Vista or not to Vista soon

today i have been looking for vista pricing and trying to updgrade my xp to vista and found these interesting arcles...

http://www.engadget.com/2006/11/02/microsoft-changes-vista-eula-to-appease-modders-pirates-still-s/

nice trick by MS

http://www.engadget.com/2006/10/13/vista-license-to-only-allow-one-computer-transfer/

Toronto Launch event for Microsoft Office 2007, Exchange 2007 and Windows Vista

Toronto Launch event for Microsoft Office 2007, Exchange 2007 and Windows Vista
Tuesday December 05 2006 9:00am – 5:00pm

Here are some of the things that I was able to capture. Over all it has been a great event packed with tons of knowledge.

Key note
I found the presenter did an awesome job to simplify some of the key points that are so fundamental to our business "why should customers do business with us?" Very valuable point explained with his 25 years of experiences.

Also he outlined some of the Management IT matrix on:
How strong your value proposition?
How effective your market change?

I found lots of inspiration from the case study about ICICI bank and how they were doing the portfolio management. According to the speaker, it is so amazing their cost structure is only 10% from the other famous Canadian banks. In other words, they are cutting 90% from their cost of operations from other Canadian banks.


Architecture
Mohammad Akif (http://blogs.msdn.com/mohammadakif/) did an awesome job presenting the architecture point of view of these great products (office 2007, .Net 3.0 (http://wcf.netfx3.com/) and Vista).

Other Architecture resources
Microsoft Patterns and Practices Developer Center
http://msdn.microsoft.com/practices/

Architecture cast
Ron Jacobs’s famous architecture cast
http://www.skyscrapr.net/blogs/arcasts/
for Anti-pattern
Ron Jacobs blog on Enter the debate – “Loosey Goosey” an Anti-Pattern? and others
http://blogs.msdn.com/rjacobs/archive/2006/11/12/enter-the-debate-loosey-goosey-an-anti-pattern.aspx

Finally they presented with a demo done by an ISV. Another awesome presentation about how they synergize the Vista and office 2007 (a very good inspiration)

Developer track

Windows presentation foundation

Found the Open XML standard to build and test the .Net 3.0 to be very cool (except the demo presented did not work ;) and especially how the Microsoft Expression Blend (http://blogs.msdn.com/expression/) and Visual studio 2005 can be used (using XAML) to build a very elegant good looking UI with your backend code. This can work with both your thick, thin and smart client and ASP.Net web pages.

Windows Communication foundation
http://wcf.netfx3.com/

Good thing its still backward compatible to our famous Peer to peer protocol
net:psp:// (http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/01/02/netpeers/)

They talked about the Windows RSS platform I am waiting for the presentation to be available online.
Introducing the Windows RSS Platform
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/FeedsAPI/rss/overviews/msfeeds_ovw.asp

Windows Card Space

To test the windows CardSpace
http://sandbox.netfx3.com/

Last but not least to my favorite topics on Windows workflow foundation and MOSS 2007

Ease of web part development is 2 click away compare to the stsadm and install assembly tools for the 2003 versions. (for more I will post this on another blog)

Web part development for MOSS 2007 and WSS V3
Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Tools: Visual Studio 2005 Extensions
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=19f21e5e-b715-4f0c-b959-8c6dcbdc1057&displaylang=en

More on the event

Find the event resource, presentations, pod cast and others posts on the event
http://blogs.msdn.com/cdndevs/
Find other launch resources
http://msdn.microsoft.com/canada/anewday2007/resources/

Virtual Labs

MS Virtual lab
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/traincert/virtuallab/sps2003.mspx

load of stuff for MOSS and WSS V3 from Mark Kruger

This is exactly what i was looking for
http://www.sharepointblogs.com/mkruger/archive/2006/05/25/7570.aspx

Thanks Mark for putting all together

tired of the beeps

from

Disable the Beep in a Virtual Machine on Virtual Server
http://www.tech-recipes.com/windows_tips1014.html

Everytime a system event occurs in Virtual Server, the PC speaker will beep. This will disable it.
You can disable to the beep service if you are tired of listening to your PC speaker during every system event.

Stop the Beep Service #1:


1. Click Start
2. Click Run
3. In the run box type
sc config beep start= disabled



Stop the Beep Service #2:

1. Click Start
2. Click Run
3. In the run box type
net stop beep

Note: Using net stop, the service will restart when the virtual machine is restarted.