Mike held a small roundtable for a number of pressies. He gave a quick rundown of things you all basically already know, so I took the time to ask a few questions which kept you guys in mind. The questions I asked:

• What’s the difference between “API Complete” (build 6801) is and “Feature Complete” (Beta 1)?
• Why were lots of code samples and features being shown off for the Superbar at PDC when developers can’t develop for it? (Rafael’s extension of my API v. Feature Complete question)
• Why were the sensor demonstrations missing from the Windows 7 keynote today?

The answers to these questions can be found in the true-to-life* transcript after the break.

*Given that this is a transcript, it may be wrought with grammatical errors, but this is exactly how the chat went down.

Bryant: I had a question which I had myself but my colleague Rafael phrased it much better than I did, and it kinda ties into your note about how the build given to developers here at PDC this week is “API Complete” whereas the builds you were… whereas beta 1 is going to be “Feature Complete” or at least that’s the attempt… my own question is: what’s the difference between “API Complete” and “Feature Complete”? More specifically, Rafael’s question is, um, he noted that there are a lot of sessions at PDC talking about the superbar, and developing for the superbar, and one session that he went to had a lot of code samples being shown, but he also took note that developers can’t even develop for it because the superbar isn’t even in the build.

Mike: So the question really is, first of all, “What’s the difference between ‘API Complete’ and ‘Feature Complete’, and what is a developer to do who wants to write software that takes advantage of features that aren’t in the current ‘M3’ build.” So API complete, um, says that all the interfaces that developers are gonna code to… are in the product, and the third milestone of Windows 7 always had the goal of being API complete, which means  we’re not going to add any more APIs subsequently. Feature complete means that all the functions that are gonna be part of Windows 7 are in that build, and our beta, which will ship early next year [in time for CES], will be Feature Complete. The real – One of the hard questions we had… which we faced, is “Well, do we give everyb—do we only demo the API Complete release even though we have been working since September when we cut M3, do we demo more than the M3 build” and the answer is “aaah! We only have these developers together that often. It’d seem like kind-of a shame to not show them everything we had,” which then begged the question “Well why don’t you just give them the build that Steven used on stage?” which was the stuff from last Friday. The answer is “Well, in order to stabilize that, we woulda had to start stabilizing it back in August to be done in September (which is kinda what we did), so we couldn’t give you something from last Friday at this scale, or at the same time, it’d seem like a shame to not show you everything that we had. So what you see here is that optimization. Is it perfect? No. I think the other thing—hey well I could tell anybody anything til it’s all the way done. The problem there is, you don’t give the ecosystem the chance to get going. So, you are here a little bit watching the sausage being made in the sense that you’re watching us have this dialog with our partners to make sure that they are ready so that when we get to beta, there’s some momentum for Windows 7, and then certainly as we get towards general availability for Windows 7, there’s a healthy set of things that take advantage of Windows 7 that are out there.

Bryant: So, I guess tying back into the API Complete v. Feature Complete stuff, could a developer develop for the superbar in 6801?

Mike: Certain aspects of it, yes; certain aspects of it, no.

Bryant: Okay.

Mike: and some of that is sorta enough work to do between now and then that when the beta comes out they can get, you know, have all those features be there.

Bryant: Okay, thanks.

Mike: Great question.

Bryant: A few more questions, I guess, but… in the keynote that I saw today, there was one thing that was notably absent, and that was the sensor demos which were later discussed in the expo hall. Are you guys saving the sensor demonstrations — like the accelerometer demos, the touch demos and such… well not the touch demos so much but mostly just sensor work) — but are you saving that more for… WinHEC?

Mike: If I told you, I’d have to kill you.

Some other pressie: Cool!

Mike: Okay, here’s the challenge. Today was the first time that we talked about Windows 7 in any scale, and I’d say, again, sorta the… how advanced this thing is – this phase, we’re further along than we’ve been at least in a long time. How much do people know? We’ve held a lot more back than ever, so today was like “WOW; lot to talk about and not a lot of time,” and we had to be sorta choiceful about what we talked about.

Bryant: Yeah.

Mike: Next week we have WinHEC – things that are about sorta the core of Windows 7 by default happened here. Things that are more… developer oriented… happened here. Things that are more hardware oriented, without being specific, you could expect to be in a convention center not unlike this one in a town with the same zipcode.

[laughter]

Mike: Yeah, in about a week.

Summary:

• What is API Complete v. Feature Complete? API Complete has the developer bits ready for the developers to work with, even if some of them are dead-ends for now. Feature Complete expands on this by making all of the APIs functional.
• Why were code samples and such being shown off for the Superbar? Developers will be able to code for it anyway, but they’ll have enough to work with between now and Beta 1 that once Beta 1 hits the scene, they’ll have a good amount of code that doesn’t require functional awareness actually prepared.
• Why were the sensor bits missing from the Windows 7 keynote? Because it’s more relevant to WinHEC, but there’s a session on that which I’ll be covering today, so it’s all good.

There you have it. I’ll be covering today’s sensor demonstration at 10:30 today. I look forward to bringing you what I see.

Slashdot readers, thanks for visiting. Feel free to chime in here or on the forums.

Mike Nash, former Security Guru and current Client Guru over at Microsoft, has just announced on the Windows Vista Blog that the new name for Windows “7” will be:

Windows 6.1 7

…which makes me wonder why it’s going to be NT 6.1.

It also means that Windows Strata will likely be the codename for the new Cloud OS discussed by Ballmer earlier this month. We’ll carry more about all of this from PDC in two weeks.

Update: Brandon followed up with me on twitter saying it’s the 7th release of Windows, which is ridiculous:

1. Windows
2. Windows 2
3. Windows 3.0
4. Windows NT (NT 4)
5. Windows 2000 (NT 5)
6. Windows XP (NT 5.1)
7. Windows Vista (NT 6)

That’s 7 releases right there, including XP. If XP isn’t counted because it’s Kernel 5.1 (which would bring the total with Windows 7 back down to seven), then why is Windows 7 being counted as the “seventh” release if it’s kernel 6.1? I hope I’m not the only one seeing the naming problem here.

Kernel increments are used mostly for application compatibility purposes, but still, the logic is lost upon us as most people would count XP as a semi-major release in comparison to 2000. I hope the guys at the Blog have an update, because this is weird.

More potential views of how this could have worked (Update 2: as well as Mike’s clarification) after the break.

So let’s take a look at client releases which may have targeted consumers outside a business environment:

1. Windows
2. Windows 2
3. Windows 3.0
4. Windows 95
5. Windows 98
6. Windows ME
7. Windows XP
8. Windows Vista

Those would be the versions of Windows targeted towards a more “homey” audience, and even then, the total hits seven before Windows 7 comes into the picture without including the incremental versions that came between Windows 3.0 (1990) and Windows 95 (1995).

How about business releases?

1. Windows 3.1
2. Windows 3.5
3. Windows NT 4
4. Windows 2000
5. Windows XP
6. Windows Vista
7. Windows 7

Aha! Some success! But how confusing would it be to know that Windows 7 is the seventh Windows based on a list of client operating systems for businesses, and that that list starts at 3.1?

The only approach I see which could possibly work is based on counting kernel revisions, which would only make sense if they did not count XP and also decided to increment the NT kernel to 7, which might just be the biggest piece of news here: enough changes may have been made to the kernel itself to warrant Windows 7’s consideration as an all-around major release.

I adore Microsoft’s quest for simplicity here, but thanks mostly to this attempt, my mind is blown.

“Simply put, this is the seventh release of Windows, so therefore ‘Windows 7′ just makes sense.”
-Mike Nash

Right. Except it doesn’t.

Update 2: Thanks, Mike! Here’s the answer we were looking for:

We learned a lot about using 5.1 for XP and how that helped developers with version checking for API compatibility.  We also had the lesson reinforced when we applied the version number in the Windows Vista code as Windows 6.0– that changing basic version numbers can cause application compatibility issues.

So we decided to ship the Windows 7 code as Windows 6.1 – which is what you will see in the actual version of the product in cmd.exe or computer properties.

There’s been some fodder about whether using 6.1 in the code is an indicator of the relevance of Windows 7.  It is not.

Windows 7 is a significant and evolutionary advancement of the client operating system.  It is in every way a major effort in design, engineering and innovation.  The only thing to read into the code versioning is that we are absolutely committed to making sure application compatibility is optimized for our customers.

So, basically, Windows 7 will be 6.1 for appcompat reasons, but they’ll still count it as the seventh release of Windows (XP and 2000 were thrown in one net as release 5)

Mike, I hope no poor bloke sees a winver dialog and decides to sue, thinking he was ripped off.