Wictor Wilen

It has gone several weeks since the launch of Windows Vista and I am still waiting for a non-beta release of the NVIDIA ForceWare drivers! What are you guys doing? Are you waiting for the release to the general public in January? On the NVIDIA website only drivers for RC2, from october 17th, are available. These drivers do not contain the functionality to fine tune my plasma TV, nor does the standard drivers in Vista, like it can be done in Windows XP.

Microsoft has now released the first Service Pack for Visual Studio 2005 and the Team Foundation Server. The Service Pack comes in several versions, depending on which version of Visual Studio 2005 you have. Here are the downloads: Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite SP1, this updates Standard, Professional and the Team Editions Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server SP1 Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions SP1 What I look forward is that the Service Pack addresses theses issues:

I have created a free web application that converts an RSS feed into an XPS document at http://www.rss2xps.com/. You are free to use it and test it. The application is in beta and will continously improve over the time. I would appriciate any feedback or feeds that will not just work. Update: if the .com address does not work for, you can use http://www.rss2xps.se/ instead.

The Architecture Journal, an online magazine by Microsoft with focus on software architecture, have posted two articles on Domain-Specific Languages, DSL. Domain-Specific Modeling A five page article on what Domain-Specific Languages and Modeling is about and when to use it. Bare Naked Languages or What Not to Model An seven page article on how DSL fits into the software factories methodology.

I previously suggested a better method for getting attributes for an System.Xml.XmlNode in a response to an post by Marcus. Craig Nicholson highlighted in a comment that the code i provided can be even further optimized. private static string GetAttribute(XmlNode node, string name) { XmlElement elm = node as XmlElement; return (elm == null) ? string.Empty : elm.GetAttribute(name); } .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; } .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; }

The Panel is a site, by Microsoft, with projects focused on the Windows Vista Presentation Foundation and XAML. The site will feature applications and source code for these techniques to show how you can design and implement nice applications for Windows and Live Gadgets. Currently there are some Live Gadgets available as well as a nice 3D RSS Reader called UniveRSS. Feeds are displayed as rotating boxes in a “galaxy” in which you can move around. The feeds are retrieved from your Internet Explorer 7 feeds. Register and download it to try it out.

Expression Design was released yesterday as the December 2006 CTP . The major change was a brand new user interface and a lot of missing functionality from earlier previews. According to the Expression team at the Microsoft newsgroups it just seems that the missing functionality in Design is simply gone due to lack of time. Currently I have noticed that the Live Effects are not present in this CTP, but they are documented in the help files. Pixel layers seems to be completely gone and no reference in the help file - so I doubt they will be back :-(

Microsoft today announced huge changes to the Microsoft Expression suite. Expression Studio Expression Studio is a new member of the Expression suite and is a suite of tools for building web sites and Windows client programs and rich media content. The Expression Studio consits of the four core Expression products; Web, Blend, Design and Media. Expression Design Expression Design, formerly known as Graphics Designer, has come in yet another CTP. The big news here is a complete new user interface, at first glance it looks much better than the old one.

On Microsoft Connect I discovered that Microsoft Expression Graphics Designer and Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer has recieved new names. Interactive Designer has become Expression Blend and Graphics Designer Expression Design. Anybody know anything about this?