Imagine you are doing maintenance on an application from the late 90’s that uses the classic ADO libraries. The recompiled code works fine on any Windows 7 SP1 machine, but mysteriously crashes on the Windows XP machines that have been running the program for nearly a decade. This is the problem facing lots of maintenance developers.
Designed for use with “out-of-browser” instances of Silverlight, it uses COM automation to expose features specific to Windows 7. The major feature areas include Message Interception, Sensor API, H.264 video encoding, taskbar extensions, Speech API, and access to portable devices.
Microsoft has released a library exposing Windows 7 features – sensors, speech, devices, taskbar, touch – to Silverlight Out-of-Browser applications running with elevated trust.
Using Silverlight 3, web developers can offer multi-touch applications to their Windows 7 users.
The “Windows API Code Pack for Microsoft .NET Framework” is a wrapper that exposes Windows functionality to .NET developers. The wrapper is written primarily in C#, with the DirectX functionality in C++/CLI. The source code is available, but it isn’t licensed as open source.
Today Microsoft made Windows 7 (English) available for download for MSDN and TechNet subscribers. Windows 7 will be available for general consumers October 22nd. A complete list of the different availability dates for all type of customers can be found at the Windows 7 blog.
The Windows 7 graphics engine changes the way DWM, introduced with Vista, works, it also comes with new APIs, D2D and DWrite, a new Direct3D 11, and better handling of multiple output devices.
Microsoft has made available Windows API Code Pack for Microsoft .NET Framework (v0.85), a library useful to access new Windows 7 features, including Vista ones, from managed code. This library is not included in .NET 4.0.
