2 February 2006 in Apple & Windows | Comments (4)

The new MacBook Pro looks amazing and I’m really trying my best not to buy one. One reason being that I just can’t validate spending that much money on something that really would just be a novelty at the moment.

However, now that they have moved to the Intel chip (x86 architecture effectively) there is the chance that Windows XP/2003 can be installed on it and dual boot with it. This suddenly makes it look a whole lot more attractive – I can validate the expense because I can now do my work on it (boot into Windows, code in .Net).
There is now a site that has a bounty for anybody who discovers the way to dual boot with Windows XP. The bounty is now up to just over US$9000 dollars. I’m looking forward to tracking this as I’d assume that anybody who works out how to do this will certainly want that money.

Lets hope somebody succeeds with this

- JD

5 September 2005 in Windows | Comments (0)

It would appear that Microsoft have dropped the short-lived name of “Windows Graphics Foundation” (WGF) for Avalon. It is now just DirectX 10.

Source: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=25902

I never liked the WGF name – too much of a mouthful.

– JD

1 September 2005 in .Net & Code & Microsoft & Windows | Comments (0)

As promised, a post on my experiences at TechEd 2005.

This was my first time attending TechEd and I was really impressed.

I was stunned at how well Sky City catered for the ~2500 people attending this year. I used to work in catering while at University and was always embarrassed by how amazingly poor the food quality was (I had no control over it so nobody should blame me! I’m a lover of food!). It was great – I don’t think I’ve eaten that well in my entire life.

All the speakers also were really good to listen to.

I really enjoyed the security related talks (I think we can all agree that Steve Riley and Jesper Johansson are kick ass speakers!) – if you ever get a chance to listen to either of these guys talk I would strongly suggest you take it up. I think Nic said it best by saying “basically the presenter I’d want to be”. He was speaking of just Steve, but they’re both awesome.

There were so many topics that I enjoyed – Darryls discussion about the compact framework was great – right at my level. Really did well at inspiring me to have more of a play around with my phone to do some cool things. I’m not sure what yet but that’s half the fun

Other Intergenites did a great job as well – I attended talks by Derek, Andrew Tokely and Jeremy Boyd. All excellent.

I must add that at the start of the week I wished TechEd was a week long. This quickly changed. I don’t think I’ve been so worn out in all my life! Once you include the drinks, the partying etc, it takes it out of you. I don’t know exactly how JB manages it – but he went up their early, then headed over to the Australian TechEd. All up he must be doing 6 or more talks! This excludes mention of the huge amount of work he did before Tech Ed – not just with preparing his topics, but in organising the Hands On Labs which Intergen ran this year. Well worth a mention.

Also a hi to Darryl Burling and Chandima who mentioned that they have read my blog – always good to hear

- JD

1 August 2005 in Windows | Comments (1)

So another night of playing around – I finally got Visual Studio 2005 installed on Vista.

How often have you found yourself copying files – thousands and thousands of files. You’re dragging them over your network and you’re about half way and the damn thing, for whatever reason, screws up. No option to continue, no option to retry that file again – you just have to start again. It might not happen that often but when it does it sure is damn annoying.

This is what happened when I tried to copy three files from a CD and it failed on one of them:

It’s only taken until 2005 (well… 2006) for us to get this functionality that should have been there in the first version of Windows. At least it’s finally here!

– JD

1 August 2005 in Windows | Comments (6)

Vista comes with six new fonts and one of them is a fixed width coding style font by the name of Consolas.

If you have a copy of Vista Beta 1 installed I would recommend that you grab this font and chuck it on your dev machine then update Visual Studio to use it. It looks great.

Word of warning however, it is designed to be used when ClearType font smoothening is enabled – if you’re on a CRT or don’t like ClearType is tends to look a bit crap.

Example:

UPDATE: This entry is getting a lot of attention. If you found your way here with Google then please subscribe to my rss feed (here) or pop back some time. I post about all sorts of technology and would appreciate your readership if you like this type of content Cheers and thanks for visiting.

- JD

1 August 2005 in Windows | Comments (0)

In an earlier blog entry I wrote about wanting to know why I didn’t have any transparency in Vista Beta 1. I had seen all the pretty screen shots with the nice transparency around windows and when I installed Vista Beta and there was nothing. A plain boring border to your Vista windows.

If this is you then you’re probably using an nVidia graphics card. The reason for this is that you need a special LDDM drivers. Apparently you get ATI LDDM (Longhorn Display Driver Model) drivers out of the box with Vista Beta 1 but not for nVidia. So to solev this you need to install this driver:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_75.03.html

Be warned however this this is an alpha driver and from my experience so far it’s a bit slow and some people have complained of major problems. If you want decent performance just use the latest nVidia drivers and sacrifice the nicer UI. Also worthy of note is that you will lose your nView software (including the driver options on your display properties).

- JD

31 July 2005 in Windows | Comments (0)

James Story has beaten me to it and started playing around with Avalon in the Vista Beta. This week I will have to do some catching up.

While I was browsing around I’ve found a couple of decent sites for Avalon information (this entry is as much a reminder for myself as it is for any other would-be Avalon fiddlers).

Tool to export from Adobe Illustrator directly to XAML:
http://www.mikeswanson.com/XAMLExport/Eye%20Candy.htm

A site with samples and controls:
http://xamlshare.com/

A good Microsoft site that talks about developing for Avalon:
http://winfx.msdn.microsoft.com/library/

Also just to remind people, Avalon has officially been renamed the “Windows Presentation Foundation”.

- JD

29 July 2005 in Windows | Comments (1)

So I’ve just finished installing Vista on my home machine. First impressions: good.

I’m pleased to see that for a beta is performs reasonably well, doesn’t seem to hate my hardware and isn’t over the top with it’s new chrome. There are literally hundreds of small things which are cool which many of you will undoubtedly find yourself.

Search is everywhere! This all looks good for when the WinFS add-on comes out and will hopefully unify all of this search functionality. The Virtual Folders functionality looks very promising in slowly moving away from the idea of drives and folders – even if only hinting at it. At the end of the day – why does it matter where something is?

One thing that I personally look forward to seeing in our production environment – the enhanced EventViewer. You now have your three core system logs (System, Application and Security) and then another folder called “Application Logs” which has a log for each application. For example, at the moment, I can read the log for the Kernels PnP layer from it’s own folder. I really am looking forward to trying out my own applications and seeing if it logs correctly to it’s own application log.

IE 7.0 doesn’t appear to be all that great. Sure, there are tabs, but that’s just catch up. The only feature so far that does look unique and done well with IE is the RSS viewer – very clean layout, easy to read – I hope they don’t change it.

One thing I am a bit let down about however is the lack of translucent boarders on my windows. It might be a feature that I would turn off after I get bored with it however in all the screenshots I’ve seen show translucent boarders. It is very possible I just can’t find the right option but I don’t see it. Does anyone know how to get this working?

UPDATE: I found the answer to the translucent windows and posted an answer here

– JD