Wictor Wilen

This new year starts great! Virtual PC 2007 is now available as a release candidate on Microsoft Connect. Usage of wireless network cards is now on by default and audio works in Vista.

Happy new year to all of you and thanks to all readers of my blog. The number of readers is increasing and I hope it will continue on the other side of the bell tolls tonight. See you in 2007!

I have now updated msfeedicon to version 1.3 after a few days of running and some feedback. The major issue corrected in this version is that the application looses connection to the Windows RSS platform after a few hours of running, this problem is in all previous versions. You can find the new version here.

Microsoft yesterday released the second beta of the Microsoft XML Paper Specification Essentials Pack 1.0 (build 5715). The pack contains the following: XML Paper Specification (XPS) Viewer XPS metadata and thumbnail handlers for Windows Explorer XPS rich-preview provider XPS IFilter You need Windows XP SP2 or later and the Microsoft Core XML Services 6.0 to be installed on your system.

I had just finished msfeedicon 1.0 when I decided to make an update, version 1.1, with some functionality I would like to see and some bugfixes. This 1.1 update contains: New feature: Refresh feeds option in the context menu New feature: greenish icons when the RSS platform downloads/refreshes feeds Update: better icons Bug fix: correct number of unread posts when a feed is removed You can download the update here, hope you like it…

For a while I have been annoyed that there is no good notification in Internet Explorer 7 when you have unread posts in your subscribed feeds. You have to have the Favorites Center opened to be notified of any feed updates, which may take up useful space on your screen. Therefore I created a small utility that takes advantage of the Windows RSS platform and shows an icon in the system tray which notifies you of any unread feed posts - called msfeedicon.

A few months back I showed how you could add the new Office 2007 icons to a SharePoint 2003 or Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 site. The Right Stuff has made a complete post on how to add the complete set of icons for the different Office 2007 applications. The post also contains a few different sets of Office 2007 icons so you can choose the one that suits your site best.

Today I start my two weeks vacation and I thought I should summarize this year. The year of 2006 has been characterized, for me, as the year of Betas and Technology Previews. I have been trying to involve myself as much as possible in the all the goodies flowing out of Redmond. Microsoft has released numerous amount of new applications and upgrades. Internet Explorer 7 The new version of Internet Explorer is the application this year that will have most impact in the short run on users. More standardized and a slicker interface with support of for example blogs.

 Here is a small tip to all of you that have DVD movies on your hard drives, like me. I have copied most of our kids DVD’s to the hard drives so there is no need to change DVD every fifth minute and as all of you with kids know - they are not that gentle to the DVD discs nor the cradle of the player.