Microsoft Professional Developers Conference 2008

The Microsoft Professional Developers Conference 2008 takes place between October, 26-30 in Los Angeles. More than 5000 developers from all over the world are expected to join the conference. You might be asking why we are posting about this and how it is related to Windows 7. Red on and you will find it out.
Microsoft will disclose details of its future plattform at the conference and the current agenda lists four Windows 7 sessions:
Windows 7: Graphics Advances - Windows 7 enables you to advance the graphics capabilities of your applications while carrying forward existing investments in your Win32 codebase, including GDI and GDI+. New enhancements to DirectX let Win32 applications harness the latest innovations in GPUs and LCD displays, including support for scalable, high-performance, 2D and 3D graphics, text, and images. Also learn how to leverage the GPU’s parallelism for general-purpose computation such as image processing.Windows 7: Optimizing for Energy Efficiency and Battery Life - A single application can reduce mobile battery life by up to 30%. Windows 7 provides advances for building energy-efficient applications. In this session we will discuss how to leverage new Windows infrastructure to reduce application power consumption and efficiently schedule background tasks and services.Windows 7: Touch Computing - In Windows 7, innovative touch and gesture support will enable more direct and natural interaction in your applications. This session will highlight the new multi-touch gesture APIs and explain how you can leverage them in your applications.Windows 7: Web Services in Native Code - Windows 7 introduces a new networking API with support for building SOAP based web services in native code. This session will discuss the programming model, interoperability aspects with other implementations of WS-* protocols and demonstrate various services and applications built using this API.Part of the touch computing was already revealed yesterday at the D6 Conference when Microsoft demonstrated a multi-touch interface running on Windows 7.
It is possible to draw some conclusions that will most likely make their way into the release candidate of Windows 7. Microsoft is definitely aiming to raise the consistency between their web applications (Windows Live) and Windows 7. This could mean that many web services will be integrated in Windows 7. The recently leaked internal memo linked Windows Live and Windows 7 as well.
Notebooks and mobile devices will benefit from an optimized operating system and infrastructure. This is important because of the popularity of mobile computing. Windows Vista was not that energy efficient and it would be a welcome change if Windows 7 would be less energy hungry.