Wictor Wilen

Microsoft offers a number of VHD downloads at Microsoft Download Center. You can find ready to go/test virtual hard disk images of: Windows Server 2003 R2 Exchange 2007 and Microsoft Live Communications Server 2007 ISA Server 2006 SQL Server 2005 Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 Virtual PC demonstration The Dynamics CRM demo VHD contains a complete server with Windows Server 2003, Active Directory, SQL Server 2005, Exchange Server 2003, Microsoft CRM and Visual Studio 2005.

The new Office document format present in the new Microsoft Office 2007 suite is completely new and open and based on XML. This opens up a lot of possibilites for us developers; there is now an easy way to create your own Word or Excel documents from an application. The file format used is called Ecma Office Open Xml format. Previously it has been very difficult or expensive to provide the customers with nice Word or Excel output from an application. For example when delivering an Excel sheet from a website it has been done by creating a table in html and then sending it to the browser with the correct content type (application/vnd.ms-excel), the same thing for Word. But when it came to embedding images or attachments or creating advanced layouts (headers or footers) it has been troublesome. It can be done; for example I created a web application that had a Word document as output, nicely formatted using the mht format.

I have a lot of problem with comment spam on the blog as well as spamming on the trackbacks and the problem is spread widely over the blogging world. A lot of you turn off comments or have registration or other methods to get rid of the comment spamming. LinkSleeve (SLV - Spam Link Verification) is a link spam solution that checks a text for well-known URL’s in a text and tells if it contains any known spam addresses. This service is provided via an XML-RPC service without any licensing.

I have made some updates to this site, the most noticeable are the new addresses (URL’s) to the posts which now should be more descriptive than just an id-number. The permalinks in the feeds should be the same though. If you notice anything annoying or wrong, please leave a comment.

RSS 2 PDF is a nice web application that turns an RSS into a PDF file, which can be useful when you would like to store a feed. The result is a PDF document with bookmarks to all posts in the feed. Try it out for my feed here.

A few days ago Microsoft officially released a modified Royale theme in black. The Royale theme is the one used in Windows XP Media Center. Now there is an updated variant of that theme called Zune desktop theme, download it here. This theme looks really great and matches the black and silver themes in the new Office 2007 and the default theme for Windows Media Player 11.

When developing applications and/or integrations for Visual Studio 2005 with the Visual Studio 2005 SDK, for example using the DSL Tools, the testing and debugging is done using a Visual Studio Instance that are running with a special registry hive, instead of the normal so you don’t mess up your normal Visual Studio operations. After a while, when you have created a lot of testing applications the Visual Studio interface is bloated with messed up toolbars, menus and templates you will need clear this experimental hive. Fortunatley the VS SDK comes with a utility called VsRegEx.exe which will reset the hive to the original state or to the Last Known Good state.

It’s snow in Sweden to everyones surprise! Yesterday Stockholm in Sweden received a few centimeters of snow and the quicksilver reached a few knots below zero degrees Celsius and the whole town went crazy. Cars in the ditches, cars in the wrong lane, busses burning rubber on the ice, frozen train switches…you name it! The thing that amazes me is that it comes as a surprise every year, we have been having snow and winter here in Sweden for the last 10.000 years!

The comments on this blog should now be working. I had some glitch in my spam detection, which should now be fixed.