Wictor Wilen

I initially had some trouble installing Microsoft Silverlight on Windows Vista. It all installed perfectly without any warnings (not during setup nor in the Windows logs), but I could not get the Silverlight 1.0 beta applications to run. I guess that it had something to do with having installed WPF/E betas installed. To get it to work this is what I did… 1: Start a command prompt using elvated privilegies Click the Start button, enter “command”, right click Command Prompt and select Run as administrator and the click Continue in the User Account Control dialog.

Silverlight (formerly known as WPF/E) is heavily discussed right now, and I really like what I see.. I’m not going to dig in deep here instead I recommend you to read Scott Hanselman’s post on the .NET Ecosystem which I find great. He has put it all into context and thats when I get really excited…

Joost has delivered unlimited invites to all the beta testers and I thought I share a few of them. Since I can’t invite people all day long then the first ten to comment on this post will recieve an invitation. Please supply first- and last name and an e-mail address.

Microsoft Expression Design, version 1.0 is now available for a 60 days trial download, was one product I had big hopes for during the CTP cycle, but now it’s just a simple vector editor. Ok, I’ve said this before and this is not what this post is about… If you now use Design to create images and drawings you have the excellent option of saving or exporting your file in numerous formats other than the Expression Design format; such as GIF, JPEG, PNG, Photoshop format etc. You can even export it to a PDF file, which is great for example when you have a sketch you would like to send to your business partner or friend.

The msfeedicon 2.3 application is now available for downloading. msfeedicon is a free plugin for the Windows RSS platform and Internet Explorer 7 which displays notifications whenever one of the subscribed feeds contains updates. Read more about it here. New in this release is: New icons to enhance usability - due to popular demandNow orange icons is shown when there are unread posts and grey if there are no unread posts. New feature, for Windows Vista only, that disables the notifications when presentation mode is on. For example when a PowerPoint slide is running or when your screen saver is on. Notificatons will be queued up and shown when presentation mode is turned off New feature to clear all queued notifications Numerous fixes Download it here.

One of the features of XML Paper Specification, XPS, is the light-weight reader approach and the portable format which Adobe have had the major market share for, and still has, with the PDF format. We all like the approach with having some kind of document format that can be sent to anyone without worrying that they don’t have a reader for the document. I like that there now are competition on this market, even though I really think that Microsoft with XPS have a long road ahead until they reach an acceptable level of XPS users, even with an XPS reader built in to Windows Vista.

I have been running Windows Vista for a few months now and I discover new bugs (and features) every other day. Vista does not seem so stable as it should be. It’s no big blue screens or major application crashes but small annoying stuff like not persisting settings and stuff like that. I earlier wrote about changing the start menu power button, this changed setting reverts to it’s original state about every third boot and then goes back to my changed state on the next boot! I have also written about that icons disappear from the notification area once in a while.

Today I recieved an e-mail from the Swedish Standards Institute, SIS, containing the proposal for the Office Open XML as an ISO standard (ISO/IEC DIS 29500). Office Open XML is today an ECMA standard, TC-45, and ECMA has submitted the standard to the ISO fast-track process Office Open XML. The fast-track means that it can be an international standard by this August, read more on the fast-track process in this post by Brian Jones. I’m definitely going to second to the proposal.

If you have an Ahanix computer case (in my case an MCE 302-SA) with a Samsung VFD and have upgraded your HTPC system to Windows Vista you may have found out that the VFD does not work nor does the drivers available from the Ahanix web site. But to your rescue there is FrontView for MCE by Media Center Magic. FrontView is an alternative to the default drivers for numerous LCD and VFD displays (CrystalFontz, Samsung, SilverStone etc) optimized for Media Center experience and with a highly customizable interface.