I can't watch it from the office, but the e7 blog listed some of the W7 presentations at PDC last week... Windows 7: Introducing Direct2D and DirectWrite.
Could be an interesting next-step in the whole DirectDraw/GDI/GDI+/WPF family. So far there seems to be little talk online about it, but I wonder if it has any merits for game development or if it's just a "normal" graphics API for desktop apps and pro DCC work...??
Oh good, I'm glad Leonardo stressed it's "all about native code" about 5 seconds in, so I don't have to worry about it [smile] Having watched about half1 of the presentation, am I wrong to think that it's a cleanup of the low-level plumbing to make the whole plethora of rendering APIs more interoperable? If not, why do we need yet another API? Where does WPF fit in?
Also, moving GDI onto WIC... isn't that all about DRM?
1 I really tried, but I gave up about a quarter in when they were discussing the 17% time gain ClearType affords when recognizing text next to an icon. I think much like the audience, I'm quit stricken by the vagueness of where all this fits in and if the benefits are really there outside the MS usability labs.