Run As Explorer

Aarn Margosis' has a great read up on his blog about operating in least privileged mode and using Windows Explorer at the same time. This was posted a while back yet reading the whole of the MSDN root RSS feed along with TechNet takes time.

Some great desktop wallpaper from New Zealand

http://www.microsoft.com/nz/windowsxp/downloads/nzbliss.aspx

 

RSS on Microsoft KBs

This will make life so much easier for so many IT professionals. Microsoft knowledge base now available through RSS.

Introducing MSN's Virtual Earth

Wow! Don't you just love this Google vs. Microsoft battle. It will be interesting to see the backlash from the anit-Microsoft crowd saying that Microsoft got the photocopier out on this one. Yet in the Channel9 video here you can see that the MapPoint team have been building this up for 10 years with various MapPoint products like Streets and Tips along with the TerraServer -- granted Google were first to market with the AJAX delivery for this product category.

New free Windows Media Bonus Pack available

Nothing too amazing yet it is cheaper then Apple updates.

New Tablet PC demo site

http://www.tabletpcdemo.com/

Update for MSN Search Toolbar with Windows Desktop Search

http://toolbar.msn.com/. More over on Scoble's blog.

Steve Ballmer @ Standford University

Webcast here. Thanks Scoble.

Need I say more... Xbox 360!

http://www.xbox360.com/ - also more news over on Major Nelson's site and Endgadget - video here.

Windows Mobile 5 keynote

Mike Hall points us to Bill Gates' keynote speech for Windows Mobile 5.0/2005.

RSS in the Market Place

Windows Market Place now has RSS feeds

Microsoft Technologies Available for Licensing

Brian Groth lets us know about new technologies that Microsoft (mainly Microsoft Research) are making available under license to other organizations to build on.

 

http://microsoftipventures.com/

New OneNote site

http://www.stationeryisbad.com/

Note to self: I need to start using OneNote more!

Bring on Metro

At WinHEC (Hardware and Engineering Conference) last week. Bill Gates and team announced the new technology Metro. A new document format which will be royalty free. The demonstration showed how such things as gradients could easily be replicated (as a portable document format should!) to a Metro equipped printer. Metro FAQ's now available.

So the question is where does this leave Adobe? To be honest I've never been a big fan of Acrobat. While the idea is great, the implementation leaves little to be desired. The fact that most times I find people can't print or a print queue is blocked at work and a PDF is fault is astonishing. Not to mention the slow load times of Acrobat 6 - noted that version 7 improved on this. I can't wait to start using new Metro format for all my content creation where possible and finally have some competition to PDF.