James Brundage published an excellent serie of articles about using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and PowerShell) on the Windows PowerShell team blog :

• WPF & PowerShell – Part 1 ( Hello World & Welcome to the Week of WPF )
• WPF & PowerShell – Part 2 (Exploring WPF (and the rest of .NET) with Scripts)
• WPF & PowerShell -- Part 3 (Handling Events)
• WPF & PowerShell -- Part 4 (XAML & Show-Control)
• WPF & PowerShell - Part 5 ( Using WPF & PowerShell Modules)
• WPF & PowerShell - Part 6 (Running Functions in the Background)
• WPF & PowerShell - Part 7 (Sharing Hosts)

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The four new features discussed in this post require upgrading to Domain Fonctionnal Level (DFL) Windows Server 2008 :

• SYSVOL Distributed File System (DFS) replication support
• Advanced Encryption Services (AES 128 and 256) support for the Kerberos protocol
• Last Interactive Logon Information
• Fine-Grained Password Policies

Read the complete post at 4sysops.com

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This news is cool, really cool !

The famous Sysinternals tools are now accessible online thanks to this new service : Synternals Live.

Simply enter a tool's Sysinternals Live path into Windows Explorer or a command prompt as \\live.sysinternals.com\tools\<toolname> or view the entire Sysinternals Live tools directory in a browser at http://live.sysinternals.com.

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Microsoft Office Labs has released a free screencasting software using which you can capture all your desktop activities with keystrokes and audio. When you install Community Clips, it adds buttons providing options to Office Ribbon and also to System Tray. Its a simple , basic screencasting software and very easy to use for preparing demo or help videos.

Source :	meraTechPort
Download :	communityclips.officelabs.com/download.aspx

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There is a lot of rumours over the net about Windows 7, from new features to why Microsoft is so silent.

Today Chris Flores, Director at Microsoft working on the Windows Client Communications Team publish a few straighten a few things on Windows Vista Team Blog :

With Windows 7, we're trying to more carefully plan how we share information ...

Contrary to some speculation, Microsoft is not creating a new kernel for Windows 7.

... we're still on track to ship approximately three years after the general availability of Windows Vista.

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Here’s a quick summary of upcoming changes in Microsoft Office 2007 SP2 with regards to document formats:

1. With Office 2007 SP2, you will be able save documents to Adobe PDF format without requiring external plug-ins.
2. Microsoft Office 2007 will still not be able to read content from your PDF files so Adobe Reader is safe.
3. Like PDF, Office 2007 will also let you save documents in ODF format which is used by OpenOffice and is supported by almost every web office suite.
4. Unlike PDF, you will be able to open OpenOffice documents in Office 2007 for reading and editing.
5. Office 2007 customers will get an open to set OpenOffice as the default document format. That means when you hit Ctrl+S inside Microsoft Word, the first choice will be .odt.
6. The expected release date for Microsoft Office Service Pack 2 is 1H 2009.

For details, check the press release or tech analysis by Matusow and Doug Mahugh.

Source  : Digital Inspiration

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Kong is a freeware top-down shooter game featuring monkeys with a thirst for blood in a full 3D environment. The rules are simple, pick up as many health/armor packs and weapons as you can before blowing your enemies into smithereens. The game currently features three game modes including deathmatch, team deathmatch and capture the flag with plans to introduce a number of new game modes. Computer controlled bots are provided as target practise but the real fun comes from playing in multiplayer over a local area network or the internet.

official site : http://www.konggame.co.uk

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Formula One is to have its first official computer game in more than two years next season following the capture of a new official licencing deal with British gaming company Codemasters, autosport.com can reveal.

The new game should be based on the 2009 season and should be available in 2009.

If you'd like to give you ideas on the game there is already an official forum.

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If you like to play first person shooter games on Windows here's two free games :

• Celistial Impact
• Nexuiz

Have fun.

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Great post by arcanecode ! This is a step by step guide to successfully install the new Ubuntu 8.04 on Virtual PC 2007.

 

Source : arcanecode.wordpress.com

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Dmitry Sotnikov posted a great step-by-step instruction on installing Windows PowerShell on Windows Server 2008 in Server Core mode.

Note that these are in no way official or supported by Microsoft. Microsoft is working on official version of .NET and PowerShell for Server Core installations, so eventually you will be able to get this fully supported. Until then below are the instructions you can use at your own risk, etc., etc.

Source : dmitrysotnikov.wordpress.com,

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Microsoft released an update for Virtual PC and Virtual Server to support Vista SP1, Windows 2008 and XP SP3.

You can download the updates at Microsoft.com/downloads :

• Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 SP1
• Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 Update

Don't forget to upgrade the Virtual Machine Additions on each Virtual Machine to the new version 13.820

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If you are looking for more features in the builtin forum webpart in in SharePoint you may want to look at thoses alternatives :

• Tobias Zimmergren's SharePoint Forums WebPart
• SharePoint Forums Web Part Project
• Enhanced Discussion Board Edition from The Community Kit for SharePoint Project
• KWizCom SharePoint Forum Web Part (commercial)

Note : I didn't try any of those webparts (you'll have to try them for yourself), some are still in beta and there may be more Forums WebPart on the net.

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Following popular demand, Kirk Stark from the SharePoint User Assistance team has created a set of useful posters that show the Stsadm command line parameters for MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0.

Source : blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint

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Don't be too fast to complain about Microsoft. It Looks like some OEM (like HP) have shipped their INTEL and AMD based computers with the same Windows XP image. This is not a recommended config.

Jesper M. Johansson as an excellent post on his blog about this problem and how to fix it.

[May 19, 2008] Microsoft issued a technical note about this problem : http://support.microsoft.com/kb/888372/en-us

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From  Microsoft's Failover and Network Load Balancing Clustering Team Blog :

We’ve had a lot of requests for a centralized website to find clustering and high-availability information and…it’s coming soon. J But in the meantime I’ll post some great resources from Microsoft’s Clustering and High-Availability team.

 

I’ll try to update this list when we get a few more. We have several coming out in the near future (including Active Directory considerations).

Check the list at blogs.msdn.com/clustering

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Active Directory Reporting Tool (ADRT) allows you to sort user objects depending on a couple of important attributes: disabled, locked, expires, never expires, expired, password expires, password never expires, password expired, and never logged in.

This product is currently free and 100% functional!

Source :	4sysops.com
Download :	maxpowersoft.com

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It's with great excitement that I get to be the first to announce the initial release of the Microsoft SharePoint Administration Toolkit!

this first release contains two very useful tools which are both supported on Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

The first tool, called "Batch Site Manager", adds new functionality through Central Administration.  From the new "Move, Lock, and Delete Site Collections" page on Applications Management you can schedule bulk operations against site collections in the farm—including moving site collections between content databases

The second tool is actually a new command in STSADM called "updatealert". This command will refresh all alert URLs in a specific site collection, which is extremely important should you change the URL of a web application or after an upgrade

Source : blogs.msdn.com/sharepoint

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The Microsoft Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset (DaRT) interface.

This month, Microsoft updated its Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP), a suite of desktop management tools that are currently offered only to the company's Software Assurance (SA) customers. As with earlier versions of MDOP, this suite is a must-have collection of valuable utilities--many of which originated at startups since purchased by Microsoft--and an obvious and tangible benefit of Microsoft's subscription-based enterprise licensing program. If you're not taking advantage of MDOP, it's time to take a look.

Read this great review of MDOP by Paul Thurrott.

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