The Windows Product team have made a really smart decision to put in some effort around the Windows XP Virtual PC experience .  This feature will is aimed at businesses that need to maintain XP compatibility with line-of-business applications.  Essentially, prior to this feature announcement...

Who needs people any way.  Of all the times I’ve had to deal with less than professional IT administrators who more closely resemble Nick Burns, company computer guy, than a well spoken service professional, it’s about time that IT troubleshooting has a level automation to it.  What I’m refering...

Lots of updates with the new versions of Live Messenger, Live Writer, Search Toolbar, and Live Services integration.  Check it out!  Also, the branding and skinning of all the apps have become more unified so the look and feel is similar.   New Windows Live Betas – Download Wave 3 Now...

Office Labs has recently released a PowerPoint 2007 add-in called pptPlex .  For those of you who saw Bill Gates show off the TouchWall at the CEO Summit, you saw how information no longer had be be presented in a linear fashion.  When dealing with many data sources and disparate views, users...

Xobni , the small San Francisco Bay start-up, has gone public with their Outlook, and now Yahoo Mail, plug-in.  If you recall, I wrote about Xobni a few months back.  Having been on the private beta, I can only say, that Xobni has really changed the way I use Outlook.  I love the fact...

So I had a weird morning today.  My computer woke up from sleep a little grumpy, definitely not the typical experience which is usually smooth as a baby’s bottom.   Anyway, I fire up outlook and I’m greeted with an error that says Outlook can’t launch because the OST file is corrupted.  I sigh in annoyance...

It's been a really hectic month for me this last March, hence the utter lack of regular blog posts. For this I apologize. Even though I'm was on vacation at my home in Dallas, Texas, I wanted to let everyone know about a really cool site called Animoto . Animoto's goal is to create Hollywood quality...

What year is it?  It’s 2008 and I’m still writing about how to defrag my Windows machine.  It’s pathetic.  The whole idea is ridiculous especially considering that as the size of partitions have shot up almost exponentially, while the time taken to completely defragment...

My colleague James O'Neill has a really simple step by step blog post on how to use the new deployment tools that come with Vista to create an SP1 Vista image.  He makes it sound so easy!  * it actually is*  The coolest part of the entire image creation process was that it was done completely...

  This is going to be one of those months.  Most of you all knew it was coming with the announcement a few months ago.  Be aware this only applies to WSUS customers who have changed the default setting.  What does this mean for your apps?  Well if you haven't tested all your...

Last year was a big year for Office documents. Office 2007 was launched, Office Open XML became an ECMA standard, and the security group for Office released a major service pack for Office 2003. Last year was also a big year for hackers who found one of the few remaining “Trojan horses,”...

I recently had the opportunity to play around with the new Zunes at Best Buy while attending MacWorld.  I was definitely impressed with how much the Zune team has accomplished in a year *sorry I doubted you J *.  The biggest improvement, in my opinion, is not the hardware, but the software...

Hello Everyone, For the next three days I will be talking with customers at the Microsoft booth. For those that do not know what BETT is, it is the largest Education-focused tradeshow in the UK. There are a lot of exciting technologies on showcase here so I want to share parts of the event as well...

My cousin decided to get a new place and needed to post pictures of their apartment on Craigslist.  I suggested they try panoramic pics of their place to show the size of the apartment.  Being a lazy person, he didn't care, so I did it for him, mostly to satisfy my technical curiosity. The...

Microsoft announced yesterday that Tafiti , the experimental Silverlight front-end for Live Search, has been released under the Microsoft Shared Source Permissive License *it's like BSD*.  Here is the announcement.   Internally this caused a lot of buzz on our enterprise search distribution...

My colleague James O'Neill beat me to this one.  SP1 for Office is finally here, and none the sooner as I was ready to destroy my laptop and beat it with a sledgehammer because of the stability issues with Outlook. Funny story, a lot of the bad rap that Vista has been getting has actually been due...

I know a few of you who attended my presentation on Search Server 2008 had questions regarding wildcard search capabilities. Sammy Jankis sums up SharePoint's wildcard search functionality pretty well. After reading his article if you find that you want a more robust solution, Mondosoft 's Ontollica...

Thursday was a busy day at Microsoft.  RC1 for Longhorn is now out and available for download.  To read up on some analysis about the update, check out James O'Neill's post . Going over to the other side of the "pond," Keith Combs mentions some good news around virtual machine VHDs...

So for the last few weeks I've been secretly blogging without a computer. I won't tell you which articles, but a few of them were written, hyperlinked, and published via my Orange M3100; shitty phone, great pda. I accomplished this amazing feat by using an amazing killer app called "Diarist 2." Diarist...

Of course not, if you do, you're dumb.  Please unsubscribe from my RSS feed now please.  During a late night after-party recap, me and James started talking about cool stuff *deployment? Where's Kanye? *  that people should do but don't, stuff that is really practical to IT Pros and partners...

Just about one year ago, Bill Hilf announced Zend and Microsoft's partnership to enhance PHP performance on Windows Server's IIS web server. This technical collaboration has focused on enhancing the reliability and performance of PHP on Windows Server 2003 , and Windows Server 2008 . As part of this...

Microsoft has partnered with world-renowned accessibility partner, HiSoftware , to give SharePoint developers the tools they need to comply with various accessibility and disability laws. The Internet is exploding and with the growing socioeconomic importance of the various services offered by websites...

I was downloading Camtasia so that I could begin recording some screencasts when I discovered one of Techsmith's *makers of Camtasia* pet project called Jing . With a name like Jing , who could resist clicking on it. Even as I contemplated on what it could possibly be, my mind wandered to interesting...

      Anyone who works with me knows that I'm a big OneNote fanatic!  Not only is it a great piece of software, it is a great development platform for ISVs.  One of the great things developers can do is tap into the OneNote API and extend functionality. David Tse is a program...

  This is exactly what I was looking for.  Leo Vildosola has written a great plugin that gives bloggers an easy way to add Digg button.  It seems to work well seeing as how I've just added the button with one simple click!  Now let's see if anyone will "digg" me.