Vista SP1 RC is now available for public testing

Microsoft has recently released the previously closed trial Vista SP1 Release Candidate 1 as a publicly available "Refresh" trial, which you can download from here.

This service pack is a collection of all the cumulative bug fixes and product enhancements to date and SP1 for Vista represents substantial progress in the reliability and performance of Vista machines and should signal an uptake in the adoption rates for Vista across the business market.

Whilst we usually recommend waiting for the official releases of hotfixes and service packs; if you are in a position facing low performance or reliability, the service pack is available now should you wish to test.

The Windows Vista SP1 RC Refresh is time limited to June 30th 2008, although you can uninstall it and install the Vista SP1 release when it becomes available later this quarter.

I suspect that people will either stay on Windows XP SP3 or now move to Vista SP1 with a few consumers moving to Mac OS and businesses waiting for Vista SP1. Looking back in time, I remember troubles with Windows XP - an operating system which only came into demand a year or so after its release and was only taken up en-mass with the release of XP’s SP1.

For me, I’m rather hoping that Microsoft will finally see sense and get around to slipstreaming common SATA drivers onto the Windows Vista installation DVD ROM images and we can finally leave floppy disk drives to a well deserved retirement!

Come on Microsoft - release Vista SP1, Server 2008 and SQL 2008 already!

.NET Source Code now available for VS2008 users

Last October, Microsoft promised the release of source code for .NET developers to download and browse the .NET Framework and hence debug their applications built on top of the framework more easily.

Previously, when debugging .NET code, only the granularity of a method call or object instantiation was available. Now the call stack can load the symbols to let you step into the .NET code for almost all the .NET classes and methods in your application. This ability is only available for Visual Studio 2008 users.

To get started, either download and install the symbols directly from Microsoft (location to be announced), or enable automatic symbol download from Microsoft by providing the http location within the Options dialog as shown below:

It is now possible to debug .NET applications much further than was previously possible.

However not all the namespaces of the .NET Framework are available to debug in this way, and the .NET Compact Framework still isn’t (at all). So there’s still plenty of work to do. So thankyou, .NET Framework team, and keep up the good work!

Thank you to Richard D for the heads up on this news

Sources:

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/01/16/net-framework-library-source-code-now-available.aspx
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/10/03/releasing-the-source-code-for-the-net-framework-libraries.aspx

Play all your media from anywhere on the Internet for free with WebGuide for Windows Home Server!

Microsoft have recently released a free add-in for Microsoft’s popular Windows Home Server software which lets you access your home server remotely across the internet, and play movies, music or pictures from your media library.

Products to access media remotely through the Internet are not new, Winamp has their own branded version of the open-source Orb solution, and there are numerous other small shareware applications for distributing media. However, this is the first addon to explicitly support the new Windows Home Server and it supports one extra facility that existing products for Windows Home Server do not - scheduling of TV content.

Using this addon, you can browse the TV listings and remotely schedule TV listings to be automatically recorded. Something which you then can of course watch the recordings back again later. Slingbox does something similar, but it’s not free and doesn’t integrate with Windows Home Server and your existing Windows Home Server library. Although I don’t think it will be long before SlingMedia have this issue covered. I think many home prosumer users will be looking to consolidate all the content across their home systems under the Windows Home Server banner. GB-PVR, the open source solution also provides remote access and remote scheduling, but the configuration and setup interface is not as neat as WebGuide.

If you’ve been reading my post on building your own Windows Home Media Server, then this addon would sit very well alongside Windows Home Server

More information:
http://www.asciiexpress.com/webguide/homeserver.aspx
http://blogs.technet.com/homeserver/archive/2008/01/10/updated-version-of-webguide.aspx http://wegotserved.co.uk/2008/01/10/add-in-webguide-for-windows-home-server/
http://winbeta.org/comments.php?id=13475&catid=1&highlight=webguide

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