To mark the release of the TouchSmart 3.0 SDK, HP has a goodie to give away at the Microsoft PDC 09: A super-slim 2 GB USB memory stick (embedded in a hard-plastic business card with a nice imprint). It contains the new SDK and a few documents about a software development partner program HP is starting.

If you see me at PDC, say hi, and I may be able to hand you one of these puppies. I only have a limited supply, though. 15 to be precise.

Check out the pictures:

Front of the card

Back of the card

Back of the card with USB memory stick flipped open/out

Front of the card with USB memory stick flipped open/out

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Categories: HP TouchSmart, Microsoft, Software, Software development, WPF, Windows 7
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As evidenced by this scan of one of the setup disks:

(Someone was cleaning up a bunch of old floppy disks at work. I happened to come across them because I needed a floppy for updating the BIOS of a really old laptop.)

Just an interesting little factoid for your geek trivia…

Categories: Microsoft, Software
4 Comments »

I noticed recently that I’d get logged off from my computer over night. I’d leave the system running at night without logging off, and in the morning I’d have to log in again, with all the previously running programs gone. I had recently added a SATA controller in order to be able to run three SATA drives on this particular system (it only has 2 SATA ports on the motherboard), so I thought the culprit was a bad driver for the new card. Turns out that wasn’t it.

My computer runs backups over night (I use MozyHome), which shouldn’t be a problem, really. But as part of the backup, a volume shadow copy snapshot is made, and this step caused the blue screen error.

In addition to adding a SATA controller, I had also bought a bigger hard drive to hold my ever expanding collection of pictures, vacation videos, etc. When I installed it, I cloned the old drive (which was a PATA drive) to carry all the information forward onto the new drive.

Apparently, after you install a cloned a hard drive, some information is retained on the system about the old drive, and this affects volume shadow copies.

I had to go to Device Manager and turn on “Show hidden devices”:

Then, under Storage Volumes, I had to delete one in particular that seemed to have gotten a corrupted name (something like Generic Volume□□□ [not shown in this screenshot, since it’s fixed now]):

Just for good measure I deleted all of them (although they didn’t seem to really disappear), ignoring the request to reboot after each prompt to do so.

When I was done, a couple of reboots of Windows recreated the necessary information about these volumes from the (old and new) hardware. After that the volume shadow copy snapshots no longer failed and I was able to run my backups without blue screen errors.

Credits for this find go to the folks in this thread: http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic94820-2.html

Categories: Microsoft, Software, Tech Toys
1 Comment »

A lot has been written about how Windows Vista Ultimate was a major disappointment. First it was billed as the version that would “keep on giving” in the form of Ultimate Extras – cool new features that would be exclusive to Ultimate customers. When those extras finally materialized most people were underwhelmed. The extras were mostly Language Packs, DreamScene (with a few content packs) and a game or two. And for that, people paid a hefty premium over the Home Premium edition.

Now Microsoft has published special early upgrade pricing to entice people to rush out and get Windows 7 “while supplies last”. And they’re at it again. Guess what the upgrade price for Windows 7 Ultimate is:

Yup.

$219.99!

Sorry to shout there. At least this time there’s no promise of “Extras”. Only BitLocker and Language Packs (in addition to the Professional features). Not sure that’s worth $120 over the Professional Upgrade or $170 over Home Premium (even considering XP mode.)

Oh, and you can’t do an edition “downgrade” from Vista to 7. You can buy the upgrade package, but you’ll have to use it to do a “custom install” (i.e. clean install) and then reinstall all your programs and data. Despite that inconvenience, I’ll go for the Home Premium upgrade, thank you very much. I’m done being an Ultimate customer. Or is that Ultimate fool?

(And just for the record, Windows 7 is a fantastic product in my opinion. I hope Paul Thurrott is right when he says it may be the next Windows NT. Unfortunately he also seems to be right about how Microsoft can mess things up with their pricing)

Categories: Microsoft, Software development, Windows 7
1 Comment »

Just so I can say that I jumped on a bandwagon once: Mike Swanson inspired me to create my very own Windows 7 Theme Pack. It contains 12 pictures I’ve taken over the past year or so with my trusty old Canon PowerShot S30 (yes, I’m still running around with a camera that only does 3 megapixels.)

I’ve included a few photos in the pack that I managed to have included in the Spring 2009 software for the HP TouchSmart PC. They’re in the Personalize – Background area, should you be interested in finding them. Here’s one you may recognize:

While I didn’t put this one in the Theme Pack, I did pick a similar shot of downtown Seattle. Come to think of it, maybe this post will be inspiration for doing a “picture of the day” type of thing. Hmm. Been wanting to do that for a while.

All I can do now is hope the size of the pack (12 MB or so) won’t blow my bandwidth allowance…

Categories: HP TouchSmart, Microsoft, Tech Toys
2 Comments »

I just caught the replay of the CES keynote by Steve Ballmer. I think this is the first time ever that I’ve seen Microsoft allow non-Microsoft software to be shown in a keynote product video. I was blown away to see the HP TouchSmart software actually shown and interacted with instead of the Windows Desktop. Thank you, Microsoft!

Categories: HP TouchSmart, Microsoft, Opinion, Software
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I had a very unpleasant experience today. My wife is trying to deal with pain in her arms and hands from too much typing by using Vista’s speech recognition feature along with Word 2007. She was writing a final paper for a college class and had just finished the last four of nine pages. That’s when she noticed an extra word in her paper, right at the end: “document”. It didn’t belong there, so she did what you’d do naturally and said “delete document”.

THAT’S WHEN BAD THINGS HAPPENED. Apparently the speech recognition software turned that phrase into a command and proceeded to empty the nine page paper of all content without hesitation. On top of that, the undo feature of Word seemed to not have noticed the command (or been bypassed somehow), so she couldn’t get the document back via undo either!

This all happened while I was in a meeting at work right before lunch. When I got back to my desk I had several panicked voice messages. Luckily, five pages from the day before could be salvaged because my wife had the presence of mind to close the document without saving, which let her recover all but the about four hours of work that had gone in before the disaster struck.

I went home over lunch to see if I could salvage any more. I decided that I needed support from Microsoft. Well, the call with Microsoft Product Support was less than pleasant (as support calls usually are) and didn’t get us the four pages back, either. Best I could tell nobody had ever reported such an issue before.

I’m surprised this glaring problem escaped all testing at Microsoft. One of the cardinal rules of software development was violated in this case: “Never, EVER, lose the user’s data.” I can’t believe there was no prompt to confirm if she really intended to delete everything in response to the phrase “delete document”. I can’t believe there was no undo possible.

I just can’t believe it. Yet, it’s true.

Categories: Microsoft, Personal, Software, Vista
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The PDC keynote this morning was amazing to me. It felt like the HP TouchSmart PC was utilized for about half of the entire keynote by Steven Sinofski and Julie Larson Green. Four machines on stage, front and center.

Since the HP TouchSmart doesn’t have VGA out, there was a camera guy up on stage during the demos, which I thought worked out really well, sort of bringing the audience up on stage with Julie.

Naturally, the machines had been wiped clean and had a Windows 7 build with the new taskbar installed (6933, the build on “The Goods” is 6801 and doesn’t have it). NextWindow, the people making the touchscreen, are making a Windows 7 compatible driver available so you can start developing for Windows 7 touch today, using the TouchSmart. Of course, I’d rather you develop something for the HP TouchSmart UI that we’ve created, and you’ll be able to download some documentation for that soon, from the community site TouchSmartCommunity.com.

But I digress.

If you ever doubted that .NET and WPF were ready for “prime time”, doubt no longer. According to Scott Guthrie’s keynote, Visual Studio 2010 will have its user interface migrated to WPF. That almost blew my mind. Microsoft transitioning their bedrock developer tool to WPF – they wouldn’t do that lightly. Here’s a shot of how WPF in VS 2010 will enable useful visualizations and hookup to external tools:

Scott, too used TouchSmart for his keynote:

And Tesco used it for their demo as well:

And the machines that were all covered up tightly in the big room yesterday:

Yup, all TouchSmarts, ready for Multi Touch hands-on-labs:

The Windows 7 booth had one:

The WPF team did too, although I don’t have a picture of it.

The coolest “giveaway” of PDC 2008 has to be the Sensor development kit from the Windows 7 team. It’s got a hardware board from Freescale with a bunch of sensors, accelerometer and LEDs, all powered via USB, and accessible via the new Sensor APIs in Windows 7. Here’s a shot of the booth:

I can’t wait to play with it.

What a day. Not sure it gets much better than that.

Categories: Microsoft
2 Comments »

Windows Azure (hmm, hard to pronounce for non-U.S. people, wonder if they ever consider things like that). Ozzie was great, knew his material, delivered well! Wonder what they’ll charge once it’s ready. Red shoes on the dev team, nice touch.

Best presentation, HANDS DOWN: Surface! Cool technology, excellent demos, super easy SDK. One word: wow! Sorry, no pics. Sure you can find plenty elsewhere.

Biggest surprise for me on a personal level: Meeting Nathan Dunlap from IdentityMine (Hi, Nathan!). Seeing their components demoed, running on HP TouchSmart, no less: fabulous.

Other HP TouchSmart sightings: DevExpress demoing their wares on TouchSmart too. More sightings to come tomorrow after the Windows 7 keynotes.

Handed out about three handfuls of USB drives with TouchSmart development guidelines (to some that might be an SDK, but it really is just a document with some high level guidelines). In other words: yes, you can write your own programs for HP TouchSmart and yes, this will be available for download some time soon (pending a software update that is needed for the IQ 500 series, IQ 800 series should be good to go as-is). If you’re not at PDC – sorry, you’ll have to wait a little longer to get it. Someone from Microsoft said it was the nicest USB drive he had seen so far.

My OpenSpace session on TouchSmart development happened, sort of. I just didn’t get to talk much with anyone completely new to HP TouchSmart with an interest in developing for it. Was nice to see some familiar faces, though (Hi, Mark, in case you read this!)

Check out my photos on Flickr.

Categories: Microsoft
1 Comment »

I downloaded and installed the latest version of the Media Center SDK just now, and was a bit surprised to see that WPF apps are now officially deprecated as a supported way of extending Windows Media Center on Vista. There’s no big announcement around this so far, it’s almost just a footnote in the “What’s New” section:

Deprecated features

The following features have been deprecated:

• Hosting for Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) browser applications (XBAPs).
• The Triple-tap/Soft-keyboard ActiveX control for hosted HTML applications.
• Support for using alternative shells to run and host HTML applications.

The reason I’m surprised is that Microsoft announced the support for WPF based extensibility apps at PDC05 with some fanfare.

I guess interest among developers just hasn’t been there for WPF-based Media Center apps, and Microsoft needs to make judgment calls on where to invest in their extensibility platform. The rest of the deprecated features seem to have been made for the same reason: limited interest among developers for these features. In addition I think there might be issues of an architectural nature that just make the three things that got dropped too expensive to maintain or improve.

I’m sad about this development, mostly because I still don’t see a great set of development and design tools around for MCML. WPF seems to me to have a whole lot more momentum than MCML (WPF has the Expression suite of tools and has been billed as the “GDI for the next 20 years”), but who knows what may be coming for Windows 7, or even an earlier interim update for Media Center?

Categories: Microsoft, Opinion, Software development, Vista, WPF
8 Comments »