.NET From India

.NET Micro

Microsoft just announced a .NET framework version aimed at embedded devices smaller than a Pocket PC or SmartPhone, currently called .NET Micro.

Using this you can develop applications for these devices using Visual Studio and .NET. The beta of the toolkit is now available to partners and ISVs.

(via Pocket PC Thoughts)

Google Videos in Windows Media Player

This blog post on Everything About Google Video talks about some corrupt header that Google has added to google video (.gvi) files that seems to break only WMP. All other players seem to ignore this bit and play the video fine.

Wasn't "Do no evil" supposedly Google's principle?? Maybe that is not the case for Google video?

(via Totally innocense)

Is the number of Spinal Tap Fans increasing??

My colleague Ankur pointed out an interesting set of pictures at the Microsoft and nVidia web sites. To understand why I found these funny, you need to have seen a film called “This is SpinalTap”, a rockumentory about a hard rock band called “Spinal Tap”.

In one of the famous scenes in this film (Watch this Scene in YouTube), one of the band members takes the interviewer around to show their new amp, which can go up to 11, instead of the normal 10. This scene has a famous one-liner “But this goes up to eleven”.

So I almost laughed out loud when I saw two pictures that reminded me of this at two different sites on the same day. The Microsoft picture seems to have disappeared now, but the nVidia one is still there at their home page.

Blog Posts with Word 2007 B2TR

I did post about the new Technical Refresh that I installed last week. I only got time over the weekend to check out if there are any additional features. The main new feature is that, now you can create a Blog post out of the File->New menu. Some of the dialog boxes like the "Password Prompt" dialog has been cleaned up a little bit and has a correct caption now.

The support for Categories has been added, but then as of now Word is unable to retrieve categories from Typepad MetaApi provider.

Now you are able to insert SmartShapes/Shapes, but they do not get rendered into HTML on publishing. Not sure if this will be part of the feature set on release, but if it is, then it would be a very good reason to use Word for posting to your blog.

Also Word does not seem to support RSD (“Really Simple Discoverability”) as yet.

Symantec, Adobe Complain Over Vista

Looks like both Adobe and Symantec has complained to EU about the new features in Vista that will be competing with their existing products. I am really quite amused.

I at least understand Symantec's case; they are offering a security service (I would consider AV also as a service as you need updates and you buy a subscription), while MS is providing an competing service in OneCare. And with Defender, they also may lose out on the anti-spyware/security software business.

But Adobe?? They have a monopoly in the document creation and printing market and their standard is the defacto standard and they go to the monopolies commission!! And MS has not integrated PDF into their OS (Yes it is available in Office, but then I would assume, you cannot create a secure PDF doc similar to what Adobe Acrobat can with Office). Also PDF is no way threatened as of now, and most probably more people will use PDF since they can create basic PDFs from Office. Yes, the number of people buying Acrobat may go down a little bit, but then if you are a serious user of PDFs, then Office is not going to be enough, you will still need Acrobat.

Microsoft has created a new standard and it is not even widely used as of now (And as of now, XPS is only supported on Vista and in other Windows platforms. I don’t see any implementations for UNIX/Mac/Linux as yet). Before XPS does become a more widely used standard, Adobe has more than enough time to be create a better format/product that will still be way ahead.

Interesting JS trick

My friend and co-MVP Sanjay Vyas actually pointed out this trick when we were chatting today morning. I am not sure where he got it from, but it is kind of cool.

The idea is to go to any site (say www.microsoft.com) in IE (have not tried it with FF or Opera though), and then type the following script in the address bar:

 

javascript:R=0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300; y4=200;x5=300; y5=200; DI=document.images; DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0; i<DIL;i++){DIS=DI[ i ].style; DIS.position='absolute';DIS.left=Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+x5;DIS.top=Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5}R++}setInterval('A()',5); void ( 0 )

And also try just keeping the focus on the addressbar and click enter multiple times.

Office 2007 Beta 2 TR – First things you will notice

Well most of the changes seem to be visual. The splash screens have changed and so have the application icons. Some of the icons in the Ribbons seem to have changed. I am not sure what else have changed, but I can see some extra options now being available from the blog posting mode.

I will post more as I start working with the newer build.

(Posted from Microsoft Word 2007 Beta 2 TR)

Office 2007 Beta 2 TR

A new update for Office 2007 is out now, called Office 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh. It is something like a service pack for the Beta 2 build and extends the validity of the Beta 2 build till we can see an RC1. To install this you will need to have Beta 2 installed first. Also, it is free to download (You dont have to pay the $2 download fee for this, as of now) from the Office Preview Site.

It does take a long time to install and the setup interface is just a progress bar. So make sure you get it started when you go out for lunch..:-)

Atlas ceases to exist

So the exciting news is out. Atlas will go live by end of this year with a core set of libraries and then get features added on to it as it matures. So you will not need to wait till Orcas ships to really go to production with Atlas.

And of course, then Atlas as a name ceases to exist and you will be talking either of Microsoft Ajax Toolkit or ASP.NET Ajax extensions.

(Posted from Microsoft Word 2007 Beta)

Browser Shield!!

Microsoft Research has come up with a prototype of what they call "BrowserShield"

Researchers at the Redmond, Wash., company have completed work on a prototype framework called BrowserShield that promises to allow IE to intercept and remove, on the fly, malicious code hidden on Web pages, instead showing users safe equivalents of those pages.

From the article it looks like this is a framework which can be updated with addins, which can protect you against specific attacks. And since this runs before IE gets the HTML, it can modify the HTML that gets delivered to IE. So they may in the future send out updates for BrowserShield, before they actually release a patch, when a critical flaw is found in IE.