Microsoft

I decided to be one of those early installers that brave the RTM and hope everything has been programed correctly, so my current system doesn’t get blown away in the upgrade process. I have a small in home Team Foundation Server that I use for my home based business and personal coding. So an upgrade is pretty risky, in that I risk loosing everything. Knowing all the risks I decided to move forward and everything was going smoothly with installing Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server, until I ran in to the follow problem. ...

Scott Guthrie has announced that Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 are now available for download and provides a tour of some of the new features. If you are a MSDN subscriber, you can download your copy from the MSDN subscription site (note: some of the builds are just finishing being uploaded now - so check back later during the day if you don’t see it yet). If you are a non-MSDN subscriber, you can download a 90-day free trial edition of Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite here. A 90-day trial edition of Visual Studio 2008 Professional (which will be a slightly smaller download) will be available next week. A 90-day free trial edition of Team Foundation Server can also be downloaded here. If you want to use the free Visual Studio 2008 Express editions (which are much smaller and totally free), you can download them here. If you want to just install the .NET Framework 3.5 runtime, you can download it here.

Hi loyal readers, I have to apologize, I have been a really bad blogger lately. I have neglected my blog because of a new job and a brand new Web 2.0 site that I am about to release. At the end of the month I will make an announcement about this project and all the new technologies that many of you have probably heard of but few have implemented. But until then please keep visiting and I really enjoy your comments on the following popular postings: ...

Please note: These fixes break all current methods of bypassing driver singing requirements except the good old F8 during boot (that you have to do every single time you start vista) If you are using Rivatuner, atitool and or Peerguardian on 64bit vista, you will have to use F8 every single time to disable driver signing requirements to use those two programs. x86 version is unaffected. These updates should go official on the next patch Tuesday (in one weeks time). Please read more for the download links and information on these updates. ...

One of the new features of Windows Vista was the Driver integrity Checks. In the x64 version of the product it is turned on by default, and is a great idea to prevent kernel level access to only drivers that have passed the Microsoft Testing for security and performance. However this feature can be rather annoying since Microsoft hasn’t even released signed drivers for all their products. (i.e. Streets & Trips GPS Device) So I have included the following steps in order to disable the driver signing integrity checks, so that you can install unsigned drivers. ...

I haven’t even herd of a new version of SQL Server 2008, coming out, but according to this blog the new version has some very interesting and new data types that will come in useful for geography processing. DATE - ANSI-compliant date data type TIME - ANSI-compliant time data type with variable precision DATETIMEOFFSET - timezone aware/preserved datetime DATETIME2 - like DATETIME, but with variable precision and large date range ...

Since my last article I have updated the OS on my cell phone to AKU 3 for Windows Mobile 5.0. This has been a huge productivity increase, since there is no longer a need to have a modem driver, and you can browse the internet and take calls on your cell phone at the same time. Requirements: A Windows Mobile 5.0 or 6.0 device. Active Sync 4.2 or greater for Windows XP or Windows Mobile Device Center for Windows Vista. USB Internet Sharing: ...

Apple has just released a public beta of its Safari browser for Windows yesterday. And there have been already 6 zero day exploits and many, many crashes for the browser. You can read about them here here here and here. Which makes the following image from the Apple website, borrowed from aviv.raffon.net, all the more funny. ...

I am happy to announce that Apple iTunes 7.2 has been released and this is the first release since Windows Vista was released 6 months ago that worked through Apples normal install process with out any problems. I just wanted to keep everybody updated since I have talked about the problems of installing iTunes on Windows Vista x64 in the past. If you want any more information about this release, please view Mac Rumors.

You’ll see many posts out on the web talking about what a great thing it is that Dell is offering a Free OS on their hardware. And many stories talking about the Windows Tax. I was very disappointed to see the superficial overview that Jeff Atwood on his website, he has always done very in depth reviews in the past, however he slipped this time: Whether you’re a fan of the latest open source operating systems, or just a fan of plain old-fashioned consumer choice, the end of the Microsoft tax is a win for customers. I was a little worried that Dell would charge extra for the privilege, but it looks like they played fair and square: ...