Well since I've moved into the Microsoft business group at work, I thought it was appropriate to start doing some more "Microsofty" things with my network at home. To start off with I thought I ought to try the new Windows 7 RC. Since my home PC needed a rebuild anyway I figured I might as well stick the RC on that and then just rebuild when the RTM was released.
First off I was quite impressed with the speed at which the OS installed - based on past experience from XP and Vista Windows 7 seemed to fly through the initial install screens. Next came the inevitable task of restoring everything from backups I'd previously made. I'd made a concious decision not to back up my entire documents folder this morning when I was selecting things to save, opting instead for my Firefox bookmarks, Outlook PST files and a few essential documents. Since I'd not even looked at the majority of files in the last year or two I figured I obviously wouldn't miss them too much (or even notice at all).
After only using the OS for the last hour or two the main improvements which I've noticed (and liked) are

• Taskbar items - These are grouped into application (as was previously in XP and Vista) but this time are simplified to an icon for each. Nice and clutter free but might be annoying if you have many of the same window open.
• My Documents folders - In Vista the move was slightly away from a My Documents folder towards content based document folders (images, movies, music etc.) This time Windows 7 has stepped slightly further and redefined it further into "Libraries". I quite like this way of catagorizing content but if you've moved all your files and folders from an old My Documents folder there might be an overhead sorting and moving files around. This structure does closer integrate with the Windows Media Center software (which also looks new)
• Aero effects - Like Vista Windows 7 has some pretty visual effects which it calls Aero. I feel that most of these have been introduced in a bid to tempt people away from buying the MacOS based systems. Most of the effects are just for to make things look nice but that said I do like the way the new Alt+Tab works to hide other windows by making them transparent (although no way near as good as Apple's Exposé)

API's

As mentioned above, I want to try and get more up to speed with my Microsoft technologies so I thought I'd try my hand at some API stuff. The two that I want to write something for are Twitter and Remember the Milk.
I've seen a few people recently using Twitter to agregate and publish service bulletins, server health (Windows Home Server http://whstweet.hshacks.com) amongst other stuff. I thought I'd have a go at writing my own based on the work that I did for my final year project at uni.
My final year project, which I will one day publish on this site, was an RSS feed based monitoring solution which used SNMP and WMI to monitor servers and services which were then published as RSS feeds to support personel. I thought I could extend this functionality to provide an update to Twitter.
So far I've only got as far as installing Visual Studio but I'll hopefully put some updates on here when I get round to writting something a little more worthwhile!