Download Windows 8 Developer Preview OS

Windows Developer Preview downloads

 

The Windows Developer Preview is a pre-beta version of Windows 8 for developers. These downloads include prerelease software that may change without notice. The software is provided as is, and you bear the risk of using it. It may not be stable, operate correctly or work the way the final version of the software will. It should not be used in a production environment. The features and functionality in the prerelease software may not appear in the final version. Some product features and functionality may require advanced or additional hardware, or installation of other software.

Windows Developer Preview with developer tools English, 64-bit (x64)

DOWNLOAD (4.8 GB)

Sha 1 hash – 6FE9352FB59F6D0789AF35D1001BD4E4E81E42AF

All of the following come on a disk image file (.iso). See below for installation instructions.

• 64-bit Windows Developer Preview
• Windows SDK for Metro style apps
• Microsoft Visual Studio 11 Express for Windows Developer Preview
• Microsoft Expression Blend 5 Developer Preview
• 28 Metro style apps including the BUILD Conference app

Windows Developer Preview English, 64-bit (x64)

DOWNLOAD (3.6 GB)

Sha 1 hash – 79DBF235FD49F5C1C8F8C04E24BDE6E1D04DA1E9

Includes a disk image file (.iso) to install the Windows Developer Preview and Metro style apps on a 64-bit PC.

Windows Developer Preview English, 32-bit (x86)

DOWNLOAD (2.8 GB)

Sha 1 hash – 4E0698BBABE01ED27582C9FC16AD21C4422913CC

Includes a disk image file (.iso) to install the Windows Developer Preview and Metro style apps on a 32-bit PC.

Live Connect

Sign up for the Live Connect technical preview.

Live Connect provides developers a set of controls and APIs that enable applications to integrate Single Sign On (SSO) with Microsoft connected accounts and enable users to access information from SkyDrive, Hotmail, and Messenger.

System Requirements

Windows Developer Preview works great on the same hardware that powers Windows Vista and Windows 7:

• 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
• 1 gigabyte (GB) RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit)
• 16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)
• DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver
• Taking advantage of touch input requires a screen that supports multi-touch

Notes about installing the Windows Developer Preview

• You can’t uninstall the Windows Developer Preview. To reinstall your previous operating system, you must have restore or installation media.

Install on:	Windows Developer Preview with developer tools	Windows Developer Preview (32-bit or 64-bit)
Windows 7 and Windows Vista	Clean install only	You can keep accounts, files, and settings
Windows XP	Clean install only	You can only keep accounts and files
A clean install is supported on all builds. You will only receive the full set of installation options when setup is launched in Windows.

How to install the Windows Developer Preview from an ISO image

The Windows Developer Preview is delivered as an .iso image that must be converted into installation media stored on a DVD or a USB flash drive. On Windows 7, the easiest way to convert this file is to use Windows Disc Image Burner. On Windows XP and Windows Vista, a third-party program is required to convert an .iso file into installable media—and DVD burning software often includes this capability.

Note: The .iso file that contains the developer tools requires a large capacity DVD called a DVD-9, as well as a DVD burner that can handle dual-layer (DL) DVDs. Most modern burners should be able to handle this format.

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Winodws 8 Previewed : Build Conference

Today in its Building Windows 8 conference Microsoft blowed off the next version of Windows. And it is Awesomely a Big thing i have never seen i any OS.

Steven Sinosky, Windows chief 

Microsoft’s goal was to make an operating system that worked well on both tablets and traditional computers. In the past, it has tried to make the classic Windows desktop work with touch-based devices, with little success. With Windows 8, it adapted the interface first seen in Microsoft’s much-mocked Zune MP3 player and then its Windows Phone 7 smartphones. In other words, rather than going from a desktop interface to a mobile one, Microsoft has gone in the other direction

Highlights in Window8: 

Metro UI. Upon bootup, you’re taken to a lock screen similar to those found on tablets and smartphones.

Swipe up to log in, and you’re taken immediately to the Start screen, which contains a series of tiles collected into groups. You can rename the groups, rearrange them and add other apps by pinning them to the Start screen.

The tiles are dynamic, particularly if the apps they represent pull in data from the Web. For example, a Facebook app might feature photos from your friends, an RSS reader shows headlines and images and a weather app has the latest forecast.

Native Windows 8 apps also use this tiled approach as part of their design. For example, there’s a traditional version of Internet Explorer available from the “classic” desktop, but if you launch IE from the Start screen, its Metro version appears.

In the image above, the thumbnails at the top of the screen are your open tabs. The buttons below let you go back, forward, pin a page to the Start screen, refresh the page and more. Tapping or clicking in the address bar at the bottom brings up the onscreen keyboard.

The Metro UI can also be used for very basic Windows tasks, including file management. For example, there’s a “light” file manager that’s great for working with documents and photos.

Applications can share data between each other. In the screen shot above, a user is selecting photos to be shared through a Twitter client. Selecting the photos in this picker passes it to the client, which accepts them and posts them to Twitter, using the app’s own interface.

The Metro interface, by the way, works very well with a mouse and keyboard, too. Windows knows when a mouse is connected and behaves accordingly. For example, moving a tile from one side of the Start screen to another requires that you hold the tile at the top of the screen with one finger, while using another finger to swipe sideways to the tile’s eventual destination. With a mouse, you can just drag the tile to the side of the screen and it scrolls along automatically.

Performance. Windows 8 boots up almost instantly on new hardware – the video featuring a quickly booting HP notebook is an accurate representation Microsoft executives say it’s also faster on older systems. It’s remarkably fluid, and even the traditional desktop feels faster than Windows 7′s, which is already pretty z.ippy. Among the handful of sample apps provided – many of which were coded in a few weeks by Microsoft interns – I’ve yet to find one that bogs down the system.

Gestures. Windows 8 uses gestures from all sides of the screen to accomplish tasks. For example, if you swipe from the top or bottom in most apps, a toolbar appears. Swipe from the right side to bring up what Microsoft calls the “charms”: icons for searching, sharing, getting to the Start screen, accessing devices and settings. Swipe from the right to switch between running apps.

Multitasking. This is Windows, and thus it multitasks quite well. Apps that are enabled can run in the background, and switch between them is a simple matter of dragging your finger from the left side, “pulling” the app to the foreground.

But if you slow down the swiping process, the running app then expands to only fill the left third of the screen. This takes a little practice. And while you can swap positions with the larger app, you can’t dictate on the Metro side the size of the lesser app’s display. It’s one-third and two-thirds, and that’s it.

Security. Windows Defender, the antimalware application that’s bundled with Windows 7 and Vista, has been upgraded in Windows 8 to cover more types of threats. It also now loads much earlier in the boot process, so it can monitor what’s happening as other programs load. And Windows 8 checks boot components for malware before they load. If it sees something malicious, it halts that program and prevents it from loading.

The Desktop. The notion of the desktop being just another app managed via the Metro interface may take some getting used to, but you’ll understand it once you start switching through apps. When you first drag the desktop out from the left side of the screen, you’ll understand how Microsoft is treading this venerable workspace. Basically, it’s deprecated, but still available to you.

Microsoft has made some changes to the traditional desktop and its apps. For example, there’s the controversial decision to put an Office-style ribbon across the top of Windows Explorer. There’s a lot more detail and data available in the Task Manager. Progress bars that display when transferring files contain more information about what’s going on. But for the most part, the desktop works and behaves much as it does in Windows 7.

This is a very early build of Windows 8 and more work needs to be done. There are quite a few irritating aspects, such as onscreen keyboards that cover up forms while you enter data; disappearing tiles from the Start screen; and some functions and applications that are just too hard to find. In fact, if I hadn’t been shown certain features and settings during a demo session Monday, I’m not sure how easy it would be to find them on my own. It makes sense once you see them, but whether the interface’s conventions are easily discoverable remains to be seen.

And I’m not convinced that Windows 8 is going to catch on with business. This is a very radical step, and I can see most companies waiting to see how this shakes out. Windows 8 could very well be an OS that consumers flock to, but businesses avoid like the plague.

But the foundation for a groundbreaking new way of computing has clearly been laid. Microsoft still needs to execute, and developers still have to respond with apps that take advantage of the platform. Still, the early signs are good. If you’re making bets, I’d double-down on Windows 8.

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Windows 8 Metro UI for windows 7 : The Mosaic Project

I know many of you people are waiting for windows 8. Mainly to use the new interface called Metro UI, For those Mosaic application will be usefull.

  “Mosaic is an application that brings Metro UI to your desktop. It is a set of live widgets that shows some content from the web or from your PC. Some widgets (e.g. people widget, weather widget) have fullscreen extended view called hub. “

System requirements to use this application are:

• Windows 7 

• Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 (Client Profile enough but full is recommended for future versions) 

Mosaic Project                                                  Download it Here

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Windows 8 got Super Fast Boot Time : Less Than 10 Seconds [Video]

Less than 10 sec

Here is another Intresting Update from Microsoft Windows 8 development Team about boot times in Window 8.They showed in a video How fast Windows 8 would boot on Unified Extensible Firmware Interface enabled systems.

They Metioned their Challenges as :

• Effectively zero watt power draw when off (Sleep Mode)
• A fresh session after boot
• Very fast times between pressing the power button and being able to use the PC.

“The key thing to remember though is that in a traditional shutdown, we close all of      the user sessions, and in the kernel session we close services and devices to prepare for a complete shutdown.

Now here’s the key difference for Windows 8: as in Windows 7, we close the user sessions, but instead of closing the kernel session, we hibernate it. Compared to a full hibernate, which includes a lot of memory pages in use by apps, session 0 hibernation data is much smaller, which takes substantially less time to write to disk.

They also have shown the comparision between Windows7 cold boot and Windows8 boot times on 30 different PCs’

This was the Video Posted by Building Windows8 Team

 Source: Building Windows8 Blog

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Hyper-V to be included in Windows 8 client

Inbuilt Virtual Machine for Windows

[B8]: On September 7, Microsoft announced this  officially in a new post to the “Building Windows 8″ blog.

Hyper-V enables developers to easily maintain multiple test environments and provides a simple mechanism to quickly switch between these environments without incurring additional hardware costs.

“For example, we release pre-configured virtual machines containing old versions of Internet Explorer to support web developers. “

The IT administrator gets the additional benefit of virtual machine parity and a common management experience across Hyper-V in Windows Server and Windows Client. We also know that many of you use virtualization to try out new things without risking changes to the PC you are actively using.

Hyper-V requires a 64-bit system that has Second Level Address Translation (SLAT). SLAT is a feature present in the current generation of 64-bit processors by Intel & AMD. You’ll also need a 64-bit version of Windows 8, and at least 4GB of RAM. Hyper-V does support creation of both 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems in the VMs.

Hyper-V’s dynamic memory allows memory needed by the VM to be allocated and de-allocated dynamically (you specify a minimum and maximum) and share unused memory between VMs. You can run 3 or 4 VMs on a machine that has 4GB of RAM but you will need more RAM for 5 or more VMs. On the other end of the spectrum, you can also create large VMs with 32 processors and 512GB RAM.

As for user experience with VMs, Windows provides two mechanisms to peek into the Virtual Machine: the VM Console and the Remote Desktop Connection.

The VM Console (also known as VMConnect) is a console view of the VM. It provides a single monitor view of the VM with resolution up to 1600×1200 in 32-bit color. This console provides you with the ability to view the VM’s booting process.

For a richer experience, you can connect to the VM using the Remote Desktop Connection (RDC). With RDC, the VM takes advantage of capabilities present on your physical PC. For example, if you have multiple monitors, then the VM can show its graphics on all these monitors. Similarly, if you have a multipoint touch-enabled interface on your PC, then the VM can use this interface to give you a touch experience. The VM also has full multimedia capability by leveraging the physical system’s speakers and microphone. The Root OS (i.e. the main Windows OS that’s managing the VMs) can also share its clipboard and folders with the VMs. And finally, with RDC, you can also attach any USB device directly to the VM.

For storage, you can add multiple hard disks to the IDE or SCSI controllers available in the VM. You can use Virtual Hard Disks (.VHD or .VHDX files) or actual disks that you pass directly through to the virtual machine. VHDs can also reside on a remote file server, making it easy to maintain and share a common set of predefined VHDs across a team.

Hyper-V’s “Live Storage Move” capability helps your VMs to be fairly independent of the underlying storage. With this, you could move the VM’s storage from one local drive to another, to a USB stick, or to a remote file share without needing to stop your VM. I’ve found this feature to be quite handy for fast deployments: when I need a VM quickly, I start one from a VM library maintained on a file share and then move the VM’s storage to my local drive.

Another great feature of Hyper-V is the ability to take snapshots of a virtual machine while it is running. A snapshot saves everything about the virtual machine allowing you to go back to a previous point in time in the life of a VM, and is a great tool when trying to debug tricky problems. At the same time, Hyper-V virtual machines have all of the manageability benefits of Windows. Windows Update can patch Hyper-V components, so you don’t need to set up additional maintenance processes. And Windows has all the same inherent capabilities with Hyper-V installed.

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New Look for Windows8 Explorer: Ribbon added (like in Office 2010)

Return of Up button and Ribbon added to Explorer …

As we already posted that software engineers of Microsoft. Windows started blogging(Building Windows8) about their new OS code named Windows8, Today they released an update about the new look of Explorer in Windows8.

Here is how it looks…

Benifits of Ribbon:

Exposes hidden features that they already use but which require third party add-ons to use in the Explorer UI today.

Provides keyboard shortcuts for every command in the ribbon, something many people have been asking for.

Provides UI customization with the quick access toolbar, taking us back to a customization level that is basically equivalent to Windows XP.

They also mentioned about the Up button in window xp was included in this version of OS as it was not included in windows7

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