On Thursday I attended the second part of a two-part session on Windows 7 and what's new for developers. The vast majority of these features are aimed at desktop application developers (e.g. Adobe, Mozilla, and Microsoft themselves) and personally I'm looking forward to a lot of them as they

On Thursday I attended the second part of a two-part session on Windows 7 and what's new for developers. The vast majority of these features are aimed at desktop application developers (e.g. Adobe, Mozilla, and Microsoft themselves) and personally I'm looking forward to a lot of them as they will mean some great productivity enhancements. However, Microsoft are also committing to reducing the memory and processor footprint in Windows 7 and driving up battery life, and are strongly encouraging their third party developers to follow suit. Hopefully this means good news for portable devices, and could ironically mean that Windows 7 is better in the device market than Windows Vista.

Another session I went to was comparing the various development models supported by Windows Embedded Compact. CE 6.0 supports a number of application programming models - including Win32, MFC, and .NET - and there are a number of factors you should consider when deciding which one to use.  The basic upshot was that for most apps, .NET is the right choice, however Douglas Boling raised some interesting points and it's worth checking out his presentation.