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 September 2005 in Microsoft | Comments (0)

While I was away at Tech Ed (I’ll blog on this later) Microsoft released Beta 1 of WinFS.

If you have an MSDN subscription you should be able to login and grab a copy (it’s around 75MB, ignore the documentation download as it’s in the 75MB file as well).

I’ve yet to have a play with it other than to say that it won’t install on Windows 2003 which is my primary desktop environment. You can get around this by downloading the Installer SDK which is part of the Platform SDK. You can skip everything via the custom install except for the Installer SDK.

• Run to the directory C:\Program Files\Microsoft Platform SDK\Bin\Orca.Msi
• Complete the install
• Fire up Orca (on your start menu)
• Open the msi C:\winfsbeta1\winfs.msi (assuming you ran the initial install with default settings)
• Click on “Launch Condition” on the left list
• Right click on the row on the right which mentions that you need Windows XP SP2 and select “Drop Row”
• Click File -> Save.

You should now be able to do an install on a Windows 2003 machine. I installed this onto a VM earlier and it installed without any problems. Managed to reboot – always a bonus If anyone else tries this method then I’d appreciate to hear the outcome of your 2003 install. In fact, I’d like to hear from anyone playing with WinFS!

- JD