Windows Developer Preview–Keyboard Shortcuts

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After Installing Windows 8 Developer Preview in a Virtual Machine or on older hardware, you will immediately find that the interface is a bit clunky without touch of any kind.  Hopefully the following list of keyboard shortcuts will help to alleviate the pain.

  • The Windows Key takes you back to the Start Screen.
  • Alt + Tab brings up the application switcher.
  • Windows Keys + Tab cycles through the running applications.
  • Windows Key + C or hovering over the bottom left corner of the screen with your mouse brings up the Charms Menu.
  • Windows Key + F opens the search screen (or you can just start typing on the Start Screen).
  • Windows Key + Z brings up the application bars.
  • Windows Key + D takes you to your desktop.
  • Windows Key + L Locks the system (as usual).
  • Windows Key + I brings up the Settings.
  • Windows Key + E opens Windows Explorer on your desktop.
  • Windows Key + R takes you to your desktop and opens the Run Prompt.
  • CTRL-ALT-DEL brings up a screen to log off, shut down, switch users, etc.
  • Right clicking a Tile on the Start Screen brings up options (Unpin, changes size, etc.)
  • Right Clicking in a Metro app brings up the application bars.
  • The mouse scroll wheel pans through the items on your Start Screen, although it seems a bit buggy on my VM.

Run Windows Developer Preview in VMware Player 4.0

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Shortly after build I attempted  to install Windows Developer Preview in a Virtual Machine running on VMware Player without much success.  After playing with it for a while I finally gave up and moved on.  However, over the weekend, I realized that VMware had released VMware Player 4.0.  After downloading and installing the new player I was able to install the Windows Developer Preview in VMware Player with out any issues.

The process was fairly simple and straight forward, just make sure to download the ISO before you start.

  1. Select Create a New Virtual Machine from the Welcome to VMware Player Panel on the start up screen.
  2. Select the option “I will install the operating system later.”
  3. Select the Option for Microsoft Windows and then select Windows 7 x64 from the drop down.
  4. Give your VM a name and choose the location to save the files.
  5. I then selected to create an 80GB Virtual Disk.  (The Build PC has a 64 GB SSD, I figured a little extra space couldn’t hurt! Smile)
  6. On the next screen I choose Customize Hardware.
  7. I set the Memory to use 2GB (I only have 4GB in my desktop).
  8. I set the Processors to 2 Cores (I have 4 Cores).
  9. I set the CD/DVD to “Use ISO Image file: “. and browsed to the ISO image.
  10. Then click close to exit the customize hardware dialog and Finish to create your new VM.
  11. Now just boot the VM and let the installation begin.  (Note: you will want to use the custom install option when the installer asks)

The Build Wrap Up

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Unfortunately, as is often the case at a large developer conference, the Internet connection gave out on Friday morning and I was unable to make my post for Thursday’s sessions.  I attended a couple of more sessions Friday and left directly from the conference for the airport and didn’t arrive home until after 2am Saturday.  Now that I am back home and settled in, Let’s just do a wrap up of the conference.

On Thursday & Friday I attended a few really good sessions, specifically “Future Directions for C# and Visual Basic” presented by Anders Hejlsberg, “Creating immersive data experiences with Entity Framework” presented by David Annsley-DeWinter & Jeff Derstadt, and “Building real-time web apps with HTML5 WebSockets” presented by Ravi Rao.

Of the Sessions I attended I would recommend watching the following if you missed them:

One of the sessions I was looking forward to on Thursday was cancelled (Building IIS and ASP.NET apps with the power of async – Damian Edwards and Phil Haack).  I believe they are planning on recording the session once back in Redmond, so I’ll post a link when I see the video.

Windows 8 Developer Preview

If you were not lucky enough to attend Build and receive a Window 8 Developer Preview PC you can download the Windows 8 Developer Preview from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/br229516.  Scott Hanselman has a good article on how to set up a Windows 7 PC to boot from Virtual Disk.  I have followed this guide and installed The preview on the PDC09 Laptop. It seems to work well so far.

Beta & technical preview downloads – Announced this week

Executive Conference Summary – Key Take Aways

The conference really revolved around the Release of Windows 8 Developer Preview and Building Apps for the new Metro Interface.

Microsoft has put significant effort into improving performance of the operating system for Windows 8.  Boot times seem to be much quicker, the UI seems very responsive and the memory footprint for the O/S has been cut nearly in half.

Windows 8 will ship with a new Windows App Store for Metro Apps.

The new Metro Interface looks a lot like the Windows Phone 7 Metro Interface.  When writing an application for Windows going forward you will have the choice of building a traditional Win32 (or .Net WinForms/WPF) app running on the desktop or a new Metro Style app running on the new WinRT (Windows Run Time).  The two environments cannot be mixed, the new Metro Style apps are sandboxed.  Also note that you cannot use GDI in Metro Style Apps, only Direct X.

As a web developer I spent most of my time attending the ASP.Net and Visual Studio 11 sessions, but there were a lot of great sessions on a whole range of topics around developing for Windows 8.  I would recommend checking out Channel9 on MSDN to learn more and watch the sessions.

In ASP.Net 4.5 Web Forms gets support for Model Binding,  Strongly Typed Data Controls, Support for Data Annotations.  All ASP.Net applications get better support for HTML 5 and CSS3, CSS Folding, auto tag matching, new improved design view support (borrowed from Expression Blend as I recall) along with a newly designed style in all the project templates. 

ASP.Net 4.5 also includes the ASP.NET Optimization – Bundling package which combines and minifies the CSS and JavaScript files in your Web Application.  This package is available as a Nuget Package for ASP.Net 4.0, so we can start using it today.