New MCE Cases

I am quite happy with the case I have for my MCE, but I came across the following to new cases, which if I had to buy now I would seriously consider – they are on opposite end of the spectrum and depending on what you need and your budget one might be a better fit than the other.

  1. DIGN X15e Aluminium Enclosure
  2. Enlight 7473 Home Media Chassis

Drool on! 🙂

WinFX Nov CTP support VS 05 RTM

If you read my earlier post you would know you could not get WinFX running with the RTM version of VS 05, but now that MS publicly just released the Nov CTP of the WinFX that is compatible with VS 05 RTM, so you can breathe in peace. 🙂

As always there are three pieces you need to get to, one is the WinFX Runtime itself (2.68 mb), two is the VS 05 WinFX Extensions (2.32 mb), and lastly the SDK (929 mb – yep its big) if you desire. The SDK is just documentation and does not include the runtime.

Office 12 Beta 1 is out

Office 12 Beta 1 was release today, unfortunately due to various NDA clauses, I cannot get into too much detail at this time. But slashdot has the story and there are screen shots of it by pcmag here. All I can say is that this is probably the only time I am more excited about this than when I moved from Lotus Notes to Outlook 98. 🙂

Sony Rootkit DRM Saga Gets Messy

From PCMag, Sony’s incredible gaffe – creating a DRM applet that loads prior to the operating system – has caused an incredible furor. Sony agreed to suspend the program, but that’s not all. Now the rest of the world is piling on. Microsoft now says it will delete the rootkit directly with its anti-spyware program, and it’ll be included in the December version of the Malicious Software Removal Tool. And it looks like the Macintosh, which is also affected by the rootkit, might still be at risk.

I would be very careful of any of the new CD’s I buy – if they are from Sony/BMG then they might have this!

Want to run WinFX Sept. CTP with VS 05 RTM?

Well you can’t. As you might be aware that the .NET runtime are different between Visual Studio 2005 RTM and WinFX Sept CTP build, and the only way you can get this to work together is fall back on Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2005 – which is the only supported  version as of now. On the other hand in about a week or so from now, a new WinFX build is supposed to be publicly released, which can coexist and keeps each other happy. If you can wait for a week I could recommend the latter.