.NET From India

New Keyboard and Mouse Optimized for Win8 from Microsoft

MS Hardware just announced a new Keyboard optimized for Windows 8 called Sculpt Comfort Keyboard. You can read more about the announcement at the Microsoft site. This keyboard apart from special keys to access Windows 8 features like Charms and Action bars also has a split Spacebar that has both Spacebar and backspace keys.

This keyboard is listed in the MS Store at $59.95 currently and so of today is marked "Coming Soon". MS Store also seems to have related Sculpt Touch Mouse that is also marked "Coming Soon" listed for $49.95.

The new Office 365 with Office 2013

Microsoft has announced the pricing details of the new version of Office 365 updated with Office 2013. The details of the announced pricing and various editions is available at The new Office 365 subscriptions for consumers and small businesses.

The package that got me interested is the new consumer package. Officially called the Office 365 Home Premium, it is aimed at the end consumer and packages the use of Office 365 in 5 PCs simultaneously. This is great for households with multiple computer and multiple family members using Office. So instead of buying 5 licenses, you can just buy one Home Premium license and your whole family can use the use Office on up to 5 PCs/tablets (or Macs).

The currently announced pricing is approx. $100 per year (yearly plan), which means, it should cost approx. ₹5000/year (even if MS does not give a discounted pricing for India) or so when it does get released in India. This seems to be a good pricing for 5 instances of Office and one that can be used by all members of the family.

Features of Office Home Premium

• A personalized Office experience on up to 5 PCs or tablets.
• Powerful new versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Publisher, and Access.
• Streaming full versions of Office applications with Office on Demand (PC running Windows 7 or 8 and Internet connection required). (This can be a problem for Indian scenarios as this means a 600MB+ download on each machine)
• Coming soon, with the full release of Office 365 Home Premium:
  • Talk to anyone using Skype, including 60 minutes of free international calls every month to landlines in over 40 countries and to cell phones in 7 countries. (Skype account required. Excludes special, premium and non-geographic numbers.)
  • Get an additional 20 GB of SkyDrive online storage for easy access and sharing of your documents.
  • Office for Mac

Office 2013 Preview–Install Guide

Office 2013 preview is out and the installation procedure is completely different from previous office releases. The easy to find installer is integrated into Office 365 and uses an AppV based technology called Click to Run. Basically you get a kind of a web installer and then the required bits are downloaded and installed. The attempt seems to be to make the installation process simple for the consumer, but then it also takes away your flexibility from an installation perspective.

Some problems you may encounter:

1. The default installation procedure downloads the 32-bit installer. If you have any component of the x64 Office 2010, then this will not work. You will have to choose the other install options link and ask for the x64 installer instead. This is quite easy to find.

2. The installer will automatically install only to the C:\. If you have a small C partition and want to install somewhere else, sorry no-go. I have not yet found a way to make the click to run installer install to any other path as yet.

This product SKU seems to be called the Office 365 Pro. Also you need to be connected to the internet the whole time the installation runs and it does download a lot of data and so the connection better be good (almost 1.2 GB when I checked). If you have multiple home computers, you can use the click to run deployment tool to download all the files and install it from a network share rather than go on the internet.

The problem seems to be that the click to run setup is not yet very stable and if it crashes or hangs, it leave a lot of stuff behind and then restarting the install can lead to further failures and so you basically cannot install Office 2013. This is what happened to me.

The steps to manually uninstall Office 2013 are not easy to find. I uninstalled via control panel, but still a lot of stuff was left behind. The manual uninstall steps are below:

(Original Link: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_home-office_install/unable-to-uninstall-office-365-home-preview/86bd3242-f137-4a0b-ba22-94867d82b7c2)

1. Remove the published component registration for C2R a. Locate the package folder by looking at: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\15.0\ClickToRun -> PackageFolder b. Delete the C2RManifest*.xml files from <PackageFolder>\root\Integration. c. Run the integrator with the /U command from elevated cmd: <PackageFolder>\root\Integration\integrator.exe /U 2. Remove scheduled tasks from elevated cmd: a.schtasks.exe /delete /tn "FF_INTEGRATEDstreamSchedule" b.schtasks.exe /delete /tn "FF_INTEGRATEDUPDATEDETECTION" c.schtasks.exe /delete /tn "FF_INTEGRATEDOffice 15 Subscription Heartbeat" 3. Close down any Office apps and shutdown/kill any of the following C2R processes from Task Manager: a.integratedoffice.exe b.appvshnotify.exe c.integrator.exe d.firstrun.exe e.setup*.exe 4. Remove the Office Service from elevated cmd: a. sc delete OfficeSvc 5. Delete the Office files by removing the following files/directories: a."%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Office 15" b."%ProgramData%\Microsoft\ClickToRun" c."%ProgramData%\Microsoft\office\FFPackageLocker" Note: If there is a lock on any of these files or directories that prevents deletion, rebooting the machine and trying again should remove any stragglers. 6. Delete the Office regkeys by removing these nodes: a. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\15.0\ClickToRun b.HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\Microsoft Office 15 - ProfessionalRetail - en-us Note: Depending on your SKU or language, you may need to delete a similar, but differently named key by changing "ProfessionalRetail" to your SKU, and "en-us" to your language c. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\AppV 7. Delete the start menu shortcuts: a. "%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Microsoft Office\Microsoft Office 15 Tools" b. "%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Microsoft Office" c. "%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\SharePoint" Note: If there are other Office products installed on the machine, you will need to go one level deeper than the above and delete the individual shortcuts with "15" in the names so as to not delete the shortcuts for the other Office products. 8. Uninstall the "Microsoft Office Habanero Local Components" from elevated cmd: a. If running x86 Office on an x64 OS: MsiExec.exe /X{50150000-008F-0000-1000-0000000FF1CE} b. If running x86 Office on an x86 OS: MsiExec.exe /X{50150000-007E-0000-0000-0000000FF1CE} c. If running x64 Office on an x64 OS: MsiExec.exe /X{50150000-008C-0000-1000-0000000FF1CE} 9. Uninstall the Microsoft Office Habanero Supplemental Local Components: MsiExec.exe /X{00150000-008C-0000-0000-0000000FF1CE}

 

In certain cases, as was mine, even after the manual uninstall, the Click to Run installer still will not work. The install may start and get stuck in between etc. There is a full installer like for previous Office versions still available, but it is not easy to find too.

The installer is available as below:

http://office-watch.com/t/n.aspx?a=1728 – how to get “Normal” install, 32 and 64 bit

Direct Download Link for Standalone Offline Installer (32-bit) (624 MB) direct installer file download (you must get Product Key separately)

Direct Download Link for Standalone Offline Installer (64-bit) (702 MB) direct installer file download (you must get Product Key separately)

If you install this version, you will need a product key to activate (is not needed for install to work though).

https://profile.microsoft.com/RegSysProfileCenter/wizard.aspx?wizid=f2648d40-84ce-4556-8545-93d52a3253f2&lcid=1033&ci=393– Pro Plus 32 and 64 bit Trial Product Key and installer

Technorati Tags: Office "15",Office 2013,Install,Manual Uninstall

Keyboard Shortcuts in Windows 8

For all of those power users keyboard shortcuts are part of life. So this document that lists all major keyboard shortcuts in Windows 8 should be of great help to get used to the new UI and the related set of extended keyboard shortcuts.

Download PDF file

 

(via Ajay’s Blog)

 

Technorati Tags: Windows 8

Windows 8 Consumer Preview

Looks like MS is slowly giving out info on the Win 8 Consumer Preview version expected out on Feb 29th

http://www.theverge.com/microsoft/2012/2/8/2784252/windows-8-consumer-preview-applications

Technorati Tags: Windows 8,Metro

Windows 8 Developers have a sense of humor!!

Now that the Windows 8 Developer Preview is out, I got it installed on a VirtualBox instance. As I was reading thru some of the dialogs that popup during installation, I got a sense that since this is an early release, the developers got more freedom and have displayed a sense of humor in some of the messages.

Here are some of the ones that I found interesting:

I liked this the best (something you don’t say often for a license dialog )

 

This one, though not humorous, seems to be less formal that what you usually see

Home Server 2011 Connector and Problems with .NET Framework..

I had setup the new Home Server 2011 on one of my servers and have been transitioning stuff off my Home Server v1.

So after all of the data has been transferred and I had setup the server in a way that makes sense to me (given that Drive Extender, DE, is not there anymore and how much I miss that… That is a completely separate post by itself)

Then I started moving my client machines over. I left my main desktop off till the last and I came to it yesterday.

The Connect installation is quite simple and it just asks around 2-3 simple questions and that’s it. The problem is that they have made it so simple that it becomes very difficult when there is a problem. So the only error the setup reports is a wonderfully descriptive – “The Windows Home Server 2011 Connector has encountered an unexpected error” or something like that (Well everyone knows what an unexpected error is and can easily fix that. Right )..

After some searching, I found an KB article saying that a few services need to be running and I was still getting this error after I confirmed those services were good.

Then I came upon this post on the forum that talks about this problem occurring if a beta .NET 4.0 was installed..

Then it stuck me.. I had installed the VS 2010 Beta on this machine a long time back and then after playing around for a few days, forgotten about that (as I rarely use that machine for any development). So I uninstalled all the pieces that was installed with VS 2010 Beta and then also uninstalled .NET 4.0 Beta.

Only problem was, half way thru the uninstall something happened and my machine blue screened. The Beta disappeared from the Program and Features screen. So I went ahead and installed the full .NET 4.0 RTM. But still Connector will not install. Same Problem as before.

So I tried to uninstall .NET 4.0 RTM thinking I will clean everything and try again. Now it wouldn’t uninstall cleanly. It would go half way and crash. So basically I got stuck with a half installed .NET 4.0.

Then I came upon the .NET cleanup utility. Downloaded the latest version and set it up to clean up .NET 4.0. It actually went half way and then the system re-booted. Not sure if this was the planned way, but when I checked the log, it seemed as if there was an error. So I just ran the utility again and it went through fine.

Then I went and installed the full .NET 4.0 RTM and then the Connector install went thru fine with no problems.

It would have been a lot easier and saved me around 5+ hours if the setup had just said, there was a wrong version of the .NET Framework, instead of the great “unexpected error”…

Windows Virtual PC–Launching Virtual Machine Wizard Manually

I use Windows Virtual PC for running some of the test VPCs and also for learning new features etc. Since I also play around with multiple versions of virtualization software (VirtBox, VMWare etc), I suddenly found that my Virtual PC directory settings were kind of screwed up (after many installs/uninstall of multiple virtualization software). So now I do not get the options to create a new virtual machine.

The good thing is that Windows Virtual PC is made up of multiple EXEs and you can manually launch then as required.

The easiest way is to directly type the command into the run bar as all of these EXEs reside in the system32 directory.

The command to launch the new virtual machine wizard is vpcwizard.exe.

You can find more about the different EXEs that ship with Windows Virtual PC on this post: Windows Virtual PC Executable

IE9 Released!!!

Download it from http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/internet-explorer/products/ie/home

 

 

There are also some nice updated demos of the capabilities at http://www.beautyoftheweb.com/ including a nice interactive video mixer app called Firework Interactive Video.

Enhanced Data Generator v 1.4

I just uploaded a new version of the Enhanced Data Generators over the weekend. This new version 1.4 contains misc. bug fixes and the addition of a new data generator, XMLGenerator (Note: v1.3 and above support only Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0).

The XML Generator is based on the XML Generator MSDN sample code and wraps it to work as a data generator. You basically provide an XSD and it generates XML that fits that XSD. Should be useful to fill XML type columns with valid data that fits a XSD.

Note: Since I use the MSDN sample, this does not support very complex XSD patterns. But I think, this should satisfy most of the common scenarios.

Download Enhanced Data Generator v1.4

Read More on Enhanced Data Generators