Building Windows 8 is a blog the Windows team uses to talk about what they're doing, how they're doing and what not. And these blog posts are written directly by team members and don't go through any kind of PR checks.
It's just developers showing their product, and I'm liking everything they've shown so far! 
The team also encourages people to give feedback in the comments or to send an email or ask through twitter (see the details on the blog). So if you have something to say, tell it to the team, but please be constructive.
Index:
- Building robust USB 3.0 support
- Improving our file management basics: copy, move, rename, and delete
- Designing the Windows 8 file name collision experience
- Improvements in Windows Explorer
- Accessing data in ISO and VHD files
- Designing for Metro style and the desktop
- Reflecting on our first conversations (part 1)
- Reflecting on our first conversations (part 2)
- Bringing Hyper-V to “Windows 8”
- Delivering fast boot times in Windows 8
-------------------Building robust USB 3.0 support-------------------
This blog contains a lot of info on how Microsoft has built the USB 3.0 support, how they test devices, etc. It's very developer minded, but if you want to know how the process of including such a feature goes, it's a good read.
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With this new standard, you’d be able to copy a high definition movie from a USB storage drive in about 80 seconds instead of the 15 minutes it takes with USB 2.0. [...]
The new specification provided 80% more power than USB 2.0. This meant faster charging and removed the need for odd “Y” cables used by external DVD drives and other high power devices. [...]
By also introducing new low power states, finishing tasks more quickly, and powering down at every opportunity, USB 3.0 is more power efficient than its predecessors. This translates to longer battery life for notebooks and less power consumption for desktops.
Most importantly, the specification promises to enable a new generation of USB while maintaining compatibility with full, low, and high speed devices. Even the plugs are backwards compatible.
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And the post is ended on a taster of USB 3.0 transfer speed:
This blog post details the improvements made to (you guessed it) the copy, move, rename and delete actions. This post is much about showing what has actually been done to improve the experience through screenshots and video.
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In Windows 8, we have three main goals for our improvements to the copy experience:
- One place to manage all copy jobs: Create one unified experience for managing and monitoring ongoing copy operations.
- Clear and concise: Remove distractions and give people the key information they need.
- User in control: Put people in control of their copy operations."
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Looking very nice I think! We get a video walkthrough of all the improvements too:
-------------------Designing the Windows 8 file name collision experience-------------------
This blog post talks in depth about the process of designing the name collision interface you see when two files try to use the same file name. It's very focused on usability, so if you're interested in the process the team has gone through to get it where it is, then this is a very interesting read.
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In the implemented design, there are two levels of control when acting on file name collisions (or “conflicts”).
- The primary experience is a simplified, one-click, bulk management of all conflicts, offering “Replace all” or “Skip all.” We call this the “Simple Conflict Resolution dialog.”
- There is also an option to enter the secondary experience which offers more information and more fine-grained control. This is the “Detailed Conflict Resolution dialog.”
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-------------------Improvements in Windows Explorer-------------------
This blog post talks about the changes that are coming to the Explorer. Microsoft have decided to use ribbons like we know them from Office, and it puts alot of commands that are normally hidden at our disposal. Again there is a lot of talk about the process of getting there, why things were chosen to be this way, why certain commands got in there, etc.
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We set out to accomplish three main goals with this new version of Explorer.
- Optimize Explorer for file management tasks. Return Explorer to its roots as an efficient file manager and expose some hidden gems, those file management commands already in Explorer that many customers might not even know exist.
- Create a streamlined command experience. Put the most used commands in the most prominent parts of the UI so they are easy to find, in places that make sense and are reliable. Organize the commands in predictable places and logical groupings according to context, and present relevant information right where you need it.
- Respect Explorer’s heritage. Maintain the power and richness of Explorer and bring back the most relevant and requested features from the Windows XP era when the current architecture and security model of Windows permits.
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And finally a video presentation of all the changes:
-------------------Accessing data in ISO and VHD files-------------------
In this blog post, the team details how they're improving using virtual harddrives and ISO files. Whereas before you needed seperate software to mount them, in Windows 8 you just double click on them and they're automatically mounted. Easy peasy!
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-------------------Designing for Metro style and the desktop-------------------
This blog post discusses reimagening Windows for touch interfaces while staying true to what people already know from Windows.
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The things that people do today on PCs don’t suddenly go away just because there are new Metro style apps. The mechanisms that people rely on today (mice, physical keyboards, trackpads) don’t suddenly become less useful or “bad” just because touch is also provided as a first-class option. These tools are quite often the most ergonomic, fast, and powerful ways of getting many things done. [...]
Why not just start over from scratch? Why not just remove all of the desktop features and only ship the Metro experience? Why not "convert" everything to Metro? The arguments for a “clean slate” are well known, both for and against. We chose to take the approach of building a design without compromise. A design that truly affords you the best of the two worlds we see today. Our perspective rests on the foundation of the open PC architecture that has proven flexible and adaptable over many significant changes in hardware capabilities and software paradigms. [...]
As we showed, you get an amazing touch experience, and also one that works with mouse, trackpad, and keyboard. And if you want to stay permanently immersed in that Metro world, you will never see the desktop—we won’t even load it (literally the code will not be loaded) unless you explicitly choose to go there! This is Windows reimagined.
But if you do see value in the desktop experience—in precise control, in powerful windowing and file management, in compatibility with hundreds of thousands of existing programs and devices, in support of your business software, those capabilities are right at your fingertips as well. You don’t need to change to a different device if you want to edit photos or movies professionally, create documents for your job or school, manage a large corpus of media or data, or get done the infinite number of things people do with a PC today.
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-------------------Reflecting on our first conversations (part 1)-------------------
And this post talks about what has been discussed so far and what will happen with the discussion going forward. What has been learnt, etc.
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We went back and forth quite a bit over how to begin blogging. There’s obviously a strong desire to know more. At the same time, we think that when we try to do big things there should be an opportunity to engage in a stepwise discussion of the story. Movies don’t start with the end and you get to meet the characters and motivations behind them (in a well done screenplay). There’s always learning for us in how we approach this, as the combination of the environment and work we’re doing is unique at each juncture. [...]
In this, and a subsequent post, I want to talk about four topics in particular: Feedback (which I’ll cover today), the Ribbon, Metro, and Media Center. I hope to add a bit of additional “focus, light, and magnification” without distorting the bigger picture here. Based on the comments and the dialogue, I do feel that each of these deserves some further discussion. One additional topic folks want to talk more about that we will cover at BUILD is the overall programming model. Early on it was clear this is the sort of topic that will take more than a blog post because we have so much to say and to demonstrate. [...]
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-------------------Reflecting on our first conversations (part 2)-------------------
Here the reflection is continued from the last blog post, covering the Ribbon system, the Metro design and the Media Center.
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The progressive or hierarchical rendering of features is the world we came from—some features are keyboard only, some context menu only, some top-level toolbars, some on toolbars you had to show/hide, some on menus or submenus, etc. This collection of mechanisms doesn’t work well for anyone except those who invest a lot of time. Of course if you invest a lot of time you become a very outspoken opponent of change. Perhaps there is some of that? I was a strong proponent of the Office 2000 “adaptive menus” that literally drove people crazy, and those were a deliberate attempt to have less clutter and less surface area. One failure is not a trend but the lesson that “hiding is not simplifying” is valuable I think. [...]
In many of the comments, people primarily focused on Metro as what I would say are the graphical elements of the user interface—it was Metro v. Aero. We’ve seen a clear turn where Aero is the past and Metro is the future. And with that a strong desire for the existing Windows experience to take on a new look or a Metro redesign. These comments are usually focused on style and looking "old" or "new." Generally, those details of the visual styling come later in the engineering process, but we wrongly assumed that this was known. Stating that, we could have short-circuited this concern. [...]
While not a central topic of feedback, I received about 50 emails about Media Center. I want to reassure customers that Media Center will definitely be part of Windows 8. No doubt about it. Knowing how strong the support for Media Center is among pre-release testers, we still have work to do to make sure the quality and compatibility with add-ins is what you would expect even in pre-release (as with any release of Windows, compatibility is a major effort and when we work on the underlying video engine, as one example, we have to make sure features that push these areas receive adequate coverage).
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-------------------Bringing Hyper-V to “Windows 8”-------------------
This post details the built in Hyper-V virtualization coming with Windows 8. It's a pretty technical post, but it's great to hear about the native virtualization support none the less.
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Hyper-V requires a 64-bit system that has Second Level Address Translation (SLAT). SLAT is a feature present in the current generation of 64-bit processors by Intel & AMD. You’ll also need a 64-bit version of Windows 8, and at least 4GB of RAM. Hyper-V does support creation of both 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems in the VMs. [...]
For storage, you can add multiple hard disks to the IDE or SCSI controllers available in the VM. You can use Virtual Hard Disks (.VHD or .VHDX files) or actual disks that you pass directly through to the virtual machine. VHDs can also reside on a remote file server, making it easy to maintain and share a common set of predefined VHDs across a team. [...]
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And here's a full video demonstration for some of the features included:
-------------------Delivering fast boot times in Windows 8-------------------
This blogpost details all the work that's been done to improve the boot time and the "fresh start" experience you get from a reboot. The results are quite impressive!
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Our challenge then, was to design a way to meet all of these desires on today’s PCs without requiring some special new hardware. These were our goals:
- Effectively zero watt power draw when off.
- A fresh session after boot.
- Very fast times between pressing the power button and being able to use the PC.
[...]
Now here’s the key difference for Windows 8: as in Windows 7, we close the user sessions, but instead of closing the kernel session, we hibernate it. [...]
Using this technique with boot gives us a significant advantage for boot times, since reading the hiberfile in and reinitializing drivers is much faster on most systems (30-70% faster on most systems we’ve tested). [...]
Another important thing to note about Windows 8’s fast startup mode is that, while we don’t do a full “Plug & Play” enumeration of all drivers, we still do initialize drivers in this mode. Those of you who like to cold boot in order to “freshen up” drivers and devices will be glad to know that is still effective in this new mode, even if not an identical process to a cold boot.
This new fast startup mode will yield benefits on almost all systems, whether they have a spinning HDD or a solid state drive (SSD), but for newer systems with fast SSDs it is downright amazing. [...]
Of course, there are times where you may want to perform a complete shutdown – for example, if you’re opening the system to add or change some hardware. We have an option in the UI to revert back to the Windows 7 shutdown/cold boot behavior, or since that’s likely a fairly infrequent thing, you can use the new /full switch on shutdown.exe. [...]
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And here is the video showcasing their results:
I timed the boot to around 8 seconds (!), and in the comments on the blog, the hardware detailed to be "an EliteBook 8640p (Intel® Core™ i7-620M, 8GB, 160GB SSD).", so pretty high end, but very impressive none the less!
