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By managed code, I was referring specifically to the CLI code used by MS.NET. I think MS invented this term, but I'm not certain. Anyway, that's just definitions... replace the "managed code" reference with "Code executed by any CLI compliant interpreter I've used" if you want.

This is supposedly the definition: http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2004/01/09/489 25.aspx

It seems to refer specifically to .NET: "Managed code is code that has its execution managed by the .NET Framework Common Language Runtime."

They actually already do this for compatibility testing. They release Virtual PC VHD's that let you run their os in a virtualized state. And from my knowledge it works on OS x or at least Virtual Pc 2007 does.

VHD images http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/aa700831. aspx For New VS

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2007/04/17/ie7-vi rtual-pc-image-and-ie6-virtual-pc-image-refresh.as px
for XP sp2.

Of course they do expire but new ones are posted when they do.

I run them under VPC 2007 on 64 bit vista and they do just fine. I just wish I could figure out the usb pass through for my usb phone and my ipod. Other then that with additions its a free version of xp to beat on :) and use to test.

Pretty much all that you have stated here could also refer to MS Windows.

• You can listen for notifications of file updates on Windows.
• If you didn't mind Microsoft's indexing service (which is quite serviceable) but wanted to write your front end, you can write your own GUI to do customized searches. There are many different ways that you can do this depending on how high level the language is that you use.
• If you develop a file format that Microsoft's content indexer can't recognize, you can implemented your own IFilter. These are used by many Microsoft Search programs, including the Indexing Service (dating back to Windows NT 4.0), Desktop Search, IIS, Sharepoint, Exchange and SQL Server. Here are some IFilters to download and try.

Like most people here, I really can't see what Google are on about. What can Google offer that can't be achieved with Microsoft's solution? Would Google Desktop Search also allow the Windows standard IFilter interface, or would all the third party solutions that use this interface suddenly stop working once Google's service is switched on?

I always thought that the search has got more useless with every version of Windows. In XP, I have copied a variable name from some source code and then pasted it into the search only to find no matches. It should have at least found the file that I copied the text from!

However, I have always switched off the Indexing Service so I didn't slow the system down for those fairly rare occasions that I need to search. Maybe this would solve my problem. After this discussion, I have been inspired to give the Indexing Service a try again. And I am certainly looking forward to trying the search in Vista. Thanks, Google!

If it's simulation you want, then you should also check out the Microsoft Robotics Studio.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/robotics/default. aspx

http://beta.channel9.msdn.com/Media/Microsoft-Robo tics-Tour-CCR-VPL-Simulation-Part-1/

It pains me to praise Microsoft, but from the Channel 9 video it looks pretty impresive - especially the simulation capabilities.

Moving to full interruptability and virtual memory for the GPU is a huge step, but as new GPUs with full support for interruptability begin to catch on, and software moves from DirectX 9 to 10, the benefits will become more and more apparent.

Microsoft has paid for positive comments elsewhere, including Wikipedia. http://www.informationweek.com/industries/showArti cle.jhtml?articleID=196903015.

They're trying to drum up support through their own blogs http://blogs.msdn.com/ausdev/, there was the fake support letters during their anti-trust prosecution, the fake Zune fansites, the fake Switchers campaign and a dozen more.

Why would Slashdot be immune?

Maybe they special case Ubuntu. E.g. consider.

Windows Developer: We tested Ubuntu with IE4Linux and we can catch it. It claims to be Win98 and it doesn't have the undocumented secret handshake to check for validity. And it hides the Bios too. If you look at the CS values Wine uses the same selector but you can't use that. But if you look at CS:Hardcoded_offset then all versions of Windows have some code that is not present in Wine. So we check for that.
Lawyer: Hmm. Could they change Wine so it passes
Windows Developer: Yeah, they could just set up a copy of the code code in Windows so the check is fooled. But that code is protected by copyright and patents.
Lawyer. So we release code that depends on undocumented details, they reverse engineer and fix and we sue them? Excuse me, I need to make a phone call. ...
Lawyer. Take the code out.
Windows Developer. What? I spent all night writing that! Then we'd authenticate Linux as genuine Windows. Why do we have to provide updates to people that didn't buy the software?

It's actually the same case as the AARD code which the lawyers got the developers to disable in the release build. Probably they could detect Wine and Ubuntu using undocumented details but the problem is that it would be artificial tieing updates to IE and Office to Windows which is illegal. In the AARD case, they disabled it really close to production by changing one byte in the data segment to minimise the risk. So technically it was possible - the code worked in Beta, but someone decided that the legal risk was too great for the release version.

There is some evidence that Microsoft developers are aware of these sorts of legal issues

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2007/02/ 01/1573160.aspx#1582487

I believe Cleartype is disabled by default in Windows XP versions up to Service Pack 2. It's now enabled by default.

Google "cleartype vs mac" to find tons of comparisons. I can't really find any 2 articles that come to the same conclusion.

For a very fascinating video discussion of font design and differences between Mac and Windows font rendering check out the link below. It's made by Microsoft but is not biased and they give lots of respect to Mac and other typeface platforms. http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=1467 49

And no dissing the graphical prowess of Tandy!!!

Thanks for enlightening me on the particulars of both proprietary rendering engines. The point about the boundaries of antialiased fonts is extremely interesting and appears perfectly valid from my observations.

I just remembered the resource I consulted for my information about the differences between Apple and MS (and other) typeface rendering engines - an hour-long webcast by Microsoft's typography team discussing font rendering in WinXP and Vista and some interesting tidbits on the new Office 2007 fonts. I have only a passing interest in desktop publishing but I was absolutely riveted by this webcast. http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=1467 49

In my experience, the only "Mac users" who prefer Firefox to Safari are people who never used a Mac until recently. And let's be honest—Firefox would be okay for a PC application, but by Mac standards, it's absolutely terrible. Firefox is a very literal-minded PC port that doesn't think or act like a native Mac application. I remember the same happening with the Mac port of Word 6, which was designed to approach tasks the same way as the Windows version. Native Mac users considered it shit, but ex-PC users of that era didn't seem to mind.

If you're serious about entering the Mac market, the key is not to just "port" it, but to attempt a faithful but thorough translation. Sometimes you'll need to rethink your application from top to bottom, because Mac users and PC users have very different ways of approaching problems.

I made the mistake of purchasing Word 6. It was indeed riddled with bugs, but worse, it looked and behaved like a Windows application, a wretched, horribly literal-minded port from PC land where shit is supposed to taste like chocolate.

With Office 98, Microsoft seemed to have learned its lesson (debatable?) and today I continually wonder why other software projects (Firefox in particular) have to keep pursuing this myth that cross-platform is as easy as flipping a switch.

Yeah... I consider Office 98 to be a grand example of Mac integration from Microsoft, but that's from the perspective of Word 6.

Well, you had me wondering there if I was mixing versions up, but I finally managed to compile my life in word processing software:

1986-1988 Word (On Mac. Sorry, didn't even know about version numbering at the time)
1988-1992 WordPerfect 4 and 5 (on PC) Mass-11 (on VAX/VMS, don't get me started)
1992-1998 Word 5, 5.1 (on Mac)
1998 .... Word 98 (on Mac, about 4 weeks before I ditched the CD's and re-installed Word 5.1)
1998-2001 Word 5, 5.1 (on Mac)
2001-2007 Word v.X (on Mac)

The Word 98 program was a gift by a friend who did not want to use it.
Apparently Word 6 was such a bag of bugs that I never even met anyone who used it. And you wouldn't pass it on to a friend either.

QuickTime player is simply a front-end application that makes use of the framework. Its Windows counterpart is a mere shadow of its former self.

I wouldn't completely knock Safari without giving it a chance. Safari itself was based off of KHTML (and the Apple devs still contribute back regularly to the KDE/Konqueror folks). If they ported it once, porting it twice shouldn't be a terribly huge issue once the initial kinks are worked out.

1. Missing application menu in the upper-left corner. This menu contains menu items for Minimize, Maximize, Restore, Move, and Size. This menu is still accessible via its keyboard shortcut (Alt-Space). Present since: At least Windows 3.0, 1991
   
2. Missing minimize animation. Present since: At least Windows XP, 2001
   
3. Maximize/Restore animation is odd, it resizes one dimension at a time. Windows itself resizes both dimensions at a time. Present since: At least Windows XP, 2001
   
4. Resizing can only be done from the lower-right corner. Windows allows resizing from all four sides and corners. Also, the cursor does not change when moved over the resize area. Present since: At least Windows 3.0, 1991
   
5. Clicking on the Safari icon in the taskbar when it is minimized performs the restore operation, even if the Window was maximized before... in other words, it shows the window maximized for a split second, then resizes it.
   
6. You can resize a maximized window. Windows programs normally don't let you do this.
   
7. Clicking on a taskbar icon for a window that is currently in front should minimize that window. Present since: Most likely Windows 95, 1995.
   
8. Some dialogs are missing close buttons. History, Show All History and Help, About Safari off the top of my head. In fact, the only way I found to close the History window was counterintuitively through Bookmarks, Hide All Bookmarks.

And Silverlight is supported in both Safari and Firefox browsers on the Mac. http://blogs.msdn.com/macmojo/archive/2007/05/23/s ilverlight-excitement.aspx

I'm actually glad someone has taken Microsoft to-task on this one, because the overall picture I'm getting from the online review world is ReadyBoost doesn't really help performance.

I don't think the feature is "broken" by definition, in fact I think the intended benefits are so tiny that people are left confused. According to this FAQ page, we know the following:

1. This is designed "at best" to deliver a few percent faster performance, targeting smaller files. It is intended as an upgrade path of last resort.

2. It requires incredibly fast flash memory for small block sizes (compared to your average drives on the market).

3. The software uses compression to improve thoroughput performance and AES-128 for security.

MY TAKE ON THIS: ReadyBoost is an expensive way to improve your performance by a few percent. ReadyBoost may actually be detrimental to performance if you're not COMPLETELY IO-bound because data on the flash drive has to both decompressed and decrypted during every access. The current capabilities are so unclear that it's no wonder people would call the feature "broken."

Please have a look at the Microsoft blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/microsoft_office_word/archiv e/2006/10/04/Equations-in-Word-2007.aspx

It is based on something less proprietary, and more TeX-like. The output is nicer too. I believe Nature and Science will accept the new .docx format some time. The ODF recommendation does not make sense, simply because no authors will be using it.

You might want to give some attribution to the original author of your post:
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=3150 67#315067

You know, to avoid charges of plagiarism and all that. :p

You have information that says Novell has access to "secret" documentation regarding OpenXML?

I think it is your argument that is disingenuous and lacks all validity. You're in denial that Microsoft could possibly open up it's Office formats in the same way that Sun has done with Star Office. This is exactly what they have done.

Docx documents are simply zip files containing simple xml files, it's not even half as complicated as people are implying. Creating docx documents is actually quite simple...

http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/archive/2006/06/27/6 49007.aspx

I've seen it all on slashdot today, half of the comments rated up against posts I've made are claiming the 6000 pages of documentation is too complicated and difficult to follow, the other half claim they are incomplete and I bet not a single one of these people have even looked at the documentation:

http://www.ecma-international.org/news/TC45_curren t_work/TC45-2006-50_final_draft.htm

It doesn't matter what cross platform specification there is out there, there are always be difficulties producing identical replications of a standard between platforms, just look at SOAP and HTML for examples, everyone knows the problems developing HTML applications that work across multiple browsers. Does that mean HTML or SOAP are not valid standards? Of course it doesn't.

The truth is there is an abundance of information and examples on how to create, read and modify Office 2007 OpenXml documents.

With Office 2007 Microsoft has opened the floodgates for developers and turned it into a full on document processing development platform. I think Microsoft has done this because they genuinely believe they can offer a commercial product that will be bought based on the merits of the application versus applications such as Star Office and/or Open Office.

Here's the explanation...

http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2006/10/ 12/comparison-of-openxml-math-and-mathml.aspx

You can get MathML out of Office docx documents quite easily using XSL transforms...

http://dpcarlisle.blogspot.com/2007/04/xhtml-and-m athml-from-office-20007.html

Excellent advice. It also bears mentioning that PageHeap will work when debugging programs written in languages other than C++. From the knowledgebase article:

Pageheap.exe is effective when used to verify any memory allocation process, including C++ style allocations new and delete, as long as the custom allocation/free functions eventually call into NT heap management interfaces (that is, RtlAllocateHeap, RtlFreeHeap).

(Emphasis mine.) For example, here's a bug report for something written in Delphi that crashes under pageheap.

Also, don't be tempted to use any of the following functions: IsBadWritePtr, IsBadHugeWritePtr, IsBadReadPtr, IsBadHugeReadPtr, IsBadCodePtr, IsBadStringPtr. Their use within Microsoft is deprecated as per MS's Secure Development Lifecycle. (Microsoft's resident security guru Michael Howard calls the *ReadPtr functions "CrashMyApplication" and the *WritePtr functions "CorruptMemoryAndCrashMySystem". :)

You can read about why these functions are bad on Larry Osterman's blog, and see more deprecated functions here.

Excellent advice. It also bears mentioning that PageHeap will work when debugging programs written in languages other than C++. From the knowledgebase article:

Pageheap.exe is effective when used to verify any memory allocation process, including C++ style allocations new and delete, as long as the custom allocation/free functions eventually call into NT heap management interfaces (that is, RtlAllocateHeap, RtlFreeHeap).

(Emphasis mine.) For example, here's a bug report for something written in Delphi that crashes under pageheap.

Also, don't be tempted to use any of the following functions: IsBadWritePtr, IsBadHugeWritePtr, IsBadReadPtr, IsBadHugeReadPtr, IsBadCodePtr, IsBadStringPtr. Their use within Microsoft is deprecated as per MS's Secure Development Lifecycle. (Microsoft's resident security guru Michael Howard calls the *ReadPtr functions "CrashMyApplication" and the *WritePtr functions "CorruptMemoryAndCrashMySystem". :)

You can read about why these functions are bad on Larry Osterman's blog, and see more deprecated functions here.

I know that most slashdotters don't even want to hear Microsoft's side of the story, but for the few that might, read these two blog entries by Dan Fernandez:

This gives MS's side of the story, including the two-year history of this issue:
http://blogs.msdn.com/danielfe/archive/2007/05/31/ visual-studio-express-and-testdriven-net.aspx

This follow-up blog entry gives technical details on the hacking required to get TestDriven.NET to run in VS Express:
http://blogs.msdn.com/danielfe/archive/2007/06/01/ testdriven-net-and-express-technical-information.a spx

You might want to weigh both sides of the story before choosing one side or the other.

I know that most slashdotters don't even want to hear Microsoft's side of the story, but for the few that might, read these two blog entries by Dan Fernandez:

This gives MS's side of the story, including the two-year history of this issue:
http://blogs.msdn.com/danielfe/archive/2007/05/31/ visual-studio-express-and-testdriven-net.aspx

This follow-up blog entry gives technical details on the hacking required to get TestDriven.NET to run in VS Express:
http://blogs.msdn.com/danielfe/archive/2007/06/01/ testdriven-net-and-express-technical-information.a spx

You might want to weigh both sides of the story before choosing one side or the other.

Express provides free tools and resources for the recreational, and student programmer. Coding4Fun

Charging for development tools is a bloody stupid idea in the first place

Microsoft has been in the business of providing development tools for the PC since 1975. That bloody stupid idea is what drew IBM to the fast-moving young company in 1980. It seems to be still working quite well for Adobe.

Every developer you piss off helps to push up the value of my portfolio.

There have been 14 million downloads of the Express product.

Suggesting that there is a younger generation of programmers emerging that are not as pissed off by Microsoft as their elders believe. Perhaps - just perhaps - the beginnings of an adolescent rebellion against the middle-aged spread, the predictable pieties of free and open source.

This is taking advantage of a technical limitation, which the EULA does say it is not permitted. But I still find very confusing that no where on the VS Express site, download page, or EULA is said that you cannot develop add-ins for the Express version.

Friday, June 01, 2007 3:20 PM by danielfe
TestDriven.NET and Express - Technical Information
I quickly wanted to respond to questions or misconceptions raised in the comments of my previous blog post.

A common question or misconception in the comments is saying that if didn't want extensibility we should have provided technical limitations to prevent extensibility (see comments: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, and 18).

Express Extension Workarounds
To respond, Visual Studio Express extensibility is limited in a number of ways. One way it is limited is that it does not permit extensibility through Macros, Add-Ins, or Packages. It attempts to reserve these limitations by technical means. Some examples of these technical limitations are that there is no Macros IDE, there is no Add-In manager, and registered Add-In's and Packages are not loaded at startup. The only way to even extend Express is to work around these in-built technical limitations and that is prohibited by the License.

For a high-level overview on how TestDriven.NET works around technical limitations, here's a response from our development team:

**
The TestDriven.NET product is implemented as a Visual Studio Add-In. In the Visual Studio Standard, Professional, and Team System SKUs, TestDriven.NET is installed as an Add-In and gets loaded into the IDE through the Add-In Manager. In the Visual Studio Express SKUs, because we disabled extensibility (macros, Add-ins, and VS Packages), the Add-In Manager is removed and therefore Add-Ins are not detected or loaded. Jamie has created additional components specifically for the Express SKUs to work around this technical limitation. He takes advantage of an extensibility point that allows user controls (such as a button class) to customize entries in the Properties window. When his property extender gets called, he executes code that finds, loads and injects the TestDriven.Net assembly into the Express SKU's running process, thus replacing the functionality of the removed Add-In Manager. This explains why he instructs Visual Studio Express users to open the Properties window in order to enable TestDriven.NET. Once his code is injected into the Express SKU's running process it can add menu items, enable features that were disabled, and in general take over that instance of Express. These special loading mechanisms that Jamie has built exclusively for the Express SKUs are unauthorized workarounds to the SKUs' technical limitations.
**

For an analogy, this would be comparable to someone working around the technical limitations in the personal version of TestDriven.NET to unlock features in the professional or enterprise versions for free.

What complicates this even further is that this isn't a developer doing this for his or her personal use or experimenting with our product, this is a business trying to sell a product. We tried for close to two years to get Jamie to stop releasing the Express version of TestDriven.NET without success.

I hope this helps clarify some of the questions or misconceptions surrounding this issue.

Filed under: Visual Studio Express
Comment Notification

Tomorrow is special. It's the deadline M$ gave him to remove Express support.

Thanks for pointing to the old article. The Dan Fernande's letter is priceless entertainment parodied in the following Power Point Slide:

Please Don't Help Express Users
by Dan Fernandez

• We've done so much for you, even calling you on the phone - twice in two years.
• Most people prefer our no cost version, they are not Professionals and some admit it.
• Non Professional users are easily confused, please don't make their life easier with confusing choice.
• Back when I programmed in BASIC, I would not have wanted anything else.
• I know Professionals who can't code.
• Helping people violates our "ethos"
• We are going to pick up our toys and go home now and it's all YOUR FAULT.

Why do they try? There's no way for them to win this.

Let's see what happens next! Will they stop issuing Express, remotely disable it and then sue Jamie? Do they leave him alone and let it keep working with ... the appropriate apology? Ha!

And yet, historically it has proven to be incorrect. The usual result of getting hardware developers to write compilers is that you get shitty compilers. The amazing reason for this is that people who spend their career writing compilers turn out to be way better at it than people who spend their career developing hardware.

The Intel compiler is a notable exception - but it wasn't that long ago that code correctness was not that high on the Intel compiler's list of qualities. The code was fast, but not reliable (compared to, e.g. gcc or msvc). To paraphrase Gerald Weinberg, "I can write a program that executes in zero seconds if the output doesn't have to be correct."

Just because you designed the hardware doesn't mean you have the best idea of what goes on in most 'real world' software - in some cases, you can be totally blindsided because you thought you knew best. iirc, some versions of the VAX processor had a bunch of instructions put in that were 'useful for compilers'. The compiler writers took a look at them, and said "Er, no thanks." There are other examples in the field's history.

Getting a LITTLE off topic, but thanks to both of the posts clarifying the relationship of Carbon and Cocoa! As I said, I'm the new guy! But a little more quick research finds that a significant enough part of the community has a hard time with the differences as well. A few informative bits here:

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/mac/2001/05/23/coc oa_vs_carbon.html
http://blogs.msdn.com/rick_schaut/archive/2004/02/ 10/70789.aspx
http://daringfireball.net/2006/10/some_assembly_re quired
http://wilshipley.com/blog/2006/10/pimp-my-code-pa rt-12-frozen-in.html

I have much to learn!

ATI has had WHQL ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHQL_Testing ) certified new driver releases for years now. NVidia has only recently been able to get their new releases WHQL qualified.

So this must be about ATI then ;-)

It's my understanding that most modern operating systems have essentially the same memory management underpinnings - historically *nix and Windows had different memory management models, but *nix has evolved over time from the 1960's style swap() mechanism to a modern VM system that is effectively the same as the Windows VM system (which was designed for systems with modern VM architectures). It's a tribute to the modularity of *nix that it's been able to survive such a major transformation untouched.

According to this blog post, what you're describing is called "standby list erosion" where a number of low priority applications can (over time) cause the foreground application to swap out. According to that post, it should be fixed in Vista.

Sigh, yet another general statement without supporting evidence. I think your post is a sly bit of astroturfing for NVidia. ATI has had WHQL ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHQL_Testing ) certified new driver releases for years now.

Essentially have barrier calls in most places you'd have sync calls -- and yes, maybe fbarrier or fdatabarrier, like fsync/fdatasync. Note that sync-ing already does basically the same thing, just slower.

Yes, and since fsync() is a working but suboptimal fbarrier(), you can writable portable code easily:

#ifndef HAVE_FBARRIER
#define fbarrier(fd) fsync(fd)

There are a couple of problems with that approach, I think. The most obvious one is that essentially, your application is trying to implement a transaction, and your filesystem will, if it's smart, group these into a transaction. In other words, if I read from file a, write a new version to file tmp, barrier, and then rename that tmp to a, then barrier again, all before the FS writes it out to disk, a smart enough FS might figure out that I want to atomically update a, and skip the tempfile altogether. Skipping the tmpfile means skipping dealing with allocating a new inode, setting a dozen timestamps, then unlinking it, when it might be faster to simply use the FS's own journal. (Or it might use the tmpfile anyway, if it thinks that's faster.)

Yeah, directly making an atomic change to the file would probably be faster. And there are many places that full ACID would be convenient. But there's also a lot of stuff running that doesn't need transactional semantics, and I'd expect they'd be a lot slower for it. Also databases that have their own transactional systems with different performance characteristics. This seems like a global change, and I'm not sure that's desirable.

Anyway, the transactional semantics you're describing exist, in Microsoft Windows of all places. I don't know much about them, what with hating both Microsoft and Windows.

It's my understanding that this is also approaching problems at the hardware level. For instance, tagged command queuing and friends, disk write buffers, and the general nature of the media (and the fact that you don't actually know what the physical media is) all means that your only guarantee is that when your fdatasync returns, the data is safely on disk. Maybe. Hopefully.

Well, what hardware guarantees may or may not be available is the filesystem implementator's problem. I want to know what the filesystem implementation can guarantee to me. I'd suggest reading this, this, and this. I suspect similar techniques can be used on a large file inside of an existing filesystem -- which would also blatantly make my point about duplicated effort. But beyond that, I'm really not sure.

I've read those, but they don't really help. They're focused on metadata, and I want to know what guarantees I have for data.

Hello - have you used Office 2007?

Well, it's only been out 4 months. I based everything I said off of previous incarnations of Office, from 2003 (the second latest-n-greatest) to 95 (when WordPerfect started sucking). Given I don't want to replace my shiny & new copy of Office 2003 so soon after I got it, I won't be purchasing 2007 for some time. And nor will I be using to submit to Nature or Science, apparently, even if it were free.

1. PDF publishing is supported (free)

That's good to hear, and long long missing. Questions: is the output of "Print to PDF, then print the PDF" the same as just printing? I've had issues with such software producing different output that way (even sometimes products made by Adobe!). Also, how "good" is the PDF output. That is, are the files sizes quite small, is it embedding proper scaleable fonts, and does it print fast? A big problem with the old "print to .PRN, change extension to .PS, then ps2pdf" way of going from Word to PDF was getting bloated, poor quality, and complex PDF files; even Acrobat sometimes will non-sensibly make a crappy PDF.

2. Citations and Bibliographies are both supported under Word

Having used BibTeX, I will never go back. There are huge databases of freely available BibTeX format citations. The second runner up, EndNote, hasn't nearly the amount of citations available (although importing BibTeX into EndNote isn't hard). I have used EndNote, and it is not nearly as good as BibTeX. Other people (read the comments) seem to feel that EndNote works better than Word 2007's support; I simply don't believe that a mouse-driven interface for adding citations can ever beat a text-based one.

Office 2007 documents can be saved to document managment servers for sharing

I think you're missing the point. LaTeX easily allows you (and encourages you) to split your documents up into multiple files. So, regardless of what collaboration service you use, anything from emailing files back and forth to something overly complicated like SourceVault, you can have multiple people editing the same document simultaneously. They just work on different sub-files. I've done it with email, but usually do use RCS to automate the locking support. Unless Office 2007 vastly changes things, Word documents are still monolithic files. That makes it quite difficult to support simultaneous editing; you *need* a concurrent versioning system. And, forgoing large changes in Office 2007, .doc files are still stored as BLOBS, which makes automated commit/merging difficult to impossible.

4. LaTeX has style files; Word has templates. What's the difference?

As best I can tell (I've never found it, and I've tried...) you can't apply a template to a document after the fact (and get the expected results). If my paper is rejected from one place, I can reformat the entire document by changing which style file I include. Style files pretty much guarantee that all of the final product will have a consistent look, and that said look is easy to change across the board. Journals that are either done all in LaTeX or those that hire separate typesetters (for mucho $$$) have the most consistent appearance. Others look a bit like just a bunch of papers glued together.

I can't claim Office 2007 is better than LaTeX, since I've not used the latter extensively,

Except for those on the Office 2007 team, *nobody* has used Office 2007 extensively :)

From talking with people who have used 2007, there is quite a learning jump to go from 2003 to 2007. Especially since 2007 breaks math support for journals, it makes sense to consider moving to LaTeX just a

And take a look at Murray Sargent's blog entry that has a pointer to David Carlisle's blog entry about extracting MathML from Office 2007 documents.

Here's a follow up post detailing how TestDriven does this using Code Injection.

The Express community isn't a professional development community.

It is a community of beginners, students and hobbyists: recreational programmers who have been given a powerful set of tools and support for free. Coding4Fun

To me these projects do look like fun.

Each rated according to the time, skill and, where appropriate, the materials and cost required to complete them.

Back in 2004, Jamie Cansdale released a free Visual Studio addin to help developers build unit tests. His only problem was that he enabled his addin for all versions of VS - including the Express addition which isn't supposed to support addins. After over a year of trying to talk with Microsoft and understand how and why he was in violation of their license agreement, during which they would never explain specifically which clause in the license was being violated, they sent the lawyers after him and pulled his MVP status. To top it all off, Jamie is actually a Java developer by day; his addin was originally developed just as a hobby project. A full account is available on his blog, including all email correspondence he had with Microsoft and the now 3 letters received from Microsoft lawyers. The lead product manager for Visual Studio Express has posted a response to Jamie's posts.

Back in 2004, Jamie Cansdale released a free Visual Studio addin to help developers build unit tests. His only problem was that he enabled his addin for all versions of VS - including the Express addition which isn't supposed to support addins. After over a year of trying to talk with Microsoft and understand how and why he was in violation of their license agreement, during which they would never explain specifically which clause in the license was being violated, they sent the lawyers after him and pulled his MVP status. To top it all off, Jamie is actually a Java developer by day; his addin was originally developed just as a hobby project. A full account is available on his blog, including all email correspondence he had with Microsoft and the now 3 letters received from Microsoft lawyers. The lead product manager for Visual Studio Express has posted a response to Jamie's posts.

Wrong. It will be in the next version of VS. Right now, it is a pretty awful implementation for TDDers (very slow, but some cool integration features), but they are working on making that better.

Not that I agree with what is going on with Jamie. All he ever asked for was the clause he was violating and he would happily remove it. They haven't provided that yet.

Jamie Cansdale released a free addin to Visual Studio back in 2004 to help developers build unit tests. His only problem was that he enabled his addin for all versions of VS - including the Express addition which isn't supposed to support addins. After over a year of trying to talk with Microsoft and understand how and why he was in violation of their license agreement, during which they would never explain specifically which clause in the license was being violated, they sent the lawyers after him and pulled his MVP status. To top it all off, Jamie is actually a Java developer by day; his addin was originally developed just as a hobby project. A full account is available on his blog, including all email correspondence he had with Microsoft and the now 3 letters received from Microsoft lawyers. The lead product manager for Visual Studio Express has responded to Jamie's posts.

Jamie Cansdale released a free addin to Visual Studio back in 2004 to help developers build unit tests. His only problem was that he enabled his addin for all versions of VS - including the Express addition which isn't supposed to support addins. After over a year of trying to talk with Microsoft and understand how and why he was in violation of their license agreement, during which they would never explain specifically which clause in the license was being violated, they sent the lawyers after him and pulled his MVP status. To top it all off, Jamie is actually a Java developer by day; his addin was originally developed just as a hobby project. A full account is available on his blog, including all email correspondence he had with Microsoft and the now 3 letters received from Microsoft lawyers. The lead product manager for Visual Studio Express has responded to Jamie's posts.

There are few levers that Microsoft has on encouraging 64 bit computing. The first is having good tools and support for creating 64 bit drivers with a shipping OS. The second is requiring the existance of 64 bit drivers to get a Designed For Windows Vista Logo (and co-marketing dollars?) and making the 64 bit OS version easily available in the consumer market. The last lever is finally going 64 bit only in certain products and eventually Windows itself. We are long past the first lever, we just saw the second completed with Vista and there are signs that the third is coming with announcements like Exchange going 64bit only.

However there is no reason why such big shifts can't happen cocurrently in the pipeline of these steps or even in parallel. For example, last year the win2k3 networking stack got an optional update to do Receive Side Scaling allowing a network server to scale better with multi-core/cpu. This technology is already a builtin part of the OS in Vista. One of the features on win2k8 is to fix the serialization of terminal server login session creation. As long as the hardware appears and there is bang for the buck, it will show up in the OS.

Hopefully if MS re-writes some of the Windows infrastructure to make multi-threading easier for applications we'll see better apps that more properly take advantage of the hardware that's out there.

Actually, as cool as the "birds-eye view" is, Microsoft already did this exact thing (street-level view) last year... Although it looks like they haven't touched it since launch:

http://preview.local.live.com/
http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2006/02/2 8/540724.aspx

Orca.exe is the tool for creating/editing .MSI packages. It can be used to extract package contents.

MSI packages are databases that store more than files. More about the MSI file format.

the 3 ways are:
timerstop method
relash BIOS
softmod bios

The NT kernel provides a lot of facilities that are very useful for writing secure code. I often wonder if the application developers at Microsoft ever noticed that they weren't writing code on top of DOS anymore...