Some of Windows 7's features heavily protected in PDC build

The attendees to Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference all got to take home a build of Windows 7 to get a feel for and dig into a little bit. Unfortunately, some of the features talked up by MS at the event weren’t exactly… well, present in that build. One big one that appeared to be missing was the new task bar. While poking around looking for other new features, this intrepid developer found that there was a series of restrictions placed on enabling the new taskbar.

It turns out that the build checks if you’re in an allowed domain and you’re not a temporary employee or vendor. So essentially the taskbar is supposed to be insiders only. The guy made a workaround which you can find at the page, but he warns that the reason the taskbar is locked is probably because it’s not finished: it’s a mishmash of old, new, and incomplete features. Instead of branching a PDC build and stressing the compile times, they just added in these pretty serious protections so that people wouldn’t have easy access to something that wasn’t ready to go.