At the most recent DEMO conference, a new Outlook add-in called gwabbit was introduced and immediately, it became one of the biggest hits from the whole event. The reason? Gwabbit simplifies the process of adding contacts to Microsoft Outlook. Although Outlook itself includes support for the vCard…

Computer manufacturer MSI has revealed their newest light and thin netbook, the X-Slim 320 and it was definitely drawing a crowd at this year's CES. So how light and thin is it? 1.98 cm and 2.87 lbs. The thinnest part is only 6 mm! So, yeah, it fits quite well into a manila envelope. The netbook is…

Ford SYNC, the in-car voice activation technology created by Microsoft is getting a big update – it now understands more than 10,000 voice commands. That’s up from 100 in the first generation of the product. 10,000, wow! According to the news release, you can now tell the car anything from “Call…

It’s here – Windows XP SP3 - and it brings with it several networking and security improvements as well as a small number of new updates. So what’s new in SP3? Here are some of the things I think are interesting, but this is by no means the full list, you’ll need to go here to see that: Microsoft…

Livestation, the new video streaming service that features Silverlight technology, has begun its invite-only beta this past week by sending out invites to those who signed up for on the Livestation web site. With Livestation, you can watch a range of live radio and television channels on your…

AOL has just launched AOL Sync, a new tool that keeps your contacts and calendar (calendar coming soon) in sync between Windows Mobile, Outlook/Outlook Express, and AOL. The service works over-the-air so you only need to set it once in order for it to work. With AOL Sync, you can synchronize your…

I know everyone has been playing with the beta of Visual Studio 2008 but you don't have to any longer!  Visual Studio 2008 Express flavors have been released into the wild for everyone to enjoy. Visual Basic Express Edition – productivity tool for first time or casual Windows…

This past week has been a perfect storm of bad news for OpenSocial, the Facebook-killer that was announced to much fanfare two months ago.  As more people understand it's limited scope, criticism mounts that OpenSocial doesn't focus on the right problems.  And more importantly, Facebook…

  This article is in series of BackPack API. The focus of this article is on another key consideration and needed component of the final application: local storage of BackPack data. This facilitates BackPack off-line,(need to operate against a local copy of a user's BackPack data.) If the…

Part 2 of my Halstead York interview is now up, wherein we discuss VC-1, Silverlight, frame rate unsampling, and many other things. Part 3 talking about DRM (save the most contentious for last!) will be up soon.