A single pretty important thing to mention, which held me up half an hour or so — for some reason, the installation program for the SDK doesn’t work correctly when used with the mouse. Specifically, the Next button on the first page and the radio buttons to accept the license do their jobs only when used with the keyboard… I hope this will save somebody some time.

Yesterday I managed to install Vista CTP build 5308 on my new Acer TravelMate 8204WLMi. This is what my BlogJet window looks like now:

In part it’s supposed to look like that, because the Glass effects of the new UI actually work pretty well on my system. In other parts it’s not as intended, for example where the menu bar is simply missing :-) The installation itself was easy and without problems. Kudos to Microsoft — I’m …

Still pondering that laptop thing — in response to yesterday’s post, someone pointed me to the Acer TravelMate 8204WLMi, which I had actually already seen in a review. I had not given it any further attention, partly because the review wasn’t completely positive, but now I find that this must have been about the only reviewer who found really interesting flaws in that laptop.

Turns out this is a really nice machine, with a lot more modern h …

DDD day 3 is on June 3rd, 2006, and last time there I promised I would submit a session proposal myself this time. Here are the two proposals I just put in — I hope they’re not so specific that nobody likes them :-)

Refactoring made easy with Refactor!

Refactoring is the process of changing implementation details of methods, classes or other code entities, to promote readability, efficiency and/or performance, without changing the external interface of the code entity. Refactor! is a pro …

I was looking around for a computer that would be good to install Vista on and get into some WinFX programming, specifically the WPF part of it. My current desktop system is pretty nice to work with, but I’ve also had a higher priority for large desktop real estate and so I never got into those really fast graphics cards that are needed to do Aero Glass.

My desktop system is no slouch, but it’s one of these systems that have been extended manually over years, and it really doesn’t work all tha …

I guess some of you have noticed that my blog has been offline again for the past four days, after a similar problem two weeks or so back. I’m sorry about this, it happens randomly, apparently because of some funny problem in Microsoft ISA Server 2004. The first time this happened, I knew at least that I had made changes to the firewall configuration at the point where the problem crept in, but this last time I’m pretty sure I didn’t do anything to the server at that time. In either case, ISA S …

I’m going to be at DevWeek next week, at the Developer Express booth. We’ll be demonstrating the eXpressApp Framework, possibly also some of the other upcoming Developer Express products/product versions, like XPO, XtraCharts, XtraLayout Control, … Anything really, I guess. Mark Miller will be there, so this is also a great chance to get some first-hand info or demos for CodeRush, Refactor! or the free DXCore. If you are there, drop by the Developer Express booth — I’m looking forward to a c …

… apparently. A few weeks ago, I decided to get my first DVD recorder. Yes, I know, I’m a latecomer — but up to this point I just never had the urge to record DVDs :-) So, as I’m also getting Sky+, I thought I’d do just fine with a model that doesn’t have its own hard drive, and as people kept telling me that “these days everybody has a DVD recorder, you can buy them for £49 at Tesco’s” I decided to go for a low-price Lite-On LVW5006. I got it from Argos for a pretty nice price and it arrive …