Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Development life on Vista (1): What Should you Do When Install Vistual Studio

As we all known, Microsoft announced that will not support Vistual Studio .NET 2002 or Visual Studio .NET 2003 as development environments on Windows Vista, Visual Studio 2005 is supported, but will have "compatibility issues" until Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 with Vista Support Update ships.

Now I'll discuss some issues with you about installing Visual Studio series products. I think there is no body still using Visual Studio .NET 2002 as development environment now, even not so, we can treat Visual Studio .NET 2002 as Visual Studio .net 2003 on Vista.

You should run Visual Studio IDE with "run as administrator" every time, the best way is:

  • On the devenv.exe's Properties menu, go to Compatibility tab, checked the box "Run this program as an administrator" under the Privilege Level group.

Hope this post helps.

Monday, November 27, 2006

Microsoft Adds 3-D City Models to Live Search

REDMOND, Wash. — Nov. 6, 2006 — Microsoft Corp. today announced U.S. availability of Virtual Earth™ 3D, a new online mapping interface that is part of the Live Search offering, providing consumers with a three-dimensional experience to search, browse and explore the real world online.

When people visit Live Search (http://live.com), type a query into the search box and click the “Maps” tab, they get their search results in a map context that offers the option to explore the area using two-dimensional views (aerial and bird’s-eye) or three dimensional models with Virtual Earth 3D. This new technology compiles photographic images of cities and terrain to generate textured, photorealistic 3-D models with engineering level accuracy.

“By helping people visualize information in far more useful and intuitive ways, Virtual Earth 3D takes search to an entirely new level,” said Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft. “The immersive 3-D experience provides a more powerful and engaging interface that delivers better experiences not only for consumers, but also for developers and advertisers.”

Three-dimensional models are available initially for 15 U.S. cities: San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Detroit, Phoenix, Houston, Baltimore, Atlanta, Denver, Dallas and Fort Worth. Terrain imagery in 3-D is available globally, and Microsoft expects to offer 3-D imagery in an ever expanding set of cities. Other features provided by Live Search include access to real-time traffic information in select major U.S. cities, and access to business listings “yellow pages” and people listings “white pages” that allows consumers to easily find local information and act on it.

“The release of Virtual Earth 3D is a significant step toward creating a truly new dimension in search not only in the look and feel of the experience but in the way consumers and advertisers can be involved,” said Steve Berkowitz, senior vice president of the Online Services Group at Microsoft. “Local search is one of the fastest-growing categories online today, and adding features like 3-D will only help move the category further ahead and help Windows Live attract more customers and advertisers.”

Advertisements will be available within the Virtual Earth 3D experience. Similar to billboards on the side of roads, virtual billboards will be available throughout Live Search in the 3-D view. The ads available within the Virtual Earth 3D experience are created using a combination of technologies from Virtual Earth, Massive Inc. technology, and the advertising platform from Microsoft® Digital Advertising Solutions. In addition, developers can use the Virtual Earth 3D application programming interface to build these search capabilities into their own applications and Web sites. This and other APIs for Live Search are offered at no cost to developers, with the option to acquire additional support and other benefits through a service-level agreement with Microsoft. Developers can find more information about the Virtual Earth API.

Source: Microsoft Adds 3-D City Models to Live Search

Sunday, November 26, 2006

SyncToy tool for Vista

SyncToy 1.4 for Windows Vista is available as a free download from the Microsoft Download Center. The easy to use, customizable application helps you copy, move, rename, and delete files between folders and computers.

There are files from all kinds of sources that we want to store and manage. Files are created by our digital cameras, e-mail, cell phones, portable media players, camcorders, PDAs, and laptops. Increasingly, computer users are using different folders, drives, and even different computers (such as a laptop and a desktop) to store, manage, retrieve and view files. Yet managing hundreds or thousands of files is still largely a manual operation. In some cases it is necessary to regularly get copies of files from another location to add to primary location; in other cases there is a need to keep two storage locations exactly in sync. Some users manage files manually, dragging and dropping from one place to another and keeping track of whether the locations are synchronized in their heads. Other users may use two or more applications to provide this functionality.

Now there is an easier way. SyncToy, a free PowerToy for Microsoft Windows Vista, is an easy to use, highly customizable program that helps users to do the heavy lifting involved with the copying, moving, and synchronization of different directories. Most common operations can be performed with just a few clicks of the mouse, and additional customization is available without additional complexity. SyncToy can manage multiple sets of folders at the same time; it can combine files from two folders in one case, and mimic renames and deletes in another case. Unlike other applications, SyncToy actually keeps track of renames to files and will make sure those changes get carried over to the synchronized folder.

SyncToy was released as a beta in early August 2005 for Windows XP. Features added in response to customer feedback include:

  • The ability to type in a UNC path;
  • Support for longer folder pair names and ability to widen the left pane to see those longer names;
  • The ability to support the maximum length for folder paths, and documentation was added to the help file about how to set up a share to be able to sync deep folder pairs;
  • Better handling of the difference in precision between NTFS and FAT timestamps;
  • More discoverable link to the help file for information on how to schedule SyncToy using the Windows XP Task Scheduler;
  • Support for 800x600 screen resolution;
  • Added a warning for users if the selected action will take some time to complete;
  • Added brief explanations of the actions in the user interface;
  • Improved behavior when choosing folders to include or exclude when there are large numbers of folders involved;
  • Improved support for accessibility modes.
Relevant resource: