i-mate has just announced a Windows Vista SideShow debugging tool. More information is available in their forums post here and you can download the debugger from: http://www.clubimate.com/t-WINGADRV.aspx

According to their post "This debugger also serves as a sneak preview of the functionality to be available in upcoming i-mate Mobile Devices and the anticipated Momento Digital Photo Frame Version 2.  Therefore, any gadgets that are compatible with the debugger are sure to work on future i-mate devices."

It's great to see them supporting SideShow on their already very cool Momento and Ultimate devices!

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What to added mapped drives of network shares to the search indexes of Windows Desktop Search in Windows Vista? See KB918996

Availability of the Windows Desktop Search: Add-in for Files on Microsoft Networks

The following file is available for download from the Microsoft Download Center:
Download the UNCFATPHInstaller.msi package now. (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=f7e981d9-5a3b-4872-a07e-220761e27283&DisplayLang=en) Release Date: September 28, 2006

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A great reality check on the mac ads targeting Vista upgrades.

If I was writing a Mac commercial...

Nicely done D'Arcy! Vista does rock!

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Can't find a Telnet client in Windows Vista? It's a "Windows Feature" that must be turned on from Programs and Features in the Control Panel

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As the clock strikes midnight around the world, signs of the consumer release of Windows Vista have started to surface.

Retailers have started getting their displays ready, with many of them holding special launch celebrations

And some even have systems with Vista pre-loaded ready to go.

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This weekend I took a much needed break from work activities, and amongst other things setup the Christmas tree and made cookies. Not just any old cookies however, along with the snowmen, Christmas trees and other holiday favorites, I made special Windows Vista launch cookies to enjoy later this week in celebration of Vista making it's official debut!

Well, official debut I guess if you don't live in Canada where Edmonton Alberta hosted their Vista launch last Thursday. (I wonder if there were any cookies?) Speaking of Vista, it runs SOOOOO much better now that I have yanked the crappy ATI video card out and put an nVidia card in. No more weird artifacts and other video issues that the ever crashing ATI R300 drivers were causing.

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Jim Allchin: "It's rock solid and we're ready to ship!"

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Tonight Microsoft has made available theMicrosoft® Windows® Software Development Kit for Windows Vista™™ and .NET Framework 3.0 Runtime Components for download. Get'em while they're hot!

[UPDATE} - The Visual Studio 2005 extensions are available as well.....

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This has been around for a bit, but since I'm posting cool Vista/WPF related things tonight, it can't be missed. Via Michael G. Emmons @ xamlxaml.com:

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It's so dang close I can almost taste it!! (Or is that a rolo from halloween?)

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A slick WPF based feed reader that takes advantage of both the Vista RSS Platform and WPF. Check it out!

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This months guest speaker was Doug Turnure, Developer Evangelist, Microsoft and shared a great look at the "Vision" of Indigo and how we've moved from the start of object oriented programming to the service oriented models that are being put in place today. With the builds in flux as they are since PDC, Doug was unable to show us any live code, but it sounds like the Indigo team is on top of things. There was some good insight into the importance of standards and why Microsoft was waiting on some of them. (Microsoft waiting for standards? Haven't written that much in the past, but I think it's a great sign)

Some key points on Indigo:

 

Services Are Autonomous

Boundaries are explicit

Share schema, not class

Policy-based compatibility

If any of you know Doug, check with him next time you see him and verify if he really encrypted the notes he passed to the girls in school so the teacher wouldn't read them out loud and embarrass him!

It was a great presentation we look forward to seeing Doug back in the Triangle soon.

NOTE - The next MSDN event in Raleigh is on May 4th!

An audio replay of the WSV203 session from PDC that Doug referenced is available here and the powerpoint slides are available here. (If you're interested, all the PDC sessions are available here)

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Microsoft has now made the Visual Studio 2005 Community Technical Preview available to MSDN subscribers and those in attendance at VS live. The download on MSDN is a whopping 2.7gb DVD ISO image. I'm glad that it was put up as a single complete download. Yes, it takes a while to transfer, but that just gives us extra time to do our real work.

On the topic of 2.7gb downloads, I can't help but think back to the good old days of modems, Bulliten Board Systems (BBS), and files over 100k being huge! Hmm... 2.7gb at 2400 baud? if I started back in 1988, would I have the file yet? Heck, I remember going all out and buy my first 100mb hard drive! Ahh... those were the days.

Oh ya... back to the real work.

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Carl says that Bill said (At VSLive) that a new version of the Whidbey bits are on their way. There has been a lot of talk recently about these early releases of code. I think it's a great move to get the tools in the hands of developers as early as possible. As one recent article quotes Prashant Sridharan, lead product manager for Visual Studio, as saying “Developers will install anything, whereas an IT guy in the data center will not,"  While that's probably true, I think the importance is in getting developers comfortable with the tools as early as possible.

This new “community technical previews“ version will apparently be dsitributed Thursday to... I'm not sure to who, but I'll make sure I start checking my mailbox that day.

I hadn't noticed this before, but it also appears that Microsoft is officially referrign to Whidbey as Visual Studio 2005 and the .Net Framework 2.0. They have an excellent roadmap available here

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April Triangle .Net User Group Meeting 4/14/2004

Preview of Indigo 

Service oriented architectures are becoming the norm for enterprise systems in today's distributed world. The heart of SOA is messaging standards, and the defacto standard for messaging is web services. Web Services are quickly moving to the forefront of corporate information exchange, and XML is the most common messaging format to describe the data. Indigo is the codename for Microsoft’s new messaging framework. It provides rich support for SOA that is complementary to traditional object-oriented approaches. Indigo represents the best of .NET Remoting, ASP.NET, .NET Enterprise Services, and web service Extensions (WSE), rolling them into a unified programming and administrative model. Indigo supports standards such as HTTP, XML, and SOAP, and delivers a mechanism for secure, reliable, transacted messaging. Indigo will be included in the next version of Microsoft Windows, code-named “Longhorn”, although it should be available independently at some time before Longhorn ships.

This talk will provide an introduction and preview of Indigo. It will include both the mechanics of using Indigo, and sufficient background as to address why Indigo is so important. Come and learn how to take advantage of the coming standard for SOA on the Windows platform.

Instructor Bio :
Doug Turnure is a Developer Evangelist with Microsoft Corporation, focusing on .NET technologies. He serves numerous enterprise clients as a developer, author, trainer, and occasional conference speaker. His specialties include .NET internals, memory management, and distributed communication, although he enjoys anything pertaining to .NET. Prior to joining Microsoft, he spent five years as an instructor and course author with DevelopMentor and Aggelos, Inc. His primary topics of instruction include VB.NET, C#, and ASP.NET. Doug is currently based in Atlanta, Georgia.  

For more information please visit the TRINUG Website

UPDATE: For some background info, check out this MSDN-TV show!

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If anbody decides to play with System.Net.NetworkInformation and write a sample program that monitors changes in IP addresses, DO NOT start manually changing the IP address to see if the program picks up the events. (Which it does did quite niceley)

What happened to me was that each time I changed the address the system created another new interface for the new IP address. At first I though this was just something minor since a reboot removed all of the duplicate entires, but then it happened. First I the defautl gateway stopped working, then the system would crash and reboot when changes were made, and then it simply would not boot anymore.

MS verified that "There are problems with the new IP stack" in my newsgroup bug post.

I'm now re-installing from scratch so I can continue to play with all the great new additions to System.Net...

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While working on a sample I plan to share in the near future I have been playing with the System.Net.NetworkInformation classes. There are some nice additions here giving us easy access to a lot of network related information and ability to monitor and properly react to changes.

During this I noticed that the NetworkInterface.Type property specifies the InterfaceType as an InterfaceType enum. Would it not make sense to expose this property as NetworkInterface.InterfaceType in the same way that NetworkInterface.OperationalStatus is setup with the OperationalStatus enum? Using "Type" alone seems a little too generic and a little confusing in my humble opinion.

Thoughts?

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For those that now are able to install and use an early version of Longhorn and for others that just want to learn more about what all the talk is about, start by taking a close look at the Longhorn SDK. The information both including on the Longhorn DVD as well as available on the web at http://longhorn.msdn.microsoft.com. The information is divided into 5 main categories:

• Technologies – Provides an overview of the main technology areas of Longhorn
• Reference – A reference for the Class Libraries, Schema, Compiler and Languages
• How do I …? – Provides a list of “How do I ..?” topics grouped by technology area
• Samples – A number of Sample applications and code demonstrations
• Communities – Longhorn development community information

The format makes it easy to gain an overall understanding of a topic as well as to drill down into a specific piece of information and to see what it can be implemented. A very innovative addition is that through the entire SDK users are able to provide their comments or “Annotations” to assist in refining and improving that documentation. Users are encourage to comment on bugs, errors, and requests for additional information or details. The Longhorn SDK Documentation is a great resource that everybody should make some time to go through.

While still a work in progress, the SDK is an excellent example of how much work has already been done and the importance that Microsoft appears to be placing on working with the development community to shape and improve the continued development of Longhorn.

For the latest information on Longhorn check out:

LonghornBlogs.com
PDCBloggers.net
Msdn.microsoft.com/longhorn

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