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What does Vista SP1 add?
With the release of Windows Vista SP1, Windows Vista is more capable than ever of addressing contemporary business challenges. With a focus on continuous quality improvement, SP1 offers benefits in six key areas: 1. Device coverage: 98 of the top 100 devices are now supported, and more than 47,000 drivers have been added since Windows Vista was released...
Posted: Jul 28 2008, 09:20 AM by Amit Bahree | with no comments
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Live Mesh Update
As I said in the last post I have been using Live Mesh for a few weeks now. Since then, Microsoft has released an update to Mesh; those of you who are using it and not updated it yet, I would suggest you do. It will restart the Windows shell once the update is finished, but I would recommend to save your work before you start the update and bounce Windows...
Posted: Jun 24 2008, 05:44 PM by Amit Bahree | with no comments
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Live Mesh - Tech Preview
You might have heard of the new "Cloud" service from Microsoft called Live Mesh . You can get more details on the team's blog and a few videos . While I have the Mesh bits installed for a few weeks I only recently started using it and was very handy when I wanted to get to some information on one of the Wiki's running at home. I have some...
Beware of Installing Vista SP1!!
If you got a fingerprint reader on your machine and are running Vista then think twice before installing SP1! About 7-8 months ago I got a new tablet ( Lenovo X61 ) which is a pretty sweet machine with Vista pre-installed and all was well until I installed SP1 and then the thing won't even boot. I tried to get into safe mode but no luck; I tried repairing...
<configSections> blues
This stumped me for a while and I was not sure what I was doing wrong. Apparently it seems if you don't have the <configSections> element in your app config file as the first thing then you get a weird error saying "Only one <configSections> element allowed ...." (see example below). The description is misleading - you will see...
.NET 3.5 ThreadPool increases
This is probably old news now, but something which has me concerned as it can cause lots of unseen issues. In .NET 3.5 the default ThreadPool count has been increased ten-fold from 25 to 250 per processor per process ! ThreadPools as we know are quite handy - not only do they help when an application comes under load instead of adding more pressure in a...
WCF Throttling Issues with .NET 3.0 SP1
When you install SP1 for .NET 3.0 by default that changes the throttling settings you might be use to. You could get into a situation where a number of calls are processed and then they stop with the client eventually timing out. To get around this you either explicitly close your connection (which is a good practice in most cases) or change the serviceThrottling...
Parallel Computing with .NET
With all the modern systems using multi-core and multi-processor systems, tapping this new power is an interesting challenge for developers. It also fundamentally starts the shift on how your "average Joe" interacts with a computer and things that he/she expects to be able to. First, check out the " Manycore Shift " paper from Microsoft...
WCF Configuration Schema
WCF's configuration is somewhat complex and the first time you start using it can been daunting. Below is an image of the schema published by Microsoft. You can print this out on a A3 or something and use it has a handy reference.
Vista SDK Dialog
<rant> I was trying to install the Vista SDK and due to my network card having some issues I wanted to reboot. However, before doing that, I had to cancel the SDK setup (as it downloads the bits during the setup process). Now I understand the need to warn the user not to do "close" the setup as the installations is rolling back to previous...
Posted: Sep 29 2007, 11:39 AM by Amit Bahree | with no comments
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.NET "Micro" Framework
No, there is no typo in the title of this post - there is a .NET "Micro" Framework (which is a Microsoft stack in case you were wondering). I had not heard of such a thing until today (but then I have not done any embedded stuff for a while). It is designed to use only a few hundred kilobytes of RAM (512K) and an inexpensive processor (ARM7 and...
Finding out TFS Version
If for some reason you wanted to know what version (and possibly license) of TFS were you running (as a fellow Avanut did in the communities), then check out this tool by Jeff . Speaking of TFS, Brian has published the "final" feature list of what to expect in TFS 2008 including compatibility with VSTS 2005.
Posted: Aug 29 2007, 10:08 AM by Amit Bahree | with no comments
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Vista Performance, Reliability and Stability Hot Fixes
Microsoft has released a couple of hotfixes based on the feedback it has got from various people using the "Error Reporting Service" and sending in dumps. As far as I am aware, as of now these are not pushed via Windows update. The first one is supposed to improve compatibility and reliability of Vista; here are the things it resolves: The screen...
Posted: Aug 25 2007, 11:20 AM by Amit Bahree | with no comments
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SoftGrid available on MSDN
This is probably old news, but is new to me. I logged into MSDN to check something else out and saw that SoftGrid is now available on MSDN. I have had the bits internally for some time, but now anyone with MSDN login can get it. If you have never heard or seen SoftGrid you would be quite amazed how powerful it is. Unlike most virtualization software which...
Inside Vista SP1?
An article is discussing what possibly could be part of Vista SP1 whenever it ships, either later this year or early next year. And on the topic of Vista SP1, another rumor is that Vista SP 1 Beta will be out sometime next week .
Posted: Jul 17 2007, 09:34 PM by Amit Bahree | with no comments
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Big Security Push
As part of "Secure Tuesday" (or whatever MS calls it), there are a number of important and recommended pushes out today from MS. Better hit that Windows Update to get these. Here is what I see on Vista and Office 2007 on one of my laptops:
Posted: Jul 10 2007, 09:28 PM by Amit Bahree | with no comments
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Microsoft eScrum
Microsoft has released eScrum v1.0 which is an add-on for TFS and if you use Scrum then should be of interest to you.
Posted: Jul 02 2007, 10:17 AM by Amit Bahree | with no comments
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Which performs better - WCF vs J2EE?
Microsoft's Connected Systems Division released the results of a benchmark study that showed that applications based on WCF Web services outperformed J2EE applications running on WebSphere (ver 6.1.07) by as much as whopping 285 percent ! Woah! From a cost point of view, the .NET solution is supposed to be one-fifth of the IBM Java solution. For the...
Posted: Jul 01 2007, 09:35 PM by Amit Bahree | with no comments
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Photosynth Preview
Microsoft's Photosynth - you need to see it to believe it ! Absolutely jaw dropping! {via Lap's Moment's of Distraction }
Microsoft Update Catalog (Beta)
Microsoft has the beta version of their update catalog which is a one-stop-shop to get updates, drivers, hotfixes, etc. Although it is aimed for corporate users anyone can use it and it would help those running more than one machine at home to get all the updates once instead of downloading them again and again.
Posted: Jun 19 2007, 10:05 AM by Amit Bahree | with no comments
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Outlook 2007 Performance Fix
Microsoft has released a update (KB933493 for those interested) for Outlook 2007 which helps improve some perf issues when your PST files get very large. I have not seen this myself but then my PST files are approx 1.5gb. More details can be found at Neowin .
Posted: Jun 07 2007, 11:06 AM by Amit Bahree | with no comments
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WPF Application Portfolio
The WPF wiki on Channel 9 has a WPF Application Portfolio - some are cool and some are surprisingly useful. Many of these can be deployed with ClickOnce making it convenient. If you are not on Vista you will need the .NET 3.0 bits.
Vista SP1 detected in the Wild
More details here and screen shots here .
Posted: May 19 2007, 02:01 PM by Amit Bahree | with no comments
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VS Orcas Issues
After a few initial hiccups , I got Orcas installed and up and running but trying to do something simple with it has been challenging. For example if you create a new simple WinForm (I only tried this with c#) and open the default Form in the solution you get the following error: The service Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.Interop.ISelectionContainer already...
Posted: May 19 2007, 01:44 PM by Amit Bahree | with no comments
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Rolled back to Vista x32
After running Vista x64 (since RTM back in November) on my laptop I have finally rolled back to Vista x32. I did not have any driver issues for the most part it was more of incompatibility of some x64 bit app's. Does remind me of this:
Posted: May 19 2007, 01:39 PM by Amit Bahree | with no comments
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