We’ve been busy.

Last week at PDC we unveiled Windows 7 and provided developers with a first look at the bits. This week at WinHEC we’re providing further details about Windows 7 for the hardware community. The big Windows 7 news for XPS is that we’ve extended the developer surface to include applications built on Win32. With Windows Vista (and back to XP) we have a great developer story for managed code development with XPS support in .Net 3.0 (and later). With Windows 7 we now have great support for developers working with Win32 (aka native) code.

New Win32 APIs in Windows 7 that we covered at PDC last week:

• XPS API provides creation, manipulation, reading, writing and other services for XPS documents and print streams
• OPC API provides creation, manipulation, reading, writing and other services for Open Packaging Conventions-based file formats, including XPS, OOXML and an increasing number of industrial strength third party file formats
• XPS Print API provides a new entry point for applications to benefit from the enhanced XPS Print Path, irrespective of whether the final output device supports XPS

There’s also enhancements to the user experience and components for driver developers. More details on all of this in the coming weeks and months. In the meantime, you can catch up on the content presented at PDC on Channel9.