The SDK documentation for our new graphics and text API's in Windows 7 is now available on MSDN. Here are the links:

· Direct2D

· DirectWrite

Happy coding!

We’ve had a handful of PDC attendees contact us directly asking for help finding the DirectX related materials on the hard-drive that was handed out as part of “The Goods” at PDC.

If you look in this folder:

\Windows7\Windows_Whitepapers_and_HOLs\High-Fidelity Graphics and Media\DirectX

You will find:

• Four white-papers about DirectX innovations in Windows 7, including introductions to Direct2D and DirectWrite
• A zip file containing the source code and documentation for each module of the DirectX Hands-On-Lab that was available in the “the Big Room” at the conference.

As an aside, the code in the Hands-On-Lab includes the examples that Leonardo walked through on stage during our session.

It looks like some press folks from neowin were in the crowd for my talk yesterday, and posted some handheld video of the demo’s.

link: http://www.neowin.net/index.php?act=view&id=49358

My PDC talk is now posted on Channel 9! If you weren’t able to attend at PDC, you can watch it here: http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC18/.

If you were in the audience at PDC, thank you very much coming. It was great to finally be able to talk about what I’ve been working on since shipping Windows Vista!

If you have questions, or want to know more about Driect2D and DirectWrite, you can get in touch with me by posting a comment, or using the email link on this blog. I’ll also be watching the discussion on channel 9, so you can post comments & questions there as well.

As you've probably guessed by know, I've been busy working on something that is part of Windows 7 for the past year and a half since Windows Vista shipped.

I'll be presenting session PC-18, "Windows 7: New Text and Graphics API's" which will cover a great deal of what I've been working on.

If you haven't done so already you can register for PDC here, and build your own agenda on the sessions page.

Not much to add here - just watch the clip...(updated with higher quality video)

I saw this over at Craig's blog. Made me laugh out loud. I actually enjoyed Indy 4 quite a bit, but this was still hilarious.

Sorry for radio silence on work related posts. I promise to come back to it when there's something new for me to talk about.

In the meantime, Slashfilm has a nice write-up on some super-cool retro poster-art that Eric Tan did for the new Pixar movie WALL-E. Check it out.

I was scrolling through shelterrific this afternoon and came across a post to some new 2008 stamp designs from the postal service, including this one, honoring Charles & Ray Eames. Nice!

...and I'm catching up on my blogroll. Two things that popped for me this evening are Brand New, which has a guest editorial write-up about how the brand of American Gladiators was updated for the return to television, and Jan's review of the updated Zune client. I had a chance to work with Jan for a while in the early days of Longhorn. Jan has one of the strongest senses of empathy when it comes to UI design I've seen in many years. It really comes through in his blog, as well as his latest professional efforts.

Finally, Businessweek had a great write-up about the newest technology object of my desire, the Lenovo X300.

Microsoft, Dell and (RED) announced a partnership to help people living with HIV/AIDS in Africa. All the details are over on the Windows Vista blog. There's also some coverage of it over on Engadget.

If you have code that implements a deskband for the Windows Taskbar in Windows Vista, you may have noticed that it causes the taskbar to appear opaque when there is not a maximized window open, instead of being transparent, but darkly tinted which is the normal state of the taskbar.

You can get around this by implementing the IDeskBand2 interface and responding to the associated methods appropriately.

Someone at work forwarded me a link to this video on the New York Times site about the clutter around us.