If it was a training exercise then sessions would be based around technologies that matter to most working developers e.g. SQL Server, ASP.NET, etc. instead of the shiny new stuff MS wants developers to use.

(btw. the title of this thread isn't the best of tributes is it?)

17 minutes ago, dentaku wrote

Oh. I guess it's 8MP.
The video quality looks amazing too.
Hopefully there are some usefull video editing apps for WP8.

High performance apps like video editing should be possible on WP8 as it has native code support and a decent API instead of being hamstrung by the half-baked derived from Silverlight mess that was WP7.
In fact the more I think about how good WP8 could be, the clearer it becomes what a massive waste of everyone's time and money WP7 was.

7 hours ago, Dr Herbie wrote

Bumping this since I noticed Hanselman's blog entry shows how to create a shutdown tile on the start screen, which is nice to know.

Herbie

That's handy. But this reminds me of when MacOS X Lion changed the scrolling direction of the trackpad to better match that of the tablets despite literally noone asking for this or even thinking it was a good idea after the fact. I'm like "thanks for the blog post, but I'd prefer not to pay for an OS upgrade and then have to google a solution to un**** the dumb UI changes in it". I'm still using Snow Leopard on my Macbook

Although, why install Windows 8 at all?

http://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-responds-to-skydrive-privacy-concerns

Even if you are happy that every file you have complies with Microsoft's Orwellian policies, it seems like far too big a risk to take that their systems might flag something innocent (how many ordinary magazines and newpapers contain pictures with "parital nudity"?). When the punishment is losing not only use of Skydrive and whatever files you've stored there, but also your xbox live account, hotmail account and everything you've bought for WP7 if you were mad enough to buy that, it's not something I'd risk for the sake of a bit of storage. The advantage of Dropbox is if they cut you off for whatever reason, Dropbox is all you lose.

For backups I use Crashplan. It's in the same ballpark of backup services as Carbonite, but has no storage limit and the software is more flexible. You should be aware that even with a fast ADSL connection, it could take months to complete a full backup to a remote location, depending on how many files you have. The nice thing about Crashplan is that it's a full backup solution for local external harddrives and you can even back up one machine to another if you have a faster local connection so you can get a backup done quickly to give a decent piece of mind while you're waiting for the remote backup to complete. Encryption is available up to 256 bit and performed locally. You can select an option so that it never transmits the encryption key to Crashplan's servers, but you'll lose browser-based access to your archives if you select that.

But a few months back Lovefilm switched from Flash to Silverlight for it's streaming video service (yeh, just as everyone else was figuring out SL had no future). And more recently they started offering streaming in HD. And the bad news is it switches streams on the fly so when it's boxed in on the webpage it stays SD, but when you go full-screen is automatically switches to the HD stream.

Problem is, it uses nearly 100% CPU when playing HD video and so the sound breaks up and the video stutters. Again, Flash plays equivalent bitrate video from Vimeo just fine. If I bring up the setting panel for Silverlight it says hardware acceleration is enabled. I'm tempted to think there's some quirk of the videos they are streaming at lovefilm that means it doesn't use hardware to decode them, but then I remember how it uses nearly all the CPU time on Channel 9 too and if Microsoft can't get a Silverlight site right, who can?

14 minutes ago, fanbaby wrote

Boy, when will web designer understand that the px unit was a mistake? I guess never, since they are been thought to think in pixels. SSSStop it! The web wasn't designed to be PDF. Oh well, it's a lost war anyway. Keep on making sh!tty web sites that LOOK good.

That's not the problem at all. Browsers do actually treat px as a relative measurement in CSS. The problem is actual raster images in web pages. There's not much designers can do about that. It's really a problem for web browsers to solve, which they do mostly with the zoom modes in IE8+. These enlarge bitmap graphics and then adjust all CSS measures appropriately to match. If you're using a high-dpi monitor you get the page the size you expect it to be but with crisper text.

That's also ofc what Safari does on 'retina display' devices. Apple aren't like "we're going to whine about web designers not making everything dpi-aware and asking them to redesign the whole web". No, they just scale up images and CSS measurements by 2x and you get a normal looking page just with crisper text.

4 hours ago, evildictaitor wrote

Look, I'm not saying deleting shortcuts without a prompt is a good idea - I'm just saying that it's a valid action for the OS to take. The sole purpose of a shortcut is to take you to a target file. If that file isn't there then the only purpose of the shortcut has vanished, and hence leaving the shortcut around clutters up the folder. The reason will be that uninstalling programs often doesn't delete the shortcut files they inevitably dropped on the desktop during install, and this was an attempt to stop your desktop becoming a shortcut cemetery.

And what about the effort I put into manually changing parameters to run my program? That's why I have all these shortcuts.

So, deleting shortcuts to clean up after broken uninstallers is a 'valid action'. But that's not the only reason people have shortcuts on their desktop. Windows has just added more idiocy to fight idiocy and broken the general case: That the OS shouldn't delete user files without warning.

@Craig_Mathews Thanks for the tip. I managed to edit the file you mentioned but I couldn't change it's owner back to TrustedInstaller as there is no user called that which is weird.

@Dr.Herbie  This 'clean up'/'balls up' process only runs once a week (01:00 on Sunday night on my machine) - it might not have actually run during your experiment. As far I can tell from the PS script, it doesn't take any account of whether the drive the target is located on it available.

# Function to check whether the shortcut is validfunction Test-ValidLink([Wmi]$wmiLinkFile = $(throw "No WMI link file is specified")){    if(($wmiLinkFile -eq $null) -or ([String]::IsNullOrEmpty($wmiLinkFile.Target)))    {        return $false    }    return Test-Path $wmiLinkFile.Target}

It's another case of Windows trying to be clever and do stuff automatically when there is no automatic action that makes sense for every scenario.

And even if you want to argue that it's acceptable to delete broken shortcuts without prompting the user because that's the right thing to do 99% of the time, why in the name of great suffing **** does it not put them in the recycle bin? Who is that helping? The PM who came up with this is a complete jackass.

Seriously, who thought this was a good idea?

Of course that would depend on VS being themeable which I don't think it is even though it's a WPF application.

3 days ago, JoshRoss wrote

Going live in 3, 2, 1. I've never cared for the live branding anyways.

-Josh

When you can sign into more than one account at the same time (or at least swap between them without having to log out and back in every time), then there will be cause for celebration.

My impression is that the Visual Studio team has a designer on their staff and they like to feel like they contrubuted something even though it's not needed, and this is the result.

He isn't saying where he's going until he starts there. Top guesses (crowdsourced on Twitter) are Github and Stackexchange.SE makes sense to me, they being the posterboys for MVC, Github less so.

3 hours ago, AndyC wrote

I don't get it. Why would I want all those things on little bits of paper when the precise reason I bought a smartphone is so I don't have to carry around bits of paper with all that kind of stuff on?

The answer is revealed in the video - people who carry around Moleskine notebooks love this crap.