Wictor Wilen

NVIDIA is continuing thier path to a great driver for Windows Vista. A week ago they released ForceWare 100.65 which is a WHQL certified driver, it does not contain anything revolutionary but is stable (that’s pretty good enough right now). Yesterday NVIDIA took another step forward with a beta of ForceWare 101.41 which is the driver we all have been waiting for since the launch of Vista, four months ago! Performance is better, flat panel scaling is fixed, reduced flickering when using Aero and lots of more stuff. In a few weeks we should expect a non-beta.

The SDK for Visual Studio 2005 has been released in it’s fourth version, download it here (124 Mb). The Visual Studio 2005 SDK 4.0 contains a number of new features and fixes, read more about them here. One of the interesting new features are the Package Load Analyzer which will help you troubleshoot your package load issues. The DSL tools contains a number of minor bugfixes mostly related to the designer.

Previewing files and attachments in Microsoft Outlook 2007 is one of the new killer features that makes my, and hopefully yours, life easier. When installing Outlook 2007 you will get preview functionality for the standard Microsoft applications and images. Previewing files is also integrated into the Windows Vista Explorer. Tim Heuer (mr double-snake error) has together with Foxit software created a PDF previewer. The PDF Preview Handler is easy to set up and is incredible fast in rendering PDF documents for preview.

Today Windows Update with Windows Ultimate Extras contained new or updated versions of the Hold Em Poker Game and BitLocker and EFS Enhancements. If you check the versions of the files you can see that it’s some kind of update: Hold Em Poker Game New version: 6.0.6000.17034 Previous version: 6.0.6000.17015 But the BitLocker secure key backup utility have the same version, 6.0.6000.16442, but have a different size on the file 1.11 Mb (updated) vs 1.10 Mb (previous).

The last few days I’ve had trouble with the Windows RSS platform and Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista Ultimate. The feeds are updating fine but the notification has been troublesome, for example the feed folders never updated the number of unread items in the folder even though there were unread items in feeds in the folder, look at the image below.

Aaron Brethorst has published part two of his UAC and manifests series, this time he shows us how to embed the manifest into a managed application using Visual Studio 2005.

Here is a list of cheat sheets for the Windows and .NET platform that I frequently use and I think are of great interest. Visual Studio 2005 Keyboard Shortcut References Visual C# 2005 - PDF grayscale | PDF color Visual C++ 2005 - PDF grayscale | PDF color Visual Basic 2005 - PDF grayscale | PDF color SharePoint and Office stuff CSS Reference Chart for SharePoint 2007 (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services v3) CSS Reference Chart for SharePoint 2003 New Office 2007 User Interface - Word | PDF Web and ASP.NET stuff Microsoft AJAX ClientScript Cheat Sheet - ZIP JavaScript Cheat Sheet - PNG | PDF Other stuff

Aaron Brethorst has written a nice tutorial on how to create an UAC aware manifest for you Windows Vista applications by creating a .manifest file. He will follow up this article with information on how to embedd the manifest into a managed executable file.

I previously wrote about that Microsoft is using PDF documents as downloads for product information on microsoft.com, instead of their own XPS format. Yesterday I was happy to see that the Virtual PC site contained a Technical Overview document available for download in XPS format, of course with references to the XPS viewer download and a “What is XPS?” link, and there are no PDF download available. I decided to check back on the some other pages on microsoft.com and found out that there are now not only PDF downloads but also XPS downloads on some. For example the Desktop Optimization Pack page, which previously only had a PDF data sheet download now also have an alternative XPS download.