I went to Usman Institute of Technology yesterday for 2 presentations on Windows Vista and Imagine Cup 2007. The event went good and everything surprisingly worked fine on Vista, atleast after 1 day of struggle for running my demo on Vista I prepared for the event. But the demo always crash the desktop so I decided to run it on Xp. Display driver may not be that strong yet in Vista. The demo was made using June CTP of .NET Framework 3.0 and was built again on July CTP so it can run on Vista July CTP, lol so many CTPs to keep track off. The demo runs 7 videos simultaneously in the background and can bring them forward when mouse hover over them and will run it on full screen when a selection is made. Its an early version of the application I am working on in the part time and will talk in detail after a few days, or may be I'll post the source code and binary as well.

I felt people are most interested in seeing the AERO Glass interface in Vista, but I personally feel the beauty lies beneath it. As DWM (Display Window Manager) is the key application for handling those killing vista looks and all those transparencies and 3d surface rendering. Those who are unaware of DWM, its a full screen WPF application, responsible for managing all desktops in Vista and its also exposed as an unmanaged API for programmers which Vista uses natively. I found it quite a powerfull tool in terms of providing all those beautiful effects in our own applications. DWM is a huge topic to cover, so I am leaving it for some other time and I may also put some code examples to show its power.

You can download both presentation slides from here. Cheers!