Let's face it, every app crashes -- so what can you do to help preserve the user's important data when your app fails unexpectedly?  Windows Vista provides a new application recovery API that gives you a chance to save off as much in-memory data as possible before your process terminates.

Ian Griffiths has a screencast that shows off the basics.

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Windows Vista's UAC feature is designed to minimize security risks by running most applications under a standard user token, lessening the risk that an attacker could gain admin rights to the machine.  UAC allows executables to specify what privelege level they require -- if an app doesn't provide a specification, it will be run in the context of a standard user, but UAC will provide some virtualization features to make it appear as though certain admin tasks succeeded.Ian Griffiths…[more ]

Windows Vista's UAC feature is designed to minimize security risks by running most applications under a standard user token, lessening the risk that an attacker could gain admin rights to the machine.  This is a great step forward for users, but it may leave developers wondering what to do when their apps do really need admin rights to complete a task.

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Is your application the reason why my laptop only gets two hours of battery life?  That's not a question you want to hear from your paying customers.  Windows Vista provides an enhanced power management API and control panel which lets the user express their desired power usage profile, and lets applications query and respond to changes in power state.In the second of our Vista How To series, Ian Griffiths shows how to listen to power change events in a WPF app, and respond to low…[more ]

Ian Griffiths, dev trainer extraordinaire, recorded a series of "how-to" videos for us, each one demonstrating how to write code that takes advantage of a feature of the Windows Vista platform.  Here's the first in the series -- how to issues queries against the desktop search engine.

[Update: the second installment, How To: Use Vista's Power Management APIs To Be A Good Laptop Citizen is now up][more ]