The Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor is a small beta application that you can run on your current Windows XP-based computer to find out if it's ready for an upgrade to Windows Vista. When you run the Upgrade Advisor, it will scan your computer and generate an easy-to-understand report of any known system and device compatibility issues, along with recommendations on how you can get your PC ready for Windows Vista. Microsoft plans to add functionality to Upgrade Advisor, such as checking how your software applications will run with Windows Vista. Download the beta version today and check this site in a few months for a new version.
Source : Microsoft.Com
Looking for Internet explorer Add-ons ? look at this new site from microsoft : www.ieaddons.com
McAfee SiteAdvisor is a security add-on for your Internet Explorer browser that helps you identify sites that are linked to spyware, adware, spam, viruses, browser-based attacks, phishing, or online fraud. And it is FREE !
Microsoft has introduced a one-shop-stop for searching RSS feeds from the company, including feeds from MSDN Blogs, TechNet Blogs, Microsoft Dynamics and others.
Yesteday Microsoft finaly announced the system requirements and recommandations for Windows Vista.
A Windows Vista Capable PC includes at least:
- A modern processor (at least 800MHz1).
- 512 MB of system memory.
- A graphics processor that is DirectX 9 capable.
A Windows Vista Premium Ready PC includes at least:
- 1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor1.
- 1 GB of system memory.
- A graphics processor that runs Windows Aero2.
- 128 MB of graphics memory.
- 40 GB of hard drive capacity with 15 GB free space.
- DVD-ROM Drive3.
- Audio output capability.
- Internet access capability.
Source : Microsoft.com
Microsoft just release a great font for programming : Consolas. It's a monospaced font optimize for ClearType. It just look great on my ThinkPad.
The only catch is « This package is only intended for licensed users of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 ». Why are they doing this, isn't Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Express supposed to be free ?
I'm not suggesting in anyway thay you should try to hack the installer. But If you would like to try this font before you buy a full Visual Studio Package you may want to try to create this key in the registry : [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0] and see what happen :-).
You can download the font package at www.Microsoft.com/downloads.
WinMerge is an Open Source visual text file differencing and merging tool for Win32 platforms. It is highly useful for determing what has changed between project versions, and then merging changes between versions.
Looks a lot better than Microsoft WinDiff
Get it at winmerge.sourceforge.net
The Regex Coach is avery handy tool for anyone that needs to work with regular expressions. It can often be very time consuming to figure out why a certain expression is not working the way you think it should. This little program allows you to interactively create your expression and preview the effects instantly under different conditions. It tries to describe the regular expression in plain English and provides a graphical representation of the parse tree of the regular expression.
Get it at www.weitz.de/regex-coach/
