The dates for the next PDC are from September 30 thru October 5. Seems that it will be held in LA yet again.

Vista is now available on MSDN!

Office 2007 has been released to manufacturing. Shouldn't be to long before it becomes available on MSDN.

Especially for developers there are a lot of new features. And don't think it's just Word or Excel: there are also new releases of server products like Sharepoint Server and VSTO

http://blogs.msdn.com/erikaehrli/archive/2006/11/06/office2007_5F00_VSTO2005SE_5F00_RTM.aspx

Wrox has posted a video of a presentation by Scott Hanselman at a .NET user group. Scott is very passionate about productivity. How many times a day do you type 'otepad'? Watch the video and learn how you don't really have to.

I just upgraded to dasBlog 1.8. The main reason was that the texteditor (ftb) in version 1.7 didn't work with IE7.

For those looking to upgrade to 1.8: the page editentry.aspx produces an error when you use IIS on Vista. The error I got was:

   "System.ArgumentException: Item has already been added. 
   Key in dictionary: 'ꆈꌠꁱꂷ (ꍏꉸꏓꂱꇭꉼꇩ)' Key being added: 'አማርኛ (ኢትዮጵያ)' "

The code asssumes that the name of the culture is unique. I vaguely remember an article on changes to the way cultures work in .NET; those changes could be the reason this assumption is not longer valid.

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=186381

Although Chris Pirillo has composed a list of items that still need work, the first few hours with build 5384 have been pretty good. The install went very smooth. Even the smaller changes, make the process of installing a new OS more pleasant. For example: after selecting the locale, setup choose the right keyboard layout.

Limiting the privileges of the user (LUA) does lead to some small annoyances. Even when the user-account belongs to the local admin-group, accessing the local SQL Server from the Visual Studio enviroment doesn't work. For some reason the Sql Server Management Studio does manage to get access to the database. It turns out that after adding the specific user to the sysadmin-role on the database, the problem disappears. Minor discomfort.

The package in the SSIS-project I moved over from my XP-machine, initially failed to run. The (unchanged) package produced the following error: "the thread for the SSIS Bulk Insert task failed initialization". This happened at the point where data was being copied to a SQL Server database. Changing the destination from "SQL Server destination" to "Ole Db destination" seemed to resolve the issue. After changing the SQL datasource from integrated to SQL-login, the errors went away entirely. Because I'm not able to reproduce the initial error, i am not a 100% sure about what caused this. Might not be related to Vista at all.

On Vista-based machines it is not possible to send new messages using Outlook Web Access. Applying the fix at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/911829 should solve this. According to the knowledge base, Vista doesn't support the ActiveX control that is used for HTML editing.

Besides from these minor issues the experience is very good: I haven't seen any errors; all of the hardware was detected automatically. Even after installing Office, SQL Server and VS, the performance isn't any different from what I had running XP. From what I've seen sofar, they should be able to ship before the end of the year.

The release of both the Vista and Office betas couldn't have been planned any better. Because I don't have to work on Friday, I now have 4 days to install and tinker with all of the new goodies. Bring on the weekend! 

Biztalk 2006 is available for download on MSDN

2007 

:-(

As a developer you spend a lot of time typing documents and code. If you just spend a small amount of time, you'll be able to get a significant improvement in the speed with which you can type. Check out http://www.egbertbeuker.nl for online typing lessons.

Microsoft is teasing us about Origami.

If you don't want to wait until march 2nd, check out this post. Seems like the marketing guys were a bit to eager and didn't wait with adding the video to their portfolio. We can't be sure that this is the actual product, but it does look very cool.

Update: the movie was removed from the site, which only adds to the credibility of the story.
2nd update: mirror at http://www.youtube.com/?v=jwQJZe0KL9U

The project I'm working on at the moment requires the use of a Sybase database. To ensure we started with the correct version, the client made a dump of the current database. After installing the Sybase software - which went fairly smooth - we ran into the following error:

"The database you are attempting to LOAD was DUMPed under a different sort order ID (44) or
 character set ID (2) than the ones running on this server (SortOrd = 41, CharSet = 2).
If the sort orders differ, at least one of them is non-binary."

For some reason Sybase removed the characterset with id #44 from ASE in the 12.5 release.
The following steps were needed to resolve the issue:
- Make a copy of C:\sybase\charsets\cp850\nocase.srt and name it nocase44.srt
- Edit the contents: change the id to 0x2C and the name to nocase_44
- CD to c:\sybase\ase-12_5\bin
- run charset nocase44.srt cp850
- Change the default sortorder id to 44 (sp_configure)
- Restart the server

Now you should be able to load the dump.

Apple just announced new versions of the iMac and Powerbook that run on x86 instead of the usual PPC-chips. The call for having MacOs run on non-Apple systems will only become louder. Would it now also work the other way around: buy a Powerbook and be able to install Windows XP?

It has to be said that Apple makes great looking hardware; it would be great to be able to run Visual Studio on it.

Virtual Earth has added Bird's Eye-images for parts of the USA. Check out Pershing Square: http://local.live.com/?v=2&sp=aN.34.048837_-118.253242_Pershing%20Square

The little compass-thingy on left side of the page makes it possible to change the angle. I wonder what they'll think of next? Live feeds?