January 2006 - Posts
Microsoft released a new XP Theme called Royale with the Windows Media Center 2005. The new theme has a nice updated look that makes XP look/feel noticably better. You can get it free from MS here...also, it's nice that it's an official theme from MS so it is stable/reliable. I've been running it on all of my machines for about a week with no issues.
Looks like Microsoft is going to take a shot at the market that Slingbox currently dominates:
http://www.betanews.com/article/MS_Testing_Media_Center_TV_Streaming/1137177825
I have to say, however, that based on what is reported here, it doesn't look all that compelling/exciting to me. The inability to watch Live TV and/or access the full MCE TV experience is a big disappointment. Sling allows users access to both live and recorded TV...I can't think of a good technical reason that MS couldn't do the same with MCE.
It also falls well short of what BeyondTV and SageTV both offer with their software extenders. Both Beyond and Sage allow you to access the full DRV shell from any TV in your house over the network. In other words, with a single PC running Beyond or Sage with TV capture cards in it, you can watch live or recorded TV from any PC in the house...even laptops via WiFi (802.11 G or better...). I don't understand why MS hasn't built the same feature into MCE...and it looks like they won't be doing it any time soon.
John Montgomery from the VS.NET team posted something today about an idea that MS has been floating in private for a few weeks - creating a 'Live' version of VS.NET:
http://blogs.msdn.com/johnmont/archive/2006/01/11/511402.aspx
I have mixed feeling on this one. I was one of the 7 people (outside of Microsoft...) that was REALLY exicted about Hailstorm a few years back when they started talking publically about it...I even wrote an article on! I still remember attending the big unveiling they had in Redmond where everyone from Verizon to eBay to Groove showed really compelling demos of how they were planning to leverage Hailstorm services to make our online lives better.
Obviosuly Hailstorm died on the vine for a bunch of good (and some not-so-good...) reasons. Now we have Hailstorm 2.0 rebranded as 'Live' and Microsoft is once again taking a shot at providing online services that will make our lives better. Interestingly this time around Microsoft has done a lot more marketing of the Live concept and released a lot fewer detials about what Live is.
In his post, John is intentionally vague about what services Microsoft is considering integrating into VS.NET. I spoke with John about this a few weeks back and floated some ideas I think would be of use:
- Killer Hosted Team Development...Focued on Students: Provide a simple free way for a team of developers to work together on a project. Give them everything Sourceforge provides, but integrated it right into the IDE. This would be killer for college students working on class projects together.
- Integrated Community Managed Documentation: Think MSDNpedia integrated into the IDE. Give developers quick context appropriate content from the community along with enabling developers to contribute and edit contet from the IDE.
- Opt-In Framework Usage Analysis: Tool integrated into the IDE that would analyze the framework APIs that are used most frequently along with rich metadata about the use case (e.g. ISV, corp developer, hobbyst...). Tie this to the documentation above and you would have a killer set of documentaiton that can be tailored to a specific user's needs.
Have other/better ideas? John is looking for feedback and they are early enough in the planning stages for your feedback to make a difference...post a comment!
Like just about everyone I struggle to manage the various credentials I use to authenticate with web sites/applications/systems I use. For the past couple of years I’ve used a VERY crude mechanism for this. I created a Note in Outlook and had about 25 entries that looked something like:
eBay
UserID: xxxxx
Password: xxxxx
This was reasonably functional in that the credentials were kept in a secure location and I could quickly access them. What became problematic, however, was the inability to search Notes for a string (at least I can’t find a way to do it…) and the need I had to access my credentials from PCs where I don’t usually run an Outlook connected to Clarity’s exchange server. So, I started looking for an alternative. I had these requirements:
After doing a bit of research I settled on the following configuration:
-
Password Minder: Simple .NET app that stores credentials (encrypted) in an XML file. No install required…just need the Exe on your PC along with the .NET Framework 1.1 and it will run just fine.
- Folder Share: I just keep finding new uses for Folder Share. For passwords, I just created a Passwords folders under the folder I sync across all of my machines and put the Password Minder XML and Exe files in there. Now I have everything I need on all of my PCs to run the app and get to my credentials.
I’ve been using this for about a week and absolutely LOVE it. It’s simple, secure, and now that it is setup I don’t have to think about it again…exactly what I was looking for.
One of the more exciting (to me anyway...) announcements from CES last week was the partnership announced between Microsoft and DirectTV. The announcement was made during Bill Gates' keynote - he said that MS would work with DirectTV to bring both SD and HD content into the Media Center world. No details given on what that means or when it will happen, but this is the first time I've heard of any plans to bring DirectTV content directly into Media center.
This is a BIG announcement for DirectTV fans like me given...especially in the light of their decision to drop their partnership with Tivo. I currently have an older dual tuner Sony/Tivo DirectTV PVR that I love. It only does SD, but it works brilliantly and has been our main PVR for the past 4 years.
I love Media Center, but without a clear path on how to get DirectTV HD content into the box I haven't seen any reason to move to it. My guess is that we won't see anything in terms of DirectTV integration until this time next year (will almost certainly be tied to Vista along with cable card support...), but at least there is now a reason to believe it will happen at some point!
Couple of interesting links:
MS Press Announcement: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/jan06/01-05WMDIRECTVPR.mspx
Additional Coverage: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060105-5913.html