intuitive complement to the mouse and keyboard people use today.

Keep in Touch!

- Windows Touch Team

Touching Windows 7

We’ve come a long way in engineering Windows 7 since we first provided an engineering preview of Windows 7 and the work we are doing to support the touch interface paradigm back at the D: All Things Digital conference.  We chose to kick-off the discussion about engineering Windows 7 with touch scenarios because we know this is a long-lead effort that requires work across the full ecosystem to fully realize the benefit.  For Windows 7, touch support is engineered by building on our advances in input technology we began with the TabletPC work on Windows XP.  Touch in Windows 7 requires improvements in hardware, driver software, core Windows user experience, and of course application support.  By having this support in an open platform, consumers and developers will benefit from a wide variety of choices in hardware, software, and different PC form factors.  Quite a few folks have been a little skeptical of touch, often commenting about having fingerprints on their monitor or something along those lines.  We think touch will become broadly available as the hardware evolves and while it might be the primary input for some form factors (such as a wall mounted display in a hospital, kiosk, or point of sale) it will also prove to richly augment many scenarios such as reading on a convertible laptop or a “kitchen PC”.  One of my favorite experiences recently was watching folks at a computer retailer experience one of the currently available all-in-one touch desktops and then moving to another all-in-one and continuing to interact with the screen—except the PC was not interacting back.  The notion that you can touch a screen seems to be becoming second nature rather quickly.  This post is our first dedicated blog on the subject. This is a joint effort by several people from the touch team, mostly Reed Townsend, Dave Matthews, and Ian LeGrow. -Steven

Windows Touch is designed to enhance how you interact with a PC. For those of us that have been living and breathing touch for the last two years we’re excited to be able to deliver the capability to people using Windows 7. In this blog we’re going to talk about what we’ve done to make Windows touchable. We approached this from a number of different directions: key improvements to the core Windows UI, optimizing for touch in key experiences, working with hardware partners to provide robust and reliable touch PCs, and providing a multitouch platform for applications.

Making Windows Touchable

With Windows 7 we have enriched the Windows experience with touch, making touch a first-class way to interact with your PC alongside the mouse and keyboard. We focused on common activities and refined them thoughtfully with touch in mind. You will have the freedom of direct interaction, like being able to reach out and slowly scroll a web page then flick quickly to move through it. With new touch optimized applications from creative software developers you will be able to immerse yourself as you explore you photos, browse the globe, or go after bad guys in your favorite games.

While providing this touchable experience, we made sure you are getting the full Windows 7 experience and not a sub-set just for touch. We’ve been asked if we are creating a new Touch UI, or “Touch Shell” for Windows – something like Media Center that completely replaces the UI of Windows with a version that is optimized for touch. As you can see from the beta, we are focused on bringing touch through the Windows experience and delivering optimized touch interface where appropriate.  A touch shell for launching only touch-specific applications would not meet customers’ needs – there would be too much switching between “touch” mode and Windows applications. Instead, we focused our efforts on augmenting the overall experience so that Windows works great with touch.

We took a variety of approaches – some broad, and some very targeted to support this goal:

• Touch gestures: Windows 7 has a simple set of touch gestures that work in many existing applications. These include the basics of tap and drag, as well as scroll, right-click, back, forward, zoom, and rotate. More details on how gestures work is described later.


• Improved high DPI support: Windows 7 has improved high dpi support (see High DPI blog post). The broad benefit to touch is that UI elements are rendered closer to their intended size – usually larger – which makes small buttons, links, and other targets easier to access with touch.


• Improved window management: The updated taskbar and windows arranging features go a long way towards making Windows easier to use with touch. There have been several subtle but critical touch optimizations:
  
  
  
  • The taskbar buttons and thumbnails are ideally sized for pressing with touch, and specific behaviors are tuned for touch input. For example, the Jump Lists can be accessed with a simple drag up from the taskbar, and when opened with touch, the shortcuts in the Jump Lists are drawn with extra vertical spacing to make them easier to select.
  
  
  • Aero Peek has been tuned to work with touch – the show desktop button is twice as wide (the only visual sign you are on a Windows Touch PC) and instead of hovering (which you can’t do with touch), a press-and-hold on the button activates Aero Peek.
  
  
  • Sizing and positioning windows is easy with Aero Snap – just drag a window to a screen edge. Furthermore, this was tuned with special touch thresholds so that you don’t have to drag to the absolute edge of the screen – a better balance for touch usage.


• Refinements to key experiences: The top browsing and media activities were refined to provide an optimized touch experience. IE8 includes support for the core touch gestures (scrolling, back, forward, zoom) as well as an optimized address bar that opens by dragging down, and extra spacing in favorites and history lists when opened with touch for easy selection. In Windows Media Player, the transport controls (play, pause, etc) have larger clickable areas even though they still look the same size – so that they are easier to touch.


• Touch keyboard: The on-screen keyboard has been optimized for touch with glow key feedback that’s visible when your finger is covering the letter and multitouch support for natural typing behavior and key combinations. It’s designed for quick usage, like entering a URL.

Overall, the Windows Touch features are designed to work together to deliver a great end-to-end touch experience. For example, the goal with IE8 was to deliver a seamless touch browsing experience, this includes the panning, zooming, URL entry, and several interface enhancements. For this reason, all the new touch features require the presence of a multi-touch digitizer – more on that further down.

Gestures

The Windows Touch gestures are the basic actions you use to interact with Windows or an application using touch. As we noted above, because the gestures are built into the core of Windows, they are designed to work with all applications, even ones that were never designed with touch in mind.

Our mantra with gestures has been “Predictable + Reliable = Habits”. To be predictable the action should relate to the result – if you drag content down, the content should move down. To be reliable, the gesture should do roughly the same action everywhere, and the gesture needs to be responsive and robust to reasonable variations. If these conditions are met then people are far more likely to develop habits and use gestures without consciously thinking about it.

We’ve intentionally focused on this small set of system-wide gestures in Win7. By keeping the set small we reduce misrecognition errors – making them more reliable. We reduce latencies since we need less data to indentify gestures. It’s also easier for all of us to remember a small set! The core gestures are:

• Tap and Double-tap – Touch and release to click. This is the most basic touch action. Can also double-tap to open files and folders. Tolerances are tuned to be larger than with a mouse. This works everywhere.


• Drag – Touch and slide your finger on screen. Like a dragging with a mouse, this moves icons around the desktop, moves windows, selects text (by dragging left or right), etc. This works everywhere.


• Scroll – Drag up or down on the content (not the scrollbar!) of scrollable window to scroll. This may sound basic, but it is the most used (and most useful – it’s a lot easier than targeting the scrollbar!) gesture in the beta according to our telemetry. You’ll notice details that make this a more natural interaction: the inertia if you toss the page and the little bounce when the end of the page is reached. Scrolling is one of the most common activities on the web and in email, and the ability to drag and toss the page is a perfect match for the strengths of touch (simple quick drags on screen). Scrolling is available with one or more fingers. This works in most applications that use standard scrollbars.


• Zoom – Pinch two fingers together or apart to zoom in or out on a document. This comes in handy when looking at photos or reading documents on a small laptop. This works in applications that support mouse wheel zooming.


• Two-Finger Tap – tapping with two fingers simultaneously zooms in about the center of the gesture or restores to the default zoom – great for zooming in on hyperlinks. Applications need to add code to support this.


• Rotate – Touch two spots on a digital photo and twist to rotate it just like a real photo. Applications need to add code to support this.


• Flicks – Flick left or right to navigate back and forward in a browser and other apps. This works in most applications that support back and forward.


• Press-and-hold – Hold your finger on screen for a moment and release after the animation to get a right-click. This works everywhere.


• Or, press-and-tap with a second finger – to get right-click, just like you would click the right button on a mouse or trackpad. This works everywhere.

For touch gestures, seeing them in action is important so here is a brief video showing the gestures in action:

 

In order to make the gestures reliable, we tuned the gesture detection engine with sample gesture input provided by real people using touch in pre-release builds; these tuned gestures are what you will see in the RC build. We have a rigorous process for tuning. Similar to our handwriting recognition data collection, we have tools to record the raw touch data from volunteers while they perform a set of scripted tasks. We collected thousands of samples from hundreds of people. These data were then mined looking for problems and optimization opportunities. The beauty of the system is that we can replay the test data after making any changes to the gesture engine, verifying improvements and guarding against regression in other areas.

This has led to several important optimizations. For example, we found that zooms and rotates were sometimes confused. Detecting zoom gestures only in applications that don’t use rotation has resulted in a 15% improvement in zoom detection.

Further analysis showed that many short gestures were going unrecognized. The gesture recognition heuristics needed to see 100ms or 5mm worth of data before making a decision about what gesture the user was performing. The concern that originally led to these limits was that making a decision about which gesture was being performed too early would lead to misrecognition. In fact, when we looked at the collected user data, we found we could remove those limits entirely – the gesture recognition heuristics performed very well in ambiguous situations. After applying the change and replaying the collected gesture sample data, we found zoom and rotate detection improved by about 6% each, and short scrolling improved by almost 20%!

Supporting Gestures

Gestures are built into the system in such a way that many applications that have no awareness of touch respond appropriately, we have done this by creating default handlers that simulate the mouse or mouse wheel. Generally this gives a very good experience, but there are applications where some gestures don’t work smoothly or at all. In these cases the application needs to respond to the gesture message directly.

In Windows, several experiences have been gesture enabled. We’ve spent a considerable amount of effort on IE8 – ensuring scrolling and zooming are smooth and that back and forward are at your fingertips. Media Center, which is a completely custom interface ideally suited to touch, added smooth touch scrolling in galleries and the home screen. The XPS Viewer has gesture support that will could become a model for many document viewing apps. Scrolling and zoom work as you would expect. When zooming out beyond a single page, pages start to tile so you can view many at a time. When zoomed out in that fashion, double tapping on any page jumps back to the default view of that page. A two-finger tap restores the view to 100% magnification. These predictable behaviors become habit forming quickly.

Working with the Hardware Ecosystem

A major benefit of the Windows ecosystem is diversity – PCs come in all shapes and sizes. To help ensure that there is a great Windows Touch experience across the many different types of PCs we have defined a set of measurements and tests for Windows Touch that are part of the Windows Logo. We’ve been working with touch hardware partners since the beginning of Windows 7 to define the requirements and ensure they are ready for launch.

Our approach has been to provide an abstraction of the underlying hardware technology. We’ve specified a requirements for the quantitative aspects of the device, such as accuracy, sample rate, and resolution, based on the requirements to successfully enable touch features. For example, we have determined the necessary accuracy values for a device so people can successfully target common UI elements like close boxes, or what sample rate and resolution are required to ensure quality gesture recognition.

The requirements form the basis for the Windows Touch logo program. For consumers, the logo tells you that the PC and all of its components are optimized for Windows. Component level logo, which is what we grant to Touch digitizers helps the OEMs choose a device that will deliver a great touch experience.

Based on the quantitative requirements, we built an interactive test suite that includes 43 separate tests, all validating the core requirements under different conditions. There are single point accuracy tests at various locations on the screen, including the corners which are often harder for accuracy but critical to Windows. There are also several dynamic tests where accuracy is measured while drawing lines on the screen – see the screenshot below of Test 7. In this test, two lines are simultaneously drawn using touch along the black line from the start to the end. The touch tracings must remain within 2.5 mm of the black line between the start and end points. The first image below shows a passing test where the entire tracing is green (apologies for the fuzziness – these are foot long tracings from a large screen that have been scaled down).

 

  Figure 1: A passing line accuracy test from the Windows 7 Touch logo test tool

Not all devices pass the tests. Below is a screenshot of a device that is failing. This one has some noise – notice the deviation from the line in red. These errors need to be resolved before it would receive the logo. Errors like this can result in misrecognized gestures.

 Figure 2: A failing line accuracy test from the Windows 7 Touch logo test tool

To ensure repeatability of the tests, we’ve built a set of plastic jigs with tracing cut-outs, see photo below. This particular jig is used for 5 of the tests and measures accuracy while tracing an arc.

Figure 3. Plastic jigs with tracing cut-outs for testing.

The testing tool is available to our partners now, we’re working closely with several of them to help tune the performance of their devices to meet the requirements and deliver a great touch experience. We have set-up an in-house testing facility that will be testing every device submitted for Logo.

With the Release Candidate, OEMs and IHVs will be able to finalize the logo process for systems designed for Windows 7. Today we already have several hardware partners that have provided us with devices and drivers for testing.

Windows Touch for Software Developers

We also want to talk a little about the touch platform for software developers.  Windows 7 provides a rich touch platform for applications. We’ve already mentioned gestures, there’s also a lower level platform that gives developers complete control over the touch experience. We think about it in a Good-Better-Best software stack.

Good

The “good” bucket is what touch-unaware applications get for free from Windows 7. Windows provides default behaviors for many gestures, and will trigger those behaviors in your application in response to user input. For example, if someone tries touch scrolling over a window that is touch-unaware, we can detect the presence of various types of scrollbars and will scroll them. Similarly, when the user zooms, we inject messages that provide an approximation of the zoom gesture in many apps. As a developer you can ensure that the default gestures work just by using standard scrollbars and responding to ctrl-mouse wheel messages.

Better

The “better” bucket is focused on adding direct gesture support and other small behavior and UI changes to make apps more touch-friendly. For instance, there is a new Win32 window message, WM_GESTURE (preliminary MSDN docs), that informs the application a gesture was performed over its window. Each message contains information about the gesture, such as how far the user is scrolling or zooming and where the center of the gesture is.

Applications that respond to gestures directly have full control over how they behave. For example, the default touch scrolling is designed to work in text centric windows that scroll primarily vertically (like web pages or documents), dragging horizontally does selection rather than scrolling. In most applications this works well, but if an app has primarily horizontal scrolling then the defaults would have to be overridden. Also, for some applications the default scroll can appear chunky. This is fine with a mouse wheel, but it feels unnatural with touch. Apps may also want to tune scrolling to end on boundaries, such as cells in a spreadsheet, or photos in a list. IE8 has a custom behavior where it opens a link in a new tab if you drag over it rather than click it.

In addition to gestures, there are subtle optimizations applications can make for touch if they check to see if touch is in use. Many of the subtle touch behavior optimizations in Windows were enabled in this manner. Larger Jump List item spacing for touch, larger hot spots for triggering window arranging, and the press and hold behavior on the desktop Aero Peek button with touch are all features written with the mouse in mind, but when activated via touch use slightly different parameters.

Best

Applications or features that fall into the “best” bucket are designed from the ground up to be great touch experiences. Apps in this bucket would build on top of WM_TOUCH – the window message that provides raw touch data to the application. Developers can use this to go beyond the core system gestures and build custom gesture support for their applications. They can also provide visualizations of the touch input (e.g. a raster editing application), build custom controls, and other things we haven’t thought of yet!

We also provide a COM version of the Manipulations and Inertia APIs from Surface. The Manipulations API simplifies interactions where an arbitrary number of fingers are on an object into simple 2D affine transforms and also allows for multiple interactions to be occurring simultaneously. For instance, if you were writing a photo editing application, you could grab two photos at the same time using however many fingers you wanted and rotate, resize, and translate the photos within the app. Inertia provides a very basic physics model for applications and, in the example above, would allow you to “toss” the photos and have them decelerate and come to a stop naturally.

Showcasing Touch

We’ve previously demonstrated, Microsoft Surface Globe, an interactive globe done in partnership with the Surface effort. Spinning the globe works as you would expect from a real-world globe, but with a touchable globe you can grab and stretch the view to zoom in, rotate, and move the view around. Interacting with the globe and exploring the world is the majority of the UI, and it is exceedingly easy to use with touch. Other features like search and adding markers to the map have also been designed with touch in mind.

Here’s another video to get an idea of what we’re talking about:

 

We’re eagerly looking forward to seeing new touch-optimized user interfaces and interactions. If you’re thinking about writing touch applications or adding touch support to your existing app, you should start with the MSDN documentation and samples.

What Next?

We’ve noted several touch updates in the RC. If you have the Windows 7 Beta you can experiment with touch using a PC that supports multiple touch points. Please note that the multitouch PCs available today were developed while the Windows 7 requirements were also defined, so while we believe they can support Windows 7’s requirements, only the maker of the PC can provide the logoed drivers for Windows 7 and support the PC on Windows 7. Keeping that caveat in mind, today there are a few multitouch PCs on the market:

• HP TouchSmart All-in-One PCs (IQ500 series & IQ800 series)


• HP TouchSmart tx2 Tablet PC


• Dell Latitude XT or XT2 Tablet PC

To enable multitouch capabilities on these PCs running the Windows 7 Beta you will need to make sure you have the latest multitouch beta drivers. Remember these are pre-release drivers and are not supported by Microsoft, Dell or HP. And again, they still need to pass through the Windows Logo process we described above before they are final.

• For HP TouchSmart All-in-One PCs: The pre-release driver is available from Windows Update. After you have installed the Window 7 Beta, open Windows Update from the Start menu. You might have to click the “Check for Updates” link on your left so it will find the driver, it is Optional right now so you’ll have to select it before it will install. Alternatively you can download it from the NextWindow website.


• For the Dell Latitude XT, XT2 and HP TouchSmart tx2 Tablet PCs: the drivers are available on N-Trig’s website. N-Trig is the company that makes the digitizer in these PCs (you should read the release notes, there are some limitations, like no pen support – that will be fixed by RC – you should be aware of and how to switch between Windows Vista and Windows 7).

We often get asked about single-touch PCs. Will they work with Windows 7? There are many types of hardware available for touch and many screens and PCs can provide single touch (usually based on resistive touch technology).  A single-touch PC will have the same functionality on Windows 7 as it does on Vista, but this functionality will not be extended to the Windows 7 capabilities. As we noted earlier, Windows Touch in Windows 7 is comprised of a collection of touch enhancements, several of which require multitouch, that work together to deliver a great end-to-end touch experience.

As form factors change and the demands of our user interfaces change, input methods change and grow as well. We’re excited about the unique benefits touch offers the user, and the new places and new ways it enables PCs to be used.  We expect PCs of all form factors and price points to provide touch support and so it makes sense that these PCs will be able to take advantage of the full range of Windows 7 capabilities.

Windows 7 is designed to provide efficient ways to use multitouch for the most common and important scenarios, while being a natural and intuitive complement to the mouse and keyboard people use today.

Keep in Touch!

- Windows Touch Team

Federating Windows Search with Enterprise Data Sources

The Windows Explorer has evolved by enabling you to find all sorts of content by searching for it. Many of you have used the search features in Windows Vista (based on our instrumented data) from the start menu or from the search box in Explorer. It has been a long time since most of us could remember where everything is by carefully managing our folder hierarchy and finding things based on file name alone.  We often rely on domain specific search (in music players, mail clients, photo clients) but with Windows Vista and Windows 7 we make it possible to search within a namespace and across namespaces.  This post is about a new feature based on Search that allows searching across PCs and even servers in an Enterprise setting.  Alwin and Scott, program managers, and Brandon, a developer, on the “Find and Organize” feature team authored this post. –Steven

Finding your stuff

Whether you’re searching or browsing, Windows Explorer is really about finding your stuff, and once you’ve found it, doing something with it (such as copying, opening, deleting, etc). For data that lives on your PC or home network, Windows 7 has invested in HomeGroup and Libraries (subjects for a future posting from our team) to provide an easier and richer experience than ever before. However, we didn’t stop there. Over the last few years, we’ve seen enterprise customers’ important content migrate towards (or aggregated in) centralized content stores, such as SharePoint. These products typically provide great features for team collaboration, document versioning and workflow management, archiving, retention policy enforcement, and other centrally-managed functionality that IT managers appreciate.

Important enterprise data is found on local machines, in a variety of centralized content stores and also beyond the firewall

Unfortunately, this has placed an extra burden on customers to learn each new content store’s user interface, often asking them to give up familiar desktop features like drag-and-drop. Given their collaborative focus, these sites grow organically and it can become hard to remember where a particular document was stored and then wade through long lists of them every time you want to get back to it. Enterprise customers have asked us for a solution that simplifies finding important content in these various data stores but without leaving their normal Windows work flows.

As we looked at this trend and the lack of integration with content management and content indexing web services, we used these guiding principles in developing a solution:

• Natural for people to use. Customers want a more consistent experience for finding and working with data in these disparate content stores, and would like us to bridge the local and remote content experiences by helping them “roll over” from one to the other.


• Easy for IT admins to deploy. IT admins don’t like to deploy code, and want low-maintenance solutions that are easy to manage. Meanwhile customers want to connect up these sources without going through long and tedious installation processes or having to get help every time they want to set up a new search location.


• Easy for developers to adopt. Developers want to enable this functionality in their offerings quickly and easily. There are a lot of data sources which need to be supported because IT folks don’t want to be locked in to a specific server technology.

Choosing to build Federated Search

Federated Search wasn’t the only way to address these challenges. The brute force approach would have been to take our existing Windows Search indexing technology and just use it on these content stores—that index the remote content on a local PC. This isn’t a very realistic solution since it’s inefficient to have all content indexed over the network by each person’s machine, especially when the content is changing at a rapid pace and represents a large corpus. Corporate retention policies may also prevent keeping even a local index of certain sensitive data.

Fortunately, there’s a better option – Federated Search. Federated Search enables you to search a remote web service from Windows explorer and get results back that you can act on like any normal file. The largest barrier to doing Federated Search has already been taken care of too. That is, most of these content stores are already indexed on the server, or at least on some server. There are several great offerings that will accomplish this, such as Microsoft Search Server. Not only do these servers index this content, but many of them already expose search results via a standard web protocol. This is largely thanks to the prevalence of OpenSearch and RSS enabled clients (including Internet Explorer and Microsoft Search Server, among many others).

For Windows 7, we’ve added support for Federated Search using OpenSearch v1.1 and worked to make the experience a seamless one. We found this solution strikes a good balance by leveraging the strengths of content services and the strengths of local file interactions within Windows.

Natural to use

Using Windows Explorer, people are familiar with several important user interface and interaction elements. They know how to use the navigation pane to change what they’re looking at. They know how to scroll around, how to select an item (or several), and they know how to double-click to open them. Most people know how to right-click for context-sensitive options related to their selection, or how to find those options presented in the command bar. They know they can drag and drop items to move them around. They know how to change view modes. We hope that they know how to search their current location using the search box, and in Windows 7 we think we’ve made it much easier to discover and use the Preview Pane to make sure they’ve got the right result.

Searching a SharePoint site using the new Federated Search support in Windows Explorer

Much of the usefulness of building Federated Search into Explorer is our ability to take advantage of this knowledge and familiarity. This may seem obvious once you see it in action, but behind the scenes there’s quite a lot going on to make all of this happen. For example, some applications such as Microsoft Word already know how to work with web URLs. So opening a Word document from a web server is fairly straightforward. But the majority of applications you’ll encounter really only understand how to open files on the local machine or via standard network file sharing protocols. This includes everything from the built-in software like Notepad and Paint, to third-party software like Photoshop or iTunes.

To handle this case, we implemented a “just in time” download solution, which will download the file to the internet cache before opening an application or taking actions (like using the SendTo menu) which require local files. This lets us offer searches that are very “lightweight” from a server load perspective, where we display metadata and icons or thumbnails without ever requesting the actual file. Then if you take an action like previewing or opening an item, we will do some behind-the-scenes work to make a local copy of the file only if necessary.

That enables us to work with the existing application ecosystem without asking anything of developers. However, applications can also take steps to offer even better functionality in many cases. For example, Windows Photo Viewer has added support for non-file items. So if you open a picture result in the built-in photo viewer, it’s the photo viewer that downloads the item, not Explorer. This may not seem like a big deal, but it lets the photo viewer enable the forward and back buttons to jump to the next or previous result – and it will download that image on-demand. Starting at the PDC we began reaching out to third-party ISVs to encourage them to implement similar enhancements for Federated Search scenarios, and we will continue to offer guidance on how to best integrate with all of the newest Explorer features.

Finally, we support all the standard clipboard and drag-and-drop operations. So if you drag a Word document from a Federated Search query onto your desktop, it will be copied there. You’ll even see the familiar Windows Explorer copy dialog, with progress indication, cancel ability, conflict resolution, and so on.

But wait, there’s more! Windows Explorer is a great tool that many customers know and love. But some people use it without even knowing it. Countless Windows applications make use of what we call the Common File Dialog. This is a special Explorer window that lets you find and choose items to be opened or inserted into your current application, without ever leaving it. If you’ve ever clicked File and then Open or Save in an application menu, you’ve probably seen some version of this dialog. PowerPoint, for example, uses the common file dialog to insert pictures. That means from inside PowerPoint you can click Insert Picture, select the Federated Search link for your image repository, search for the picture you want, and then insert it directly into PowerPoint. This works for any existing application that supports the Common File Dialog, and there are a whole lot of them!

Inserting a picture into PowerPoint’s using Federated Search

Our Federated Search solution is all about simple lightweight access with a common, familiar user interface. This has a lot of benefits as we described above, but there are also cases where a server’s web interface will offer its own benefits. This might involve advanced query building, browsing, or server work-flow tasks, for example. So Windows 7 builds a bridge to these content repositories. After doing a search against a supported location, you will see a “Search on Website” button in the command bar which allows you to seamlessly send the query up to the service’s web interface in the default web browser. You’ll also see the “Open File Location” menu item when you right-click on a search result. Selecting that option will launch the web browser to the specific location in the document repository where the file is stored.

This seamless integration of Federated Search within Windows allows customers to greatly simplify their workflow for getting at remote files while still being able to easily take advantages of the advanced functionality of content repositories.

Simple to deploy

Our next challenge was to make it easy for customers to get these new connections onto their machines. It wouldn’t be practical to ship Windows with a connection to every solution in the world, so we shifted to a way that would make it very easy for any web service to deploy a connection to their specific service.

The model we came up with is similar to the way you add favorites from the web today. A web service can place a link to an .osdx file somewhere on their web page (see Channel 9’s search page for an example). The .osdx file is a simple XML file that uses the OpenSearch description document format to describe how to connect to the web service, and gives the web service some control of how the data is presented in Windows Explorer. When a person clicks on the link, Windows performs an ultra-lightweight install process that adds a search connector to that web service and places a link to that it in the Windows Explorer favorites.

If you are an administrator in an enterprise environment, you will likely want to provide some pre-installed search connectors for your users to search the company intranet or a popular internal SharePoint site for example. You can do this by deploying the search connector (.searchconnector-ms) files to your users’ machines via typical deployment techniques such as imaging, group policy preferences or startup scripts. The beauty is that it’s just a simple XML configuration file and there’s no code that needs to get installed on their machines. It’s also possible to pin one of these as a link from the Start menu through group policy. In the group policy editor look for the policy in this area: User Configuration> Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Explorer. The policy name is “Pin Libraries or Search connectors to Search again links and start menu”.

Launching a Federated Search of an enterprise Intranet from the Start Menu

Easy to adopt

Of course this technology depends on having services that support it. Although there are only a few services that provide a .osdx for you today, there are many existing services that already support the basic OpenSearch requirements.

We’re already seeing positive initial reactions from enthusiasts and ISVs alike echoing that it is indeed easy to enable your service to work with our Federated Search platform. If you’re a developer and want to enable an existing web based service to support Windows 7 Federated Search, you’ll need to provide a web service that accepts an http GET request with the search terms embedded somewhere in the URL and be able to return the results as an RSS or Atom feed. These requirements are typically very easy to meet for most applications that already provide search services via a web browser.

Your web service results should include the basic RSS tags like <link>, <title>, <description>, <pubDate> to get started but there’s much more that you can include in the RSS output and customization you can do within the .osdx file to enhance the experience for the end user.

For more information, we’ve published the Windows 7 Federated Search implementer’s guide with detailed information on how to enable your data source to work with Windows Federated Search. There’s also a recorded PDC session that demonstrates how to build a Windows Federated Search compatible web service for an existing SQL database.

- Brandon Paddock, Scott Dart & Alwin Vyhmeister, Find and Organize

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