Wictor Wilen

I start every morning on the commuter train checking out the Technology news on Tailrank, using my HTC TyTN (at http://tech.mobile.tailrank.com/) , to see what has happened in the world of technology during the night. Most of the cool stuff happens when it is night in Sweden… But now the technology news has been down for days, it has happened in the past that it has been down for a day or so, but now I have not been able to read the news on Tailrank since monday. No news? Don’t think so!

The MSDN site is currently changing how it looks and works, go check it out. Apart from the actual change of colors and layout the new tabbed interface is the biggest user interface change. Navigation is far much better with this and with the breadcrumbs. The search is the most improved feature, now with auto-complete and more indexed content. The MSDN library tree seems to be much faster, really nice for users (like me) who uses the online help instead of the full DVD install of MSDN library (I always forget to update it when a new DVD arrives). But it is still reloading the whole page and tree for every click in the content on the right!

To this site: www.wictorwilen.se! This site and blog has been up an running for a year now and I’ve had a lot of fun with it. I’m really looking forward to the next one! The number of subscribers is constantly climbing and the highlight for me has been the msfeedicon application and the Dissecting XPS series. You, the readers and web searchers, have these top five articles: Add Office 2007 icons to SharePoint 2003 Windows Live Writer 1.0 beta and Metaweblog API McAfee Security Center installation sucks Watch DVDs in VIDEO_TS folders on Vista Media Center Home page of msfeedicon Thanks to Dotnetpark who is hosting this and who have a great support! Only wish the offer .NET 3.0 hosting soon!

Delay has done it - a Silverlight “proof-of-concept” XPS viewer! Head over to his post and try it out, this might be the start of the cross-platform XPS viewer that we all long for…

Chris Lanier, Media Center MVP, just blogged about a new website which collects information on the components of Media Center PC’s, called Media Center Components. The aim of the website is to collect information on which Media Center components that play nice together. Take your time to fill out the form and help building a nice database for Media Center PC’s.

This part of the Dissecting XPS series will focus on some XML Paper Specification tools that are available as of today. The success of XPS, vs PDF and others, are really depending on the number of supported devices, operating systems and tools. Right now the XPS support is limitied in applications outside the Microsoft Windows sphere, but there are plans for other operating systems. (Maybe Silverlight will boost this with the CoreCLR).

DataViz have released a new version of DocumentsToGo for Windows Mobile with support for viewing Office 2007 files (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx etc). This is great, I have not used DocumentsToGo since my Sony-Ericsson p910i days but instead relied on the Office Mobile suite embedded in Windows Moblie 5. The current version only supports viewing of Office 2007 documents as of today, but if you purchase the application you will get free upgrades and the coming versions will support creation and editing of Office 2007 documents.

This part of the Dissecting XPS series will introduce the XPS parts of the Microsoft.NET 3.0 framework and where you should look to get started creating XML Paper Specification documents. Windows Presentation Foundation, WPF The XPS classes is a part of the Windows Presentation Foundation, WPF, and is found under the System.Windows.Xps namespace. The Open Packaging Convention classes, used to manipulate the packages is found under the System.IO.Packaging namespace. To get you started with creating XPS documents with the .NET 3.0 Framework you should read the January 2006 article in the MSDN Magazine by Bob Watson which explains it all. It contains everything you need to know from reading to writing to signing XPS documents.

msfeedicon version 2.4 is now available for download. This version does not contain any new functionality only some corrected bugs from version 2.3. Windows XP users are highly recommended to install this new version. Read more and download it at msfeedicon home page.