If you’ve got Windows 7 installed, the Windows Virtual PC for Windows 7 is now on MSDN subscriber downloads !!! I had the Release Candidate (RC) installed, so had to uninstall that first and reboot before installing the RTM release. All worked perfectly, and my VPC’s from the RC also are working fine :)  If you need to uninstall the RC you’ll find it listed under the “Programs and Features” window from Control Panel. Click on “View installed updates” top left of window, and you’ll find it listed

Last night I accidentally pulled out the wrong power plugs, crashing my computer. For some reason this meant it wouldn’t start properly. I don’t quite get why that would mean it wouldn’t start as the hard disc didn’t fail, but none the less it wouldn’t : the computer would seemingly just hang and the keyboard was no longer responsive and its lights went out.   The good news is that start-up offered a recovery, and that recovery fixed it and life is good again.  The thing to be aware

First the good news : The February release of the Snippet Editor has now had 10,000 downloads ! Now for bug fix news: There were a couple of issues with the paths per language.  A problem with Express Editions of Visual Studio occurred due to partial entries in the registry I didn’t for-see. Initial design and testing was done with full versions of Visual Studio, but I want to ensure that it does work with the express versions, that’s why the tool is standalone not an add-in.  So the good

Well if you mark your methods as being void from the outset …….

I managed to spend an hour in the veggie patch this afternoon. Was pulling a lot of big weeds really easily after the rain, getting the beds ready for spring :) And in amongst the weeds I found all these carrots which had self sown from my seed collecting last season:   And they taste great !!!  :)

The first signs of spring have sprung:   With the wild plums currently showing the most early blooms : There’s not a lot happening in the veggie patch, just some carrots and silverbeet mainly. One of the climbers around the garden is also in bloom (you can see some silver beet that was used for seed behind it): The wattles are in stunning bloom at present: Blackwood beginning to bloom: And of course the proteas are also beginning to add some colour pink proteas: honey proteas young king proteas

Recently I got this email from Ted: Hi Bill! Love the snippet tool, it's great! I'm curious, what tool did you use to produce the screencast for the tool? The quality is awesome! Thanks a lot! Kind regards, Ted The answer to that is I used Camtasia Studio 5. It’s really easy to use and lots of options on output formats. And it will even produce the basic html file for you with the embedded video etc. Note: I really like Camtasia. I do also get it for free from the nice folks at TechSmith

The last couple of weeks I’ve had what seems to be both a cold and the flu. In the process I learnt some things about them … First off, they spread easily. We had a two weekend fire line leadership course,  running from Friday after work till Sunday midday both weekends.  On the first week there was one person with a cold, and another with what was probably the flu. By the following week another six members of the class of twenty three had signs of a cold or similar. Me, I thought I had

With all the focus on Windows 7 RTM announcements, the availability of Expression 3 on the MSDN site last Thursday may have sneaked under folks radars.  For MSND subscribers, grab your copy of Expression 3.

The user experience of Live Maps completely sucks compared to Google Maps. It’s that bad I really don’t think they even bother testing it.   Live Maps experience: go to maps.live.com. Here it redirects to http://maps.live.com.au/? which seems to fail to properly load every single time. Instead you have to hit refresh. the page loads with a script error : Message: 'dapMgr' is undefined Line: 480 Char: 9 Code: 0 URI: http://network.ninemsn.com.au/share/js/spac_adx.js as I scroll to zoom