I was watching the TechEd 2009 keynote the other day and there was a lot of time spent on Windows 7. They’re making a push to get this product shipping by the 2009 holidays, which means RTM in late Oct. It’s an aggressive timeline, but they should be better at this whole “OS” thing, and my guess is there’s pressure to supersede Vista since it hasn’t been well received.

During the demo, there was one cool thing I saw. Mark Russinovich had a few windows on the screen, he grabbed the header bar of one, and shook it back and forth. The other windows that were in the background disappeared.

I thought that was cool, though I’m not completely sure why I’d do that in practice. The “shrink to fit all on screen” that my iMac has seems more useful.

I had download Windows 7 RC last week, and had it installed in a VM, so I fired it up to see if it worked. It did, though it takes a bit more shaking in a slow VM on my machine.

Another few shakes brought the windows back.

Not sure how useful this is, but it’s kind of funny. Made me think of the Hokey-Pokey

“You shake your Windows away.

You shake your Windows back,

You shake your Windows away

and you shake them all about...”