Wictor Wilen

I found an update to the Microsoft XPS Essentials Pack on Microsoft Download Center today. It does not look like an update but on Vista you will get an Windows Update (.msu) package and when I run it it says that it does not apply to my machine. The download link points to the same link that the Essentials Pack was available on before, but it has a new published date (6/19/2007).

NiXPS v1.0 has been released and is now available as a 30 day trial or for purchase. It’s available for the Windows and Mac OS/X platform. NiXPS is an XML Paper Specification, XPS, tool which can be used for inspection and manipulation XPS documents. The main features are extraction of pages, fonts and images from the document, merging of documents and find and replace. The other major feature is an inspection tool for examining the XPS document structure and XML as well as editing the XML.

Yet another It sucks post! Yesterday I installed the Apple Safari browser on my Windows Vista machine. I thought that it would be nice to use the fastest web browser in the universe to do some application/site compatibility testing without having to have a Mac OS/X system. Yes it is a beta, so I won’t complain about all the bugs and rendering problems (it might of course be the sites I’m testing but in some cases I don’t think so) - I will instead complain on the ugly look and appearance of it.

Windows Home Server, WHS, is a great addition to the Windows Server family, a product that I have wanted to have for a really long time. It will really help me connect my machines at home and provide great features to the connected home and make me share my digital media easier between Media Centers, laptops etc. I have hoped that I could turn my current Media Center, a quite powerful machine, into a Home Server later this year once it is time to build my own new Media Center. I would like to make a clean install of Windows Home Server on that old (2 1/2 years) machine after picking WHS up from my local store.

My favorite Windows Explorer replacement has finally been released in it’s 7th version. Total Commander, which much remainds of the classic old Norton Commander, is a fast and intuitive file and folder manager by Christian Ghisler. It performs much faster than Explorer and has nice built-in features such as packing (ZIP, RAR…), FTP support, multi-renaming, quick-access to common directories… you name it! Version 7 contains a number of new features and fixes, read more about them in my previous post on the subject or on the Total Commander home page.

I previously blogged about the lack of Office 2007 file format support in Windows Mobile 6. Today Jason Langridge revealed that you will not longer need any third party application for this - but instead Microsoft will provide an update to Microsoft Office Mobile 2007 with support for the new Office 2007 file formats (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx). A free update will be available for Windows Mobile 6 and 5 devices and all new shipped devices will have it in the ROM, all starting in Q3 of 2007.

The Windows Media Center Components Database is now live! MCE components is a site which targets Windows Media Center self-builders with help to choose components and to see how the components work together. To help build the database you can add your own system and grade it to help others out. There are currently about 100 systems entered into the database and it will keep growing, as long as you help out. When you are adding your system you will rate it, on a scale 1 to 5, in stability, noise and performance. You can also enter your Windows Experience Index stats, if you are using Vista.

Microsoft has released a CTP for Microsoft SDK for Open XML Formats, which can be downloaded here. The SDK contains a strongly typed library, built on top of System.IO.Packaging namespace, for creating documents based on the Open XML Format. Great, now we don’t have to use the System.Xml.XmlWriter to create Office 2007 documents. Here is a sample on how to write out the number of characters in a Word 2007 document: XmlDocument extendedProperties = new XmlDocument(); using (WordprocessingDocument wordDocument = WordprocessingDocument.Open("document.docx", false)) { ExtendedFilePropertiesPart part = wordDocument.ExtendedFilePropertiesPart; extendedProperties.Load(part.GetStream()); } XmlNodeList characters = extendedProperties.GetElementsByTagName("Characters"); Console.WriteLine(characters.Item(0).InnerText); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, “Courier New”, courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; overflow-x:visible;border:0px} .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }

You probably already have read all about the new beta of Windows Live Writer. I thought I should write some lines about some of the new really nice features. Linking WLW contains an improved linking interface. You can easily link to your previous posts or to a link in the Link Glossary, using the Link to button_,_ which allows you to write down (remember) a number of links that you often use in your blog posts. When you create a new link you can check the Add to link glossary checkbox and the link will be added to your glossary. The glossary is also accessible from the Tools->Options dialog.