Small Basic has its very own cute little IDE. Ranging from graphics, sounds, arrays, stacks, network access, and Flickr photo access, it seems to be just the perfect way for anyone to get started with programming. It also has IntelliSense built in, along with a very helpful debugger. This is like a free little Visual Studio for kids.

There’s also a very easy and helpful guide available for Small Basic to get your kid started.

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Here is how it looks under Windows Vista:

Instructions on How to replace Windows Vista Calculator with Windows 7 Calculator:

Step 1: Download Windows 7 Calculator from here.

Step 2 (Optional): Navigate to C:\Windows\System32\ & C:\Windows\System32\en-US\ to backup the files calc.exe and calc.exe.mui respectively. Do not skip this step as you might want to revert back to the original Calculator just incase you mess up something when replacing the files.

Step 3: Now copy and replace calc.exe in C:\Windows\System32\ & calc.exe.mui in C:\Windows\System32\en-US\ with the ones you just downloaded. Make sure you are logged in as an administrator account and have given your account full permissions for the files you are replacing.

That’s it! You can now enjoy fully functional calculator from Windows 7 in Windows Vista.

Download Windows 7 Calculator for Windows Vista.

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So if you are bored with all the DreamScenes shipped by Microsoft, this one is surely worth trying out!

Download
File Size: 7.2 MB
Resolution: 1024×768
Format: .wmv

Download Leopard Aurora for Windows Vista Ultimate

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What is LiveUpload to Facebook?

LiveUpload to Facebook is a plug-in for Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta that makes it easy for anyone to upload their photos to Facebook. The plug-in takes advantage of the new people tagging feature in Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta to persist your people tags onto Facebook.
Features:

• Organize and tag your photos in Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta.
• Quickly and easily upload your photos to Facebook, including any people tags added in Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta.
• Upload your pictures to an existing album or create a new one.

 

What is LiveUpload to YouTube?

LiveUpload to YouTube is a plug-in for Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta and Windows Live MovieMaker Beta that makes it easy for anyone to upload their videos straight to YouTube.

Download LiveUpload to Facebook and start sharing your photos.

Download LiveUpload to Youtube and start sharing your videos.

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See the images below for a before and after comparison.

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Welcome Page

Inbox

  Today Page

Themes Contacts

Contact drop down menu options.

More Links

Drop down options

Calendar choice on first time access.

Options

Mail Contacts

Mail Favorites

Compose Mail

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According to the website:

We’re evolving the popular SyncToy application to enable much more than just file/folder synchronization between PCs! With this project, providers will be able to register and be discovered in a variety of sync groups including contacts, files, favorites, videos, as well as synchronization across services such as the Live Mesh, PhotoBucket.com, Smugmug.com, and more. Powered by the Microsoft Sync Framework - this E2E and hub for sync providers has value for both consumers AND developers…

This project is currently in incubation with the download links marked as coming soon. The UI is pretty and could potentially allow you to move images from your desktop to Facebook or contacts to Hotmail using Live Mesh only. The scenarios could be endless with seamless syncing of data between different services. For currently possible scenarios, check our Live Mesh Scenarios Directory.

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Steven Sinofsky at the PDC2008 Open Space

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Although the Atom processor used seems to be dual core, we’ll be doing our own tests with the pre-beta build here at Redmond Pie on some single and dual core low end systems. We’ll follow up with the results soon!

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Over the next couple of months we’ll be rolling out another infrastructure update to the Windows Update agent (client code). This update makes it possible for users to install more than 80 updates at the same time. For more information about this update, please refer to KB949104 (section referring to the 7.2.6001.788 update).

This is the issue this update will fix

When you try to install 80 or more updates at the same time from the Windows Update Web page or from the Microsoft Update Web page, you may receive the error code 0×80070057.

I wonder if installing these 80 updates would be pain free and without restarts. Personally, I never had any problem installing the huge number of updates needed after a fresh Windows Vista install, which are probably far less than 80 though.

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  [Image courtesy Apple Insider]

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The great things about this viewer are endless. You don’t have to navigate through gazillion pages to view those images. That’s what you have to do to view images in Flickr. You can pan and zoom in and out fluidly, and the images just quickly as well. Having used this viewer on the website, now I’m actually addicted to it.

Now I hate the idea of navigating through many web pages to just view images. And this is just one of the examples of where Silverlight really pawns Flash!

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Meet the all new Windows 7.

Mike Nash talking about engineering Windows 7.

Shanen Boettcher talking about the transition from Vista to 7.

This preview video of Windows 7 is only available to customers running genuine version of Windows.

Download Windows 7 Preview Video

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Overview of Key Features:

Democratizing Application Lifecycle Management
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) crosses many roles within an organization and traditionally not every one of the roles has been an equal player in the process. Visual Studio Team System 2010 continues to build the platform for functional equality and shared commitment across an organization’s ALM process.
Enabling emerging trends
Every year the industry develops new technologies and new trends. With Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0, Microsoft delivers tooling and framework support for the latest innovations in application architecture, development and deployment.
Inspiring developer delight
Ever since the first release of Visual Studio, Microsoft has set the bar for developer productivity and flexibility. Visual Studio 2010 continues to deliver on the core developer experience by significantly improving upon it for roles involved with the software development process. .NET Framework 4.0 contains numerous improvements that make it easier to develop powerful and compelling applications.
Riding the next generation platform wave
Microsoft continues to invest in the market leading operating system, productivity application and server platforms to deliver increased customer value in these offerings. With Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 customers will have the tooling support and the platform support needed to create amazing solutions around these technologies.

The .NET logo has also been changed as a part of this release as seen below:

This CTP release is currently available as a image for Virtual PC only.

Download Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 CTP

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Today web gadgets, mashup components, advertisements, and other 3^rd party content on websites either run with full trust alongside your content or are isolated inside of IFrames. As a result, many modern web applications are intrinsically insecure, often with unpredictable service quality. Live Labs Web Sandbox addresses this problem.

An increasing number of Web 2.0 applications incorporate 3^rd party content. There are two common patterns: via direct script inclusion or embedded in an IFrame.

• Components that are included directly execute with full trust and can access private information elsewhere on the page and site. The site is subject to intentional or non-intentional bugs that could compromise personal information or degrade the web application’s quality of service.
• IFrames offer isolation but not complete security. Malicious code can try to install ActiveX controls, redirect users, interrogate your browser history, degrading the quality of service. IFrames also make it hard to provide an integrated experience and share data across components.

Web Sandbox from Live Labs enables developers to test their code by using the Sandbox provided here. In addition to this, they have a couple of sample codes in place for you to try and hack out.

Plus there will be more on the Web Sandbox at the upcoming PDC conference in LA. You can join in the team on Monday, October 27th at 11AM to learn more about Web Sandbox.

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These images will require Hyper-V and for that you will need to have a base install of Windows Server 2008 (64bit edition) with Hyper-V running. For more information on obtaining and installing the latest version of Hyper-V, please visit the Hyper-V Homepage.

This release is intended for testing purposes only and can be evaluated for 60 days. However, this 60 days evaluation limit could be increased to 240 days through re-arm method provided by Microsoft. After this time, you will need to uninstall the software or upgrade to a fully-licensed version of Windows Server 2008.

Further instructions on how to install Windows Server 2008 Evaluation VHD images with Hyper-V can be found here.

Download Windows Server 2008 Evaluation VHD Images for Hyper-V

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Lets first start with a brief intro on Microsoft Speech API (SAPI) version 5.3. It is basically a managed API that allows developers to write speech enabled applications in .NET Framework 3.0 and above and is already integrated with Windows Vista. The API resides in System.Speech.Dll assembly.

To begin, create a new WPF Application project in Visual Studio 2008. You must add System.Speech.Dll assembly reference to your project. To do this, go to Solution Explorer, right click on your project name, select Add Reference and then look into .NET tab where you will find System.Speech, select it and press OK.

Now, you can import all namespaces of System.Speech in your application. For now, just import System.Speech.Synthesis, System.Windows.Form and System.IO.

Speech Synthesis is a process of converting text to speech. For this, we will use SpeechSynthesizer() class, its methods and properties in our application to accomplish our goal.

The speech synthesizer class has got four properties: Rate, State, Volume and Voice that are used to get and set rate, state, volume and voice of the speech. The value of rate is between -10 to 10 where as Volume varies from 0 to 100.

The Speak() and SpeakAsync() methods are used to speak synchronously and asynchronously respectively.

SpeechSyntehsizer foo = new SpeechSynthesizer();
foo.Speak("Hello WPF."); 

So, on the basis of above class methods and properties I will start building this app. First of all, we will write the XAML code for the design elements and the controls.

<Window x:Class="TextToSpeech.Window1"

    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"

    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"

    Title="Text to Speech" Height="380" Width="580" 

AllowsTransparency="False" WindowStyle="SingleBorderWindow">

    <Grid >

        <Grid.ColumnDefinitions>

            <ColumnDefinition Width="286*" />

            <ColumnDefinition Width="272*" />

        </Grid.ColumnDefinitions>

        <Button Height="23" HorizontalAlignment="Right" Margin="0,0,12,8" 

                Name="SpeechButton" VerticalAlignment="Bottom" Width="101" 

Click="SpeechButton_Click" Grid.Column="1">

            Speak

        </Button>

        <RichTextBox Margin="0,45,0,67" Name="richTBoxContent" 

Background="WhiteSmoke" 

                     Foreground="Black" Grid.ColumnSpan="2" />

        <Button Height="23" Margin="0,10,12,0" 

                Name="OpenTextFileButton" VerticalAlignment="Top" 

Click="OpenTextFileButton_Click" Grid.Column="1" HorizontalAlignment="Right" 

Width="110">

            Open a Text File

        </Button>

        <TextBox Height="23" Margin="9,10,130,0" Name="FileNameTextBox" 

VerticalAlignment="Top" Grid.ColumnSpan="2" />

        <ComboBox Height="23" Margin="90,0,76,30" 

                  Name="comboBoxVolume" VerticalAlignment="Bottom" 

SelectedIndex="4" >

            <ComboBoxItem>10</ComboBoxItem>

            <ComboBoxItem>20</ComboBoxItem>

            <ComboBoxItem>30</ComboBoxItem>

            <ComboBoxItem>40</ComboBoxItem>

            <ComboBoxItem>50</ComboBoxItem>

            <ComboBoxItem>60</ComboBoxItem>

            <ComboBoxItem>70</ComboBoxItem>

            <ComboBoxItem>80</ComboBoxItem>

            <ComboBoxItem>90</ComboBoxItem>

            <ComboBoxItem>100</ComboBoxItem>

        </ComboBox>

        <Label Height="28" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="32,0,0,25" 

               Name="labelVolume" VerticalAlignment="Bottom" Width="51">

Volume:</Label>

        <ComboBox Height="23" Margin="22,0,130,30" 

                  Name="comboBoxRate" VerticalAlignment="Bottom" 

SelectedIndex="2" Grid.Column="1">

            <ComboBoxItem>-10</ComboBoxItem>

            <ComboBoxItem>-5</ComboBoxItem>

            <ComboBoxItem>0</ComboBoxItem>

            <ComboBoxItem>5</ComboBoxItem>

            <ComboBoxItem>10</ComboBoxItem>

        </ComboBox>

        <Label Height="28" Margin="268,0,249,25" Name="labelRate" 

VerticalAlignment="Bottom" Grid.ColumnSpan="2">

            Rate:</Label>

    </Grid>

</Window>

The above XAML code will generate a windows which will look something like this:

Now, we will create a event handler of SpeechButton and a method to convert the contents of rich text box to a string.

 // Setting up the properties to speak.

        private void SpeechButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)

        {

            int Volume;

            int Rate;

            ComboBoxItem volumeItem = (ComboBoxItem)comboBoxVolume.

Items[comboBoxVolume.SelectedIndex];

            Volume = Convert.ToInt32(volumeItem.Content.ToString());

            ComboBoxItem rateItem = (ComboBoxItem)comboBoxRate.

Items[comboBoxRate.SelectedIndex];

            Rate = Convert.ToInt32(rateItem.Content.ToString());

            foo.Volume = Volume;

            foo.Rate = Rate;

            foo.Speak(ConvertRichTextToString());

        }

 // Convert the contents of rich text box to string.

        private string ConvertRichTextToString()

        {

            TextRange textRange = new TextRange(richTBoxContent.

Document.ContentStart, richTBoxContent.Document.ContentEnd);

            return textRange.Text;

        }

And now, we write the following code to open up a text file and load its contents into the rich text box.

// Open any text file.

        private void OpenTextFileButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)

        {

            OpenFileDialog fileDialog = new OpenFileDialog();

            fileDialog.InitialDirectory = @"C:\";

            fileDialog.Filter = "Text Files (*.txt)|*.txt";

            fileDialog.RestoreDirectory = true;

            if (fileDialog.ShowDialog() == System.Windows.Forms.DialogResult.OK)

            {

                LoadFile(fileDialog.FileName);

                FileNameTextBox.Text = fileDialog.FileName;

            }

        }

        // Load text file to the rich text box.

        private void LoadFile(string File)

        {

            TextRange range;

            FileStream fileStream;

            if (System.IO.File.Exists(File))

            {

                range = new TextRange(richTBoxContent.Document.ContentStart,

 richTBoxContent.Document.ContentEnd);

                fileStream = new FileStream(File, FileMode.OpenOrCreate);

                range.Load(fileStream, System.Windows.DataFormats.Text);

                fileStream.Close();

            }

        }

Thats it! We are done. Feel free to post any queries you have related to the code posted above.

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In reply to the first ad, a few things I want to point out:

• Apple has as big an advertising budget as any other company you know. And most of it is used to mock Microsoft and Vista, instead of marketing OS X features in the ‘Get a Mac’ ads.
• Apple have yet to fix many iPhone and Leopard issues. The few Windows applications made by Apple such as Quicktime, iTunes and Safari are pathetic, buggy and crapware. We have yet to see them fix these apps for good, but in the ads they make us wonder why Microsoft didn’t spend cash on fixing Vista.
• Most people would remember, OS X wasn’t perfect when it was released. It was slow and buggy as well. And Leopard is the fifth iteration of that OS, which has now matured enough to claim respectability. While, Vista is the first of its kind. And by kind, I refer to the new driver model, APIs, UI, kernel updates and various other major changes to the Windows core.
• How about the iPhone? Apple has spent lots to market the iPhone. But the issues and shortcomings, and not to forget the lack of simple basic features of the mighty phone are well known to everyone. But does Apple fix them? Copy Paste? No! Video recording? No! MMS ? No! Plus do we have to remind you of the Mobile Me fiasco? Charging bucks for a service, that isn’t even worth using for free for starters. So Apple, why don’t you put your money where it’s needed?
• How about the insanely expensive iBricks Macbooks? Do I give a crap about the new aluminum process? No way. It’s a notebook, for God’s sake! not jewelry for my girlfriend! If Apple kicks out Firewire, it’s a great decision. If it was Microsoft, Apple would have used that as a reason to ‘Get a Mac’. Do I need say more?

Now, for the second ad.

• Funny Ad Apple. Ironic, that you didn’t mention even a single product of yours in this ad. And you’re calling on Microsoft for doing the same?

Paul Thurrott has put the ridiculousness of Apple in great words:

Irony/hypocrisy alert: For the past two years, Apple has been spending money on advertising designed to make Windows Vista look bad, while not spending money fixing the many problems in their own products. I’m looking at you Leopard, MobileMe, and iPhone 3G. And don’t get me started on the style over substance of the new Macbooks.

Irony/hypocrisy alert 2: The ad comes less than a week after Apple introduced its incredibly expensive new laptops into the worst economic conditions in almost 100 years. And as the Wall Street Journal noted this morning, they did so even though the “average price [of a Mac was already] more than twice as high as computers based on Microsoft’s Windows operating system.” So much for the computer for the rest of us.

Putting all past Apple ads aside, these have been the stupidest ones I’ve seen to date. They rate high in the category of ‘Crap Ads’. Maybe now Microsoft should get aggressive and mock Apple in an ad, by giving an Oscar to Steve Jobs for his true to life acting which fools people into buying anything he shows in his presentations! But alas, Microsoft wont fall that low as Apple does.

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Here are the simple steps.

1. Right click your Chrome shortcut icon, and open properties.
2. Navigate to the Compatibility tab and change the settings to match the ones as shown in the image above. The compatibility mode should be set to Windows Server 2003 (Service Pack 1) and not Windows XP, as Chrome fails to work with it. Also, Disable Visual Themes should be checked. Apply the settings and close the properties box and now run Chrome.

Voila! now you’ll be running Chrome in the Windows XP theme. I’ve tried using this trick on the new Windows Live Wave 3 desktop apps too, as they look nice even in the non-Aero mode, but it doesn’t seem to work with them. If anyone knows a way to get them to revert to their Windows XP themes on Vista, do let us know.

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