Sun is updating Java 6 for the first time this year providing fixes for over 300 bugs, plus Windows 7 support, and a significant number of performance improvements. These include a 30%-40% performance gain when using the default Parallel Scavenger garbage collector on machines based on a NUMA architecture with Solaris or Linux as the OS.
Windows 7 is getting closer to RTM and RC1 was recently made available for download (feature complete). Tim Sneath, director of the Windows and Silverlight technical evangelism team, have recently covered some of the resources available to developers looking to support Windows 7, as well as how to take advantage of the new features available.
The watch-word isn't "cloud computing" or "scalability", it's trust. For all the cool stuff surrounding Windows Azure, literally no one on the floor was talking about actually using it. Even for products that can be partially hosted in-house like Mesh people are saying "Cool, but I can never use it".
Microsoft is planning on publicly releasing the Surface SDK at this year's PDC. This is seen by some as the next step towards bringing their multitouch technology to the Windows operating system.
Mike Nash, Corporate Vice President, Windows Product Management at Microsoft, has announced the name of the next version of Windows client operating system: Windows 7.
Chris Flores, a Microsoft director on the Windows Client Communications Team, talks about the future of Windows.
The Microsoft MinWin core is 25MB in size on disk and contains 100 files total. This appears to be a major overhaul of Windows when contrasted with a minimal install of Windows Vista at 4GB on disk and 5000 files in size.
