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Windows Vista: More little things in the December CTP

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In August I mentioned some of the little improvements in Windows Vista Beta 1 that made using my computer more enjoyable.  Now that I've installed the December CTP (released yesterday), here are some screenshots of a few new things that instantly jump out at me:


Finally! A decent calendar and clock when you click the time in the Taskbar.


A separate dialog enables you to change the date and time. The shields indicate actions that require elevated privileges. These are now used pretty consistently throughout the UI.


Start menu searching has more enhancements, although you still can't search the control panel from here... (grumble, grumble...)

The new standard Save dialog caught me off guard, but clicking "Browse Folders" gives a familiar experience.


The Control Panel now has a Recent Tasks section in the lower left corner. That's handy!

Speaking of the Control Panel, it has several new areas, including:
(Click on the thumbnails for larger images.)

A cool Network Map:

AutoPlay settings:

A handy Performance Center:

Also, be sure to check out the December CTP for the Microsoft Visual Studio Blah Blah Blah WinFX Development Tools.  It's an add-on for Visual Studio 2005 that includes a first peek at "Cider," the WPF designer for Visual Studio!

Comments

  • Anonymous
    December 20, 2005
    Where can we find the download?
    It is not yet available under MSDN Subscriber downloads?
  • Anonymous
    December 20, 2005
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    December 20, 2005
    Yeah! What gives, I checked the MSDN download site and no December CTP. I got exited there for a bit!
  • Anonymous
    December 20, 2005
    Why has this not made it onto MSDN yet.

    Why tell people then fail to deliver.
  • Anonymous
    December 20, 2005
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    December 20, 2005
    Wow, that looks interesting Adam.

    And that clock looks a lot like the one seen on the Longhorn era sidebar (http://www.eweek.com/image_popup/0,1871,s=25983&iid=52041,00.asp).
  • Anonymous
    December 21, 2005
    I know that this blog focuses a lot on WinFX and WPF, but it would be really great if Microsoft would document and support non-.NET apps using the DirectUI APIs. It is used to do a lot of cool stuff in XP and even more stuff in Vista -- e.g. all the control panel pages. It would be great if other apps could use these APIs as well.
  • Anonymous
    January 18, 2006
    That looks nice, I am trying to work with January CTP. I have the following.
    .NET 2.0 runtime
    .NET 2.0 SDK
    WinFX Jan CTP runtime
    Windows SDK
    WinFX extensions for VS.NET

    I get the following error when trying to run XAML applications
    System.Windows.Serialization.BamlParseException: Error at element 'StaticExtension' in markup file '' : Could not load type 'System.Runtime.CompilerServices.NGenAttribute' from assembly 'mscorlib, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089'.. ---> System.TypeLoadException: Could not load type 'System.Runtime.CompilerServices.NGenAttribute' from assembly 'mscorlib, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089'.

    Any idea whats going wrong?
  • Anonymous
    February 16, 2006
    Adam, when you click on the click and click the small arrows to move the next month, click them VERY fast, as if you were impatiently trying to get to a far away year. It will NOTICED that and switch the view to "decades" which is worth seeing.
  • Anonymous
    March 20, 2006
    I'm not familiar with the Windows Vista
    but I know it is a good thing.
  • Anonymous
    January 09, 2007
    It was almost nine months ago since I pointed out that The WinForms DateTimePicker and MonthCalendar
  • Anonymous
    December 31, 2007
    PingBack from http://restaurants.247blogging.info/?p=1286