Thushan Fernando Uncut

The moment most of us have been waiting for, Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 is finally out (right now for MSDN Subscribers), read what the changes are in VS2010 Service Pack 1 (or TFS 2010 SP1 Changes) and grab it from MSDN – once the links become public will update this post.

File Name: mu_visual_studio_2010_sp1_x86_x64_dvd_651704.iso [MSDN Download Link]
Size: 1.56Gb
SHA1: 61C2088850185EDE8E18001D1EF3E6D12DAA5692
ISO/CRC: C77C2A14
Date Published (UTC): 3/8/2011 9:13:36 AM
Last Updated (UTC): 3/8/2011 10:20:52 AM

There’s also the TFS Project Server Integration Feature Pack that’s been released.

Support for Silverlight 4 and Razor, SQL CE4, IIS Express and 64bit IntelliTrace are amongst the finer things in SP1. For C++ folks, the support for Intel AVX and AMD Bulldozer instruction sets are going to be interesting

Some notable bugfixes:

• HTML Designer cannot be used as expected for designing web pages.

Enjoy!

I’m a little late on this one, but Microsoft has released Windows Phone Developer Tools January 2011 update recently. From their own list

The Windows Phone Developer Tools January 2011 Update includes:

• Windows Phone Emulator Update – Exposes copy/paste functionality in the Windows Phone 7 emulator. For more information, see How to: Test Copy and Paste in Windows Phone Emulator. End users can use the copy and paste functionality only after receiving the corresponding update to the Windows Phone 7 operating system.

• Windows Phone Developer Resources Update – Fixes a text selection bug in pivot and panorama controls. In applications that have pivot or panorama controls that contain text boxes, users can unintentionally change panes when trying to copy text. To prevent this problem, open your application, recompile it, and then resubmit it to the Windows Phone Marketplace.

• Windows Phone Capability Detection Tool – Detects the phone capabilities used by your application. When you submit your application to Windows Phone Marketplace , Microsoft performs a code analysis to detect the phone capabilities required by your application and then replaces the list of capabilities in the application manifest with the result of this detection process. This tool performs the same detection process and allows you to test your application using the same list of phone capabilities generated during the certification process. For more information, see How to: Use the Capability Detection Tool.
• Windows Phone Connect Tool – Allows you to connect your phone to a PC when Zune® software is not running and debug applications that use media APIs. For more information, see How to: Use the Connect Tool.
• Updated Bing Maps Silverlight Control – Includes improvements to gesture performance when using Bing™ Maps Silverlight® Control.

WPDT Fix includes:

• Windows Phone Developer Tools Fix allowing deployment of XAP files over 64 MB in size to physical phone devices for testing and debugging.

The BingMap updates were quite welcome too! There are two bits to this update, first grab the Windows Phone 7 January Patch, then install the Visual Studio 2010 tooling update.

Today also marked the release of Internet Explorer 9 Release Candidate which brings a nice bunch of (much needed) updates to IE9 and standards in general with a cool smooth UI.  Ars has a great write up on IE9 RC too which will be far better than what I can write up.

Windows 7 x86 | x64 for the lazy few!

The moment we’ve all been waiting for, the final release of the Windows Phone 7 SDK has been released! What are you waiting for, go download it and try out some cool things!

No Visual Studio installed? Not an issue, it comes with the Express edition of VS2010 and Expression Blend 4 for Windows Phone as well as XNA and Silverlight tools for Windows Phone and an emulator – all for free too!

For more information, see ScottGu’s great post about it!

Earlier today, we had the announcement for OpenIndiana. Aimed to be the de-facto OpenSolaris Distribution that tries to be binary and package compatible with Solaris 11 & Solaris 11 Express. Its apart Illumos Community with 20 core developers providing (eventually) a stable branch with 100% free & open source distribution.

Not only that, you can also download a ready baked OpenIndiana distribution (based on ou_147) or if you’re like me and still using OpenSolaris DEV snv_134, you can upgrade via the IPS management tools. Having said that though, I’m not going to rush and upgrade my zeus box anytime soon as it will take time to settle in, but you can take the baked ISO’s for a spin in a VM I have found a few references to OpenSolaris still there and there is currently no xVM Xen (dom0) support nor lx (Linux) branded zones. Not to worry, keep an eye out on the roadmap and release schedule for what they’re going to deliver.

You can get a copy of the OpenIndiana announcement presentation slides as well or follow @openIndiana on twitter. Otherwise, see the Getting Involved guide on the OpenIndiana Wiki and join in!

In a way, its good to know that the beloved OpenSolaris will still live – thanks to the community, but at the same time, how long that community will be turned on by developing and maintaining it will be interesting – though other forks of OpenSolaris are backing it (via Illumos) – like Nexenta and Schillix which has just released a version based on Ilumos. All in all, WATCH THIS PROJECT!

With the release of the final Windows Phone 7 SDK just days away, now’s the time to get into understanding the concepts, architecture & development side of Windows Phone 7. There’s an interesting series posted on Channel 9 to hep you get there.

This Windows Phone 7 Jump Start video training is for all developers interested in developing applications or games for the new Windows Phone 7 Platform.  The course is based on the Microsoft Windows Phone 7 Developer Training Kit and taught by Microsoft MVP’s and Microsoft Press Authors, Andy Wigley and Rob S. Miles.  Watch these entertaining sessions and complete the labs found on Channel 9 (http://channel9.msdn.com/learn/courses/WP7TrainingKit/) to gain development skills using both XNA and Silverlight. For copies of the student files and links to demo code, you can go to the Windows Phone 7 Born To Learn Forum (http://borntolearn.mslearn.net/wp7/m/classresources/default.aspx).

• Session 1: Introduction
• Session 2: Building a Silverlight Application, Part 1
• Session 3: Building a Silverlight Application, Part 2
• Session 4: Building Games for the Windows Phone 7 Platform
• Session 5: Building XNA Games for the Windows Phone 7 Platform, Part 1
• Session 6: Building XNA Games for the Windows Phone 7 Platform, Part 2
• Session 7: Advanced Application Development, Part 1
• Session 8: Advanced Application Development, Part 2
• Session 9: Advanced Application Development, Part 3
• Session 10: Marketing Your Windows Phone 7 Application
• Session 11: Working with Media
• Session 12: Final Silverlight Topics and Wrap-Up

Enjoy – the ! I’ll be posting about my own adventures soon!

An interesting article tracking The Death and Rebirth of Duke Nukem Forever was posted on ArsTechnica recently, well worth a read – or at least a watch of the trailer from 1998!

Here’s to hoping 2011 is the year of the Duke. Hail to the king baby!

Quick note that the official release of Froyo (Android 2.2) is finally trickling down to Google Nexus One users. You’ll get it by the end of the week if not already. You can also download the officially signed release and update via your SD card alternatively.

UPDATE (01/07): The link above is for updating from the Google-IO Froyo release to the final.

The full OTA release is here:
http://android.clients.google.com/packages/passion/signed-passion-ota-42745.dc39ca1f.zip

The update from Froyo Google-IO to Froyo-OTA:
http://android.clients.google.com/packages/passion/signed-passion-FRF83-from-FRF50.38d66b26.zip

1. Rename the signed ZIP file to “update.zip” and upload it to your SD Card.
2. Power off your Nexus device.
3. Turn it on with the “Volume Down” button pressed.
4. When the boot loader appears, select “Recovery” using the Volume Up/Down keys to navigate and the Power button to select.
5. Once the Nexus has rebooted, the screen will display an exclamation mark with Android. Press and hold down Power and Volume Up, it’ll take a bit of time to register.
6. Navigate to “Apply SDCard:update.zip” and wait for the verification to complete and flash your phone.
7. After a bit of time the phone will reboot and launch your cultured Froyo release.
8. Verify by going to Settings > About Phone. The build number should be FRF83.
9. Bon Appetit!

As mentioned in my previous post from a couple of months back, this release packs a bit of punch! Yum!

In genius trailer! The .NET vs Java train left the station so long ago for me. .NET’s great for somethings, for everything else, there’s Java. Probably one of the best nerdy videos for the year!

UPDATED: First video was removed

With the Sun now set, Oracle has released VirtualBox 3.2 finally In particular some lovely optimisations for the newer Intel Core i5/i7 processors, Large  Page support (which helps significantly on Windows x64 and Linux) as well as a very welcome optimisation on the networking in VirtualBox as well as multi-monitor support for Windows Guests. Whats more RDP sessions are now accelerated (VRDP).

Amongst the changes from the changelog:

This version is a major update. The following major new features were added:

• Following the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle Corporation, the product is now called Oracle VM VirtualBox and all references were changed without impacting compatibility
• Experimental support for Mac OS X guests (see the manual for more information)
• Memory ballooning to dynamically in- or decrease the amount of RAM used by a VM (64-bit hosts only) (see the manual for more information)
• Page Fusion automatically de-duplicates RAM when running similar VMs thereby increasing capacity. Currently supported for Windows guests on 64-bit hosts (see the manual for more information)
• CPU hot-plugging for Linux (hot-add and hot-remove) and certain Windows guests (hot-add only) (see the manual for more information)
• New Hypervisor features: with both VT-x/AMD-V on 64-bit hosts, using large pages can improve performance (see the manual for more information); also, on VT-x, unrestricted guest execution is now supported (if nested paging is enabled with VT-x, real mode and protected mode without paging code runs faster, which mainly speeds up guest OS booting)
• Support for deleting snapshots while the VM is running
• Support for multi-monitor guest setups in the GUI for Windows guests (see the manual for more information)
• USB tablet/keyboard emulation for improved user experience if no Guest Additions are available (see the manual for more information).
• LsiLogic SAS controller emulation (see the manual for more information)
• RDP video acceleration (see the manual for more information)
• NAT engine configuration via API and VBoxManage
• Use of host I/O cache is now configurable (see the manual for more information)
• Guest Additions: added support for executing guest applications from the host system (replaces the automatic system presimparation feature; see the manual for more information)

Download from VirtualBox or get the Windows build. I’m really hoping the good Oracle keeps VirtualBox open, this is one kickass bit of kit.

You kind of knew it was going to happen but the mighty Google has open-sourced On2′s VP8 codec and set it free (in the form of a BSD-style license). Don’t forget to read an intro to the WebM VP8 SDK and get the code (the files). Some of the companies backing it and the ideas behind WebM are posted on the first blog entry.

So what is WebM?

WebM includes:

• VP8, a high-quality video codec we are releasing today under a BSD-style, royalty-free license
• Vorbis, an already open source and broadly implemented audio codec
• a container format based on a subset of the Matroska media container

Wonder what MSFT and Apple are going to do? In either case, interesting times ahead for video.

Oh hai, I almost forgot, from their FAQ, some interesting points – besides the Licensing bits.

If I have a video card that accelerates video playback, will it accelerate VP8?

The performance of VP8 is very good in software, and we’re working closely with many video card and silicon vendors to add VP8 hardware acceleration to their chips.

Will WebM files play on my TV, set-top box, PVR, etc.?

Stay tuned! The WebM community is working with hardware manufacturers to bring WebM support to a wide range of devices.

When will other Google products support WebM and VP8?

WebM support in Android is expected in the Gingerbread release (currently planned for Q4, 2010). We expect many other Google products to adopt WebM and VP8 as they prioritize it with their other product requirements. Keep an eye on the WebM blog for announcements.

Man, Google rocks!