Marc Gregoire’s Blog

Microsoft has released a white paper for Visual Studio 2010 licensing which provides an overview of the complete Visual Studio 2010 product line. The paper also gives a number of example deployment scenarios and the licensing requirements for those.

Client editions in the Visual Studio 2010 product line include:

• Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Premium with MSDN
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Professional with MSDN
• Microsoft Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 with MSDN

(Visual Studio 2010 products can be purchased without an MSDN subscription in certain channels.)

Server products in the Visual Studio 2010 product line include:

• Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010
• Microsoft Visual Studio Lab Management 2010

Volume licensing customers who need a definitive guide to licensing terms and conditions should reference the Microsoft Licensing Product Use Rights (PUR) and applicable licensing agreements. For retail customers, the license terms are specified in the End User Licensing Agreement (EULA) included with the product.

Microsoft has just released a beta version of Office 2010.

The following programs are available in this beta version:

• Word
• PowerPoint
• Outlook
• Excel
• OneNote
• Access
• Publisher
• InfoPath
• SharePoint Workspace
• Communicator

Separately available beta programs are:

• Microsoft Visio 2010
• Microsoft Project 2010

Get all the details.

I’m a big fan of Axialis IconWorkshop. A while ago I wrote a small review of it which you can find here.

It seems Axialis is having a special promotion this weekend. From Black Friday until Cyber Monday you get 50% discount on all products. Find out more.

Apparently the pre-order of Windows 7 went extremely well. According to Amazon UK, they sold more Windows 7 pre-orders in the first 8 hours of its release than Vista did during it’s entire pre-order period.

According to Brian McBride, Amazon UK MD:

“The launch of Windows 7 has superseded everyone’s expectations, storming ahead of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows as the biggest grossing pre-order product of all-time at Amazon.co.uk, and demand is still going strong. Over the past three months, only Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol has sold more copies than Windows 7, which is an incredible achievement for a software product.”.

Tomorrow is the official launch date of Windows 7

I just came across an interesting blog post.

Apparently, Windows 7 comes with several regional themes which include wallpapers from Canada, Australia, South Africa, and Great Britain. You can easily activate those themes following the procedure in the following blog post.

Access Hidden Regional Themes in Windows 7

The Visual C++ 2010 Beta 1 release contains the Windows 7 Beta SDK. For Direct2D and DirectWrite there were some breaking changes between the beta version of the SDK and the RC version of the SDK. So if you want to use those new Direct2D and DirectWrite APIs, you definitely need the latest Windows 7 RC SDK. There are some manual steps involved in getting that to work with Visual C++ 2010. For detailed explanation please check out Using the Windows 7 RC SDK in Visual C++ 2010 Beta 1 on the Visual C++ Team Blog.

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 and .NET FX 4 Beta 1 have been released and is available for download if you have an MSDN subscription. The beta 1 will be publicly released very soon. Check out http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010/default.mspx for more information.

It seems that Microsoft Windows 7 is on track to be released in time for the holiday season of 2009. At the TechEd North America 2009 in Los Angeles, Bill Veghte said:

Microsoft is committed to ensuring that IT professionals and developers continue to have the platform and technologies to drive maximum value and business results. Getting the most out of IT investments is even more important in today’s economy.

and

With early RC testing and extensive partner feedback we’ve received, Windows 7 is tracking well for holiday availability.

Read the full press release.

A friend of mine pointed me to EasyBCD to easily make changes to the Windows Vista Bootloader. This is expecially useful if you have installed Windows 7 in a VHD for example. If you want to remove your VHD installation, simply delete the VHD file and then use EasyBCD to remove the Windows 7 boot entry from the Bootloader.

I downloaded the freshly released Windows 7 Release Candidate from MSDN and was thinking on how to test it. First I thought to install it in a virtual machine, however, that means I would not be able to test with Aero enabled. A friend of mine suggested to use a new feature in the Windows 7 bootloader that allows you to boot an operating system installed inside a VHD (Virtual Hard Disk Image). On his blog he explains the steps involved in getting this to work. I followed his steps and everything went without a hitch and Windows 7 was up and running in no time, including Aero

The benefit of using a VHD is that you don’t need to repartition your drives. The VHD is just 1 big file but when booting from the VHD, everything looks and feels as if the operating system was installed on its own physical drive/partition.

I did encounter one anomaly while using Windows 7 booting from VHD. The Windows Experience Index cannot be computed. When asking Windows 7 RC to compute the WEI score, it gives an error saying that it cannot properly assess hard drive speed, but other than that, everything seems to be working smoothly.

Over the coming days I will keep testing Windows 7 RC. One thing I stumbled upon today is that Windows 7 RC seems to have built-in support for playing XVID movies. It even shows thumbnails for XVID movies in the Windows Explorer.

The Windows 7 Release Candidate has been made available to MSDN and Technet subscribers. It will be available to the general public on May 5th. This RC will expire on June 1 2010. There is also a dedicated forum for Windows 7 at http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/category/w7itpro

A few days ago, my Windows Vista on my notebook started to have the KSOD (blacK Screen Of Death) syndrome. This syndrome is that after typing your username and password on the login screen, you are presented with a black screen and a mouse, nothing else. When searching on the internet for solutions I found out that quite a few people experienced the same issue with all kinds of different solutions. I tried some suggestions like System Restore, file system check, registry changes etc etc, but nothing was working for me.

When you are presented with a KSOD, you can try to press the left SHIFT button a few times to trigger the sticky keys feature of windows. This will popup a window that contains a link. You can then click this link and from there you are able to launch different applications. Of course, if you disabled sticky keys, you are out of luck…

After wasting almost a whole day on trying everything I could think of, I stumbled upon a blog where they said that it might be related to the eventlog. To test this, I wanted to disable the eventlog. Unfortunately you cannot disable the eventlog from a running Windows because some other services are relying on it. I booted into “safe mode with command prompt”, because normal safe mode would also give me the KSOD. I disabled the eventlog and rebooted the machine and to my surprise everything worked

The next step was to delete all eventlog files from C:\Windows\System32\Winevt\logs, switch on the eventlog again, reboot and everything was again working

With the release of the first beta of Windows 7, obviously I had to download it and try it out. I tested it on an older P4 2GHz with only 512MB of memory. I normally run Vista on that machine and 512MB of memory is a little bit on the low side for Vista. When Windows 7 first started I immediately noticed how much smoother and how much more responsive everything feels compared to Vista on the same box. I was really impressed.

In this post I want to explain a new maximizing feature that is currently in the Windows 7 beta. Suppose you start with a Wordpad window in the middle of your screen. On a side note, you can also see that Wordpad finally received a GUI update and now includes a ribbon.

Now, grab the Wordpad window and move it to the far left of your screen. Windows 7 will draw a translucent rectangle with the size of half your screen.

When you now release your mouse button, Windows 7 will maximize the window to half your screen as in the following screenshot.

This feature is a pretty useful one in my opinion, especially on widescreen monitors that are getting more and more common.

Axialis IconWorkshop allows you to easily create modern, great looking icons for your projects on Windows, Macintosh and Unix. It creates Windows icons up to 256×256 for Windows Vista and Macintosh icons up to 512×512 for Mac OS 10.5. Unix uses PNG icons. It also allows you to create image strips which can be used for your toolbars. Read the rest of this entry »

The Windows XP Service Pack 3 was released a week ago, however it had a compatibility issue with Microsoft Dynamic RMS. Because of this, the service pack was brought offline again.

Now Microsoft has fixed the issue and SP3 is again available for download. The Dynamic RMS issue is solved with a hotfix. The recommended way of installing SP3 is by using Windows Update, which will download only what you need, saving bandwidth. That way it’s typically around 70 MB.

If you need to install SP3 on multiple machines, you can download an installation package which is around 316 MB. If you are running Microsoft Dynamic RMS, it is recommended to first install the Dynamic RMS hotfix from here.  SP3 can be downloaded from here.

SP3 contains more than 1000 hotfixes and patches. Some new features are also included but which according to Microsoft “do not significantly change customers’ experience with the operating system”.

Microsoft released Windows Vista Service Pack 1 on March 18 in English, French, Spanish, German, and Japanese. You can get it from Windows Update or the Microsoft Download Center. In April, Windows Update will begin to download SP1 automatically but will only install it after explicit agreement of the user. In April, SP1 will also be available in the remaining 31 languages.

On some systems Windows Vista Service Pack 1 might not be available for installation from Windows Update and might not be offered by Automatic Updates. This can have several causes. If this is happening for you, check KB948343.

A list of all changes/fixes in SP1 can be found here.

Cyberlink PowerDVD was one of the first DVD players on the market and is still considered by many to be one of the best. The latest version is version 7 which I’m reviewing today. Installation went smooth on both Windows XP and Windows Vista.

Most people cannot be bothered to spend money on a DVD player because most of them are happy with the DVD player software that they got when they bought their PC. However, once you have used PowerDVD 7 you simply do not want to go back anymore. PowerDVD offers so much more. The deinterlacing quality of PowerDVD is much better than you get with most of those pre-installed DVD players. On top of that, the latest version adds support for high definition formats like MPEG-4 H.264 and WMV-HD and supports a wide range of audio formats like DTS 5.1, Dolby Pro Logic IIx, DTS-ES Discrete and more. Unfortunatly if you want to experience DTS-ES Discrete, DTS Neo:6 or SRS TruSurround XT you will need to buy the advanced audio pack. However, even though version 7 supports the high definition video formats, it does not support playing movies directly from Blu-ray or HD-DVD discs. For this you need PowerDVD 7 Ultra.

The Say-It-Again option allows you to quickly jump back a few seconds in case you missed something. The Read-It-Clearly feature allows you to change the position of subtitles. For notebook users, an interesting feature is the See-It-All feature. This monitors the battery level of your notbook and will automatically speed up the movie to make sure you can see the entire movie before your battery runs out. Any speed increase between 1% and 20% is actually not bothering anything.

The default interface of PowerDVD 7 looks pretty clean and modern as can be seen on the screenshot. In my opinion the new GUI is better than the previous versions.

The price might seem a bit high but you get a very good and complete DVD playback solution supporting the latest in video and audio formats.