Microsoft actually listens (so hopefully they will change the It Just Works slogan as well) to customers. There was a big rage when the new VS.NET 2005 and accompanying MSDN subscriptions where announced, since the pricing was outrageously different and higher. Things have changed. A little bit, but it changed. Read it in Rick‘s weblog.
AD is a tricky beast. Not only do you need a server version of Windows, but experimenting with it no so simple too. Microsoft created ADAM for that: AD Application Mode, that basically means that you can start it just like any other program. And…you can run it with Windows XP Pro (SP1 +) too.
Microsoft has released a step-by-step guide how to implement it, and instructions how to bundle it with your application.
ADAM itself can be downloaded here.
Thanks for pointing, TSS.
Microsoft beware! The new beta of OpenOffice has features to be a Microsoft Office killer. It opens and saves Microsoft Office documents flawlessly. It has the option to export to PDF, without a need to buy extra software. It includes an Access-like database product BASE (Access is only available in bigger Office versions, or as a standalone product). Most of all: OpenOffice is free.
True, it lacks a good email program like Outlook, but if you can’t live without it, buy it seperately for about $110. Free OpenOffice + $110 <<< MS Office Standard!
Click on the title for a review of the new beta.
As a sidenote, OASIS (an organisation defining/approving e-business standards) has approved the OpenDocument format, a minor extension of the format OpenOffice 2.0 beta uses. The OpenDocument format will save you from the vendor lock-in, since you can switch Office applications without losing your documents.
In the EMEA region the Visual Studio .NET 2005 beta experience has started: you can now order beta 2 of the upcoming IDE.
One of the findings in this post is “Micro ISVs are not on the cutting edge of technologies”. Didn’t these people hear ALL Micro ISV’s cry when the new pricing of VS.NET 2005 (especially Team Studio) became public? How can a Micro ISV support cutting edge technology, if buying into it means such a big risk? How can we test solutions for IIS 6 if we have to buy a new OS first? Why does Office change with EVERY version? Perhaps you (John) should not be asking “where are the Micro ISV’s”, but instead you should count the increase in development in the oh-so dangerous Open Source scene. Look at the number of one-man-bands that provide paid support for some kind of Open Source CMS. It pays good money, you don’t have to write or maintain the software yourself, and webapplications, hey, that’s the new hype so lot’s of companies are willing to hire you. John? You there?
Microsoft release both the redistributable and the SDK of beta 2 of the .NET Framework 2.0. And making things utterly complete, you can choose between 32 and 64-bit (IA64 and x64) editions. Click on the title to go to the downloadpage.
Most people would want the 32bit versions. The SDK is about 317MByte, the redist is about 23MByte, and as before, you need the redist before you can use the SDK.
When you need to create some temporary files, you can create them in %TEMP%. If you don’t delete them yourself, some other program or the user will, since the directory defined in %TEMP% is meant to store TEMPORARY files.
Now read this post about the Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server beta 2 setup. Tell me they are not seriously blaming the anti-virus software for deleting files from %TEMP%? Guys, this is Microsoft not knowing where %TEMP% is for. How f*cked up is that? Any decent installation program that needs a reboot creates a folder somewhere on C:, and deletes this folder after the reboot is done and the installation has completed. Not Microsoft: please disable your Antivirus software if you’re going to install TFS. This is seriously wrong. I sure hope they will have their act together before the “release”.
Things are not as bad as Microsoft’s website makes you believe. Read Larkware’s explanation, and be happy. Or less sad. Whatever.
Go here. Not just for the MSDN-subscribers anymore, but public availability. The download is about 450Mbytes.
I use Outlook (came with my iPaq) and I’m not the cleaning kind. Recently I checked the size of my PST file, and saw that its size is over 800MBytes. Since the disk it’s on also houses my “internet cache”, this disk is … well … let’s say fragmented. I think there is no file on that disk that resides in one contiguous part.
Since the recent disk-switch, I have a partition with over 30GByte of diskspace, so I closed Outlook, moved the PST file to the other disk (from a SCSI-Wide disk to a IDE Ultra/100 disk) and started defrag to be able to copy the PST file back, but less fragmented.
So I thought, what would happen if I start Outlook now? Will it ask for the new location of the PST file? To my surprise it did. After pointing to it, Outlook gives a message about not being able to open “…blabla personal folder bla bla…” and then quits. When I started Outlook again, everything was there, as expected. With one exception: there was no rattling of the disk, and the startup is almost instantly. Wow. Accessing a file of over 800MBytes, and still maintaining an “instant-on” feeling really impressed me. I know Outlook isn’t the best tool around (I must use it to be able to synchronize the iPaq), but this kind of performance is superb.