Microsoft announced earlier that DreamSpark will be available soon here in New Zealand. It is now available for Auckland and Canterbury University!

So, if you are a student in Auckland or Canterbury University, go grab your free software here!

If you are a student in another institute (here in NZ), you can still get your free software. For more details on that, visit here. (read the entire post)...

There was a discussion in IE 8 beta Newsgroups at Connect regarding always starting IE8 in InPrivate browsing mode :)
Here is how you do it

More information here (read the entire post)...

IE8 beta 2 has been a great release so far from our Redmond friends. We should not forget that its still Beta and we will have issues with it.
I was playing around with IE8 Tab Grouping and also looking into Task Manager on how IE8 was performing.
Tab Grouping is a cool feature which gives a color for similar tabs opened from same web site. For example, you may be reading an article from a web site and suddenly you see something interesting, and click that link to open in a new tab. IE8 groups those two tabs and treats them to be different web page links from the same web site and thus gives a color to it so that we can easily identify where the tabs came from.
Most interesting is even the Quick Tabs will show that color (click to enlarge)Suddenly I thought why not open Task Manager and see what's going on I was surprised to see that there are 10 instances of iexplore.exe running and also to see it marked as a 32 bit application even though I have installed the 64bit versio (read the entire post)...

I got my invite yesterday for the Bloggers Dinner @ TechEd. Bloggers @ Tech Ed is designed to help the New Zealand blogging community with both practical advice and an exclusive opportunity to network with other key bloggers in New Zealand.

The dinner will be held on September 1st at Sky City Convention Centre, Auckland.
The best part of the event is that its being hosted and keynoted by Scott Hanselman
If any of you attending the Dinner, please do leave a comment and we can meet there

See you there (read the entire post)...

After hearing lots of good stuffs about this new SERVER product from Microsoft called Windows Server 2008, I took the decision to move from Windows Vista Ultimate to Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition The good thing is, Windows Server 2008 can be configured as a fully featured desktop workstation. Your one stop guide for completing this 'awesome' task is here Below is my laptop configuration: 1) Apple Macbook 2.4 GHz 2) 4 GB RAM I have Windows Server 2008 Enterprise x86 Edition installed Below is the list of software installed: 1) Apple Bootcamp 2) Microsoft Office 2007 3) Microsoft Visio 2007 4) Mozilla Firefox 5) Skype 6) Apple Quicktime 7) Apple iTunes 8 ) Windows Live Live WriterLive MessengerLive Photo Gallery 9) Foxit PDF Reader 10) Flashget Download Manager 11) Virtual PC 12) Kaspersky Internet Security 13) tWhirl 14) Windows Mobile Device Center 6.1 This server is Fast, Sleek, and Customizable (in Features and Roles). That's a huge benefit over Vista where many ser (read the entire post)...

Just looked into 3News Apple iPhone poll in their website and the results (as of now) are,



That really shows people are not ready to accept Vodafone's plans - Its not that iPhone is bad, but its because of Vodafone that people are reluctant to buy.

Its actually much cheaper now to get an iPhone from US, jailbreak and use a Vodafone sim (there are many un-answered questions revolving in the Geekzone forums regarding this and no answer from Vodafone yet!) (read the entire post)...

One of the cool new feature introduced with Windows Vista is the Windows SideShow Eventhough one had to have a Windows SideShow enabled device to see it working (which many of us do not have), now one can use their Windows Mobile device as a SideShow device I tried it with my HTC Touch Cruise and works great! Here are some screeniesToday Screen showing the SideShow gadgets SideShow Screen with installed gadgets Powerpoint Remote Control gadget Controlling Slide Show using Powerpoint Remote Control gadget Windows Media Player gadget This is really cool (read the entire post)...

With the release of Silverlight 2 beta 1, now developers can use .Net to create Silverlight applications To be more precise, developers can use XAML and VB.NET or C# as the back-end code language. To know more about Silverlight and what tools you need to start developing Silverlight applications, visit my post here. This post focuses on how to make your Silverlight applications interact with Windows Communication Foundation(WCF) services. Visual Studio 2008 introduced several new WCF features. We will create a small calculator service which is going to add two numbers and return the result to the user. First, let us create a Silverlight Web Application project. Visual Studio creates the necessary files needed for your solution. Let us straight away start with adding our WCF service. Visual Studio creates two projects, one being the actual Silverlight control project and the other being the web application project where the Silverlight control is hosted. So, we would be able to a (read the entire post)...

Silverlight 2 beta 1 was made available along with the Visual Studio 2008 Tools for Silverlight and the Silverlight SDK at MIX'08. Silverlight 2 beta 1 ships with various user controls like Textbox, Button and also supports XAML and is tightly integrated with the .NET framework. This post will give the necessary information needed in order to start developing Silverlight applications.

Tools Required


In order to develop Silverlight 2.0 beta 1 applications, the following tools are required:

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008Silverlight 2.0 beta 1 RuntimeSilverlight 2.0 beta 1 SDK
Microsoft has released a unified installer which has the runtime and SDK and can be downloaded from here. Optionally the design engineers can also use the Expression Blend 2.5 Preview (please note that it is not Expression Blend 2, it's the 2.5 Preview) to design Silverlight 2 applications.

Using Visual Studio 2008 to develop Silverlight Applications




The SDK pr (read the entire post)...

Long Zheng has blogged about it and it seems that some info about Windows 7 is going to be disclosed at this years' D6 Conference by Microsoft! Now, that is something great for die-hard Windows fans (like me) :)

For those who are not aware of All Things Digital , then you might want to see this small video :)



Full version can be viewed here

I would be really happy to get readers' views and comments on what you think about Windows7. Rod Drury has an excellent post on what he would do if he was in charge of Microsoft, here :)

So,
1) Are you ready to face the Windows7 Challenge?
2) Will you buy Windows7 leaving your Vista behind?
3) When do you think Windows7 would be released?
4) What changes do you expect to see in Windows7?

(read the entire post)...