The WinHEC conference is wrapping up this afternoon. The conference has been a well-oiled machine, a tribute to our colleagues that run the event. A few trends that I've observed this week:

  •  Power management is on everyone's mind. Consumers are willing to pay more for a laptop that has great battery life, so there's plenty of incentive to produce machines that are hyper efficient. Windows 7 will include new tools for improving battery efficiency (if you have the M3 build, try typing powercfg /energy from the command line), and several sessions focused on using the Windows Performance tool kits to lessen the load on the CPU. Windows 7 will also be more aggressive in shutting down LCD panels during periods of inactivity.
  • Solid state drives are all the rage -- and with good reason. They're incredibly fast, growing in capacity, and offer many advantages over conventional hard disk design.
  • Multi-touch apps are coming to a Windows 7 machine near you, and it's something to be excited about. The API layer in Windows 7 will make it easy to build touch based applications. The HP Touch Smart machines are a great indicator of what's to come in this space.
  • Device Staging is one of the single biggest innovations in Windows 7, and adding support for Device Staging is a relatively easy task for hardware vendors. Device Staging packages use a well defined and simple XML schema to describe the tasks a device can accomplish (i.e., "Play Media File", "Import Pictures", "Scan an Image", etc.), and the UI offers an opportunity to provide a highly differentiated user experience for your device.

I'll be part of a panel discussion on the Windows Driver Kit (WDK) for Windows 7 this afternoon -- if you're at the conference and are interested in learning more about our documentation priorities for Windows 7 Beta I invite you to come join us (the session is in room 403/A). Among other things, I'll discuss:

  • Our documentation priorities and strategy for Windows 7 Beta.
  • How we handle customer feedback on the documentation.
  • The results of our recent documentation survey.
  • Our plans for machine translation of our content.

Of course, I'll be happy to answer questions from community members as well.

Keith Boyd, Sr. Content Publishing Manager [MSFT]