Seven Ways to Shine on Windows 7

Windows 7 offers numerous technologies and features to light up your application and make it shine. In these tutorials, we chose to focus on the features we think bring the most added value to the end user experience and that require relatively little development effort. Think of these features as giving you the best overall user experience value for your time, effort, and money.

There is no single, silver bullet Windows 7 feature that transforms your application into the best Windows application. The built-in Windows features help you create amazing applications, but it's up to you to make the right decision about which features best fit your application scenarios. You can pick and choose any combination of Windows 7 features that will all play together, and thus create a solid application that uses the right features at the right time. From nonfunctional features such as Restart and Recovery or Kernel Transaction Manager, to more user-based features such as the new taskbar, Windows 7 Libraries, or multitouch. In these windows 7 tutorials, we'll focus on a few of the most important features and the ones that you are most likely to want to use while lighting up your application with Windows 7, such as the following:

• Taskbar
• Libraries
• Multitouch
• Sensor and location
• Ribbon
• Improved fundamentals
• Enhanced graphics platform

You can mix and match any of these seven features or any other Windows 7 features. All the features in the preceding list are independent of each other. There is no one single feature that you need to implement, but it make sense to make your application feel like a Windows 7 application by optimizing its taskbar behavior and making it properly work with Windows 7 Libraries. Next, you can start differentiating your application from others by creating nextgeneration user experiences that involve multitouch, sensors, location, the new ribbon, and the new graphics stack.