Thushan Fernando Uncut » Cool Tools

Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools Released!

Thushan Fernando — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 12:51:51 +0000

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!

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Moving to Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 free ebook!

Thushan Fernando — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 10:57:34 +0000

Free ebook compliments of Microsoft Press, you can download a PDF. or an XPS of the book and grab the book’s sample code.

The book is broken down into these parts catering for the following audiences:

Part I – for those moving from Visual Studio 2003 to Visual Studio 2010.
Part II – for developers moving from Visual Studio 2005.
Part III – for developers moving from Visual Studio 2008.

See the blog post about the target audience for this ebook too.

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Oracle releases VirtualBox 3.2

Thushan Fernando — Thu, 20 May 2010 11:41:47 +0000

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.

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VirtualBox 3.2.0 Beta 1 Released!

Thushan Fernando — Mon, 03 May 2010 09:37:16 +0000

Finally downloaded the latest 3.2.0 release of VirtualBox today and gave it ago!

From the forum post for this pre-release.

VirtualBox Version 3.2.0 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

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)

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 (see the manual for more information)

USB tablet/keyboard emulation for improved user experience if no Guest Additions are available

LsiLogic SAS controller emulation

RDP video acceleration

NAT engine configuration via API and VBoxManage

Guest Additions: added support for executing guest applications from the host system

OVF: enhanced OVF support with custom namespace to preserve settings that are not part of the base OVF standard

In addition, the following items were fixed and/or added:

VMM: fixed crash with the OpenSUSE 11.3 milestone kernel during early boot (software virtualization only)

VMM: fixed OS/2 guest crash with nested paging enabled

VMM: fixed Windows 2000 guest crash when configured with a large amount of RAM (bug 5800)

VMM: fixed massive display performance loss (AMD-V with nested paging only)

Linux/Solaris guests: PAM module for automatic logons added

GUI: guess the OS type from the OS name when creating a new VM

GUI: added VM setting for passing the time in UTC instead of passing the local host time to the guest (bug 1310)

GUI: fixed seamless mode on secondary monitors (bugs 1322 and 1669)

GUI: added –seamless and –fullscreen command line switches (bug 4220)

Settings: be more robust when saving the XML settings files

Mac OS X: rewrite of the CoreAudio driver and added support for audio input (bug 5869)

Mac OS X: external VRDP authentication module support (bug 3106)

Mac OS X: Moved the realtime dock preview settings to the VM settings (no global option anymore). Use the dock menu to configure it.

Mac OS X: added the VM menu to the dock menu

3D support: fixed corrupted surface rendering (bug 5695)

3D support: fixed VM crashes when using ARB_IMAGING (bug 6014)

3D support: fixed assertion when guest applications uses several windows with single OpenGL context (bug 4598)

3D support: added GL_ARB_pixel_buffer_object support

3D support: added OpenGL 2.1 support

3D support: fixed Final frame of Compiz animation not updated to the screen (Mac OS X only) (bug 4653)

Added support for virtual high precision event timer (HPET)

LsiLogic: Fixed detection of hard disks attached to port 0 when using the drivers from LSI

NAT: fixed ICMP latency (non-Windows hosts only; bug 6427)

Keyboard/Mouse emulation: fixed handling of simultaneous mouse/keyboard events under certain circumstances (bug 5375)

Shared folders: fixed issue with copying read-only files (Linux guests only; bug 4890)

OVF: fixed mapping between two IDE channels in OVF and the one IDE controller in VirtualBox

Bootilicious! Download links are on the site (updated for BETA2).

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Mechwarrior 4, free download!

Thushan Fernando — Sat, 01 May 2010 14:13:53 +0000

Quick note after seeing this on Kotaku, Mektek has released MechWarrior 4 for download for free (as in totally). Bring back those memories! The site’s been MC hammered right now but grab the 1.7Gb and lock & load

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Visual Studio 2010 & Resharper 5 hit the interwebs.

Thushan Fernando — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 10:24:31 +0000

A little late on this one, but MSFT have released the long awaited Visual Studio 2010 release and JetBrains have also released ReSharper 5.

A full breakdown of Visual Studios are also available, not a huge fan of all these different SKUs to be honest. You can download a copy from your MSDN subscriptions now, or download the trial version (direct download), buy an upgrade from VS2008 or just download the .NET 4.0 runtime (48Mb).

I’ve spent the past 3 hours downloading from MSDN and its been crawling.

MUST.HAVE.PLINQ.FIX.

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Google shows the power of HTML 5, ports Quake II to run in browser!

Thushan Fernando — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 00:25:43 +0000

The title says it all. Using the Jake2 port of Quake II (to Java) the bright sparks at Google have used GWT to bring Quake II to HTML 5.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyfu4OwjUEI

We started with the existing Jake2 Java port of the Quake II engine, then used the Google Web Toolkit (along with WebGL, WebSockets, and a lot of refactoring) to cross-compile it into Javascript. You can see the results in the video above — we were honestly a bit surprised when we saw it pushing over 30 frames per second on our laptops (your mileage may vary)!

At first I thought it was an April fools joke, but as cruel as that may be, it wasn’t. Download the source and give it ago, I nearly fell of my chair.

At the moment you have to build from source and mess about a bit, but fear not, I followed the guide on OSNews by Kroc on our MacBook Pro and it worked quite well, yet to try it on Linux.

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xkcd goes CLI!

Thushan Fernando — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 00:14:46 +0000

This is cool, xkcd is now command line based! Try it!

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ASP.NET MVC 2 released!

Thushan Fernando — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 12:35:48 +0000

Quick note that ASP.NET MVC 2.0 was released on Friday, still yet to play with the RTM, but don’t let me stop you. Go for it!

Link dump – mostly from Scott Hanselman’s announcement:

Exciting and just in time for a fairly large project we’re working on right now

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Ninject 2.0 is out, now with more ninja!

Thushan Fernando — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 23:21:09 +0000

Nate Kohari (the head Ninja of Ninject) has announced the availability of Ninject 2.0 which has been a long time coming – being a complete rewrite. The sources are on github repository. Oh and checkout the new website, its got more ninja references that you can poke a ninja with!

As for .NET 4.0 compatibility, whilst not officially announced, we’ve been using Ninject 2.0 (betas) and now just moving to the final release with .NET 4.0 without issues. All documentation and material are available on the wiki however.

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