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“Oh lord, not another Vista article!” Like me, I’m sure many of you might be thinking something along those lines whenever you see an article with the word ‘Vista’ in the title these days. We’ve had what can only be described as a plethora of articles on Windows Vista, almost all of them repetitive, one-sided and of little practical use. Some of them have bordered on the absurd, such as Infoworld declaring Windows Vista to be the second biggest tech blunder in history, giving as its reason a one paragraph description that serves more to highlight the author’s ignorance than provide any actual logic for their decision. We’ve been suffering under the weight of these nonsensical, sensationalist and opinion-laded pro- and anti-Vista articles for far too long.

So what makes this Vista article any different? The title provides a clue: it’s as much about providing practical working solutions to resolve some of the commonly-quoted Vista annoyances as anything else. That in itself should give all Vista users a reason to read it. However it doesn’t matter whether you use Vista or not, because this article does something that most of the others don’t: it takes an objective and up-to-date look at the current state of Vista, with a range of facts, clear examples and informed opinions aimed squarely at debunking a lot of the myths and FUD we’ve been gagging on for the past year. So for those of you still considering whether to make the switch from XP, for those of you who want to abandon Vista and go back to XP, for those of you who used Vista a while ago and who are wondering whether it’s worth using again now - this article puts things in perspective with the latest facts.

What this article doesn’t do: it doesn’t try to make you believe that Vista is the greatest (or worst) thing since sliced bread. It doesn’t try to force you to think a certain way by taking liberties with the truth just to prove a point. It doesn’t try to highlight how witty and incisively sarcastic I can be. And most certainly this article doesn’t try to dazzle you with technical jargon.

Read the full article over at TweakGuides.com

Microsoft’s new $300 million advertising blitz has started. The media spots will feature Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld; the hope is to combat the Mac versus PC commercials that Apple has been so successful with.

I’m a PC user but I gotta hand it to Apple’s advertising department… those ads are hilarious. I actually stop fast forwarding my DVR when I see one.

So the first Gates/Seinfeld ad has come out and it’s… well… underwhelming?! See for yourself:

Scott Hanselman, the studmuffin of the Microsoft world drops some knowledge and clears up some confusion about the size of the .NET Framework.

The .NET Framework is not really a 200+ meg download. From Scott’s site:

Which installer do I use?

Here’s the whole thing in a nutshell for Developers, ISVs, and Administrators.

• Offline Installer - One single file that can be run offline and can install the .NET Framework any system it’s run on. It’s complete, all platforms, installable offline.
• Online Installer - A 2.7 meg setup program that will detect what just the files you need, then go download between 10 and 60 megs.
  • NOTE: If you’re IT and inside an office, you’ll want to decide if you want everyone in the office downloading .NET separately, or if you just want download it once, and have them to run it off a network share. Check out the Deployment Guide for Administrators for ways to push it out via AD or SMS.

So how big is it the .NET Framework download, really?

It depends on what you’ve already got installed. Here’s some examples of my results using an XP SP2 machine.

Scott goes into much greater detail on his blog here. He’s also launched a section of his site called SmallestDotNet, it checks you browser’s “UserAgent” and figures out what version (if any) of the .NET Framework you have (or don’t have) installed, then calculated the total size if you chose to download the .NET Framework. Easy huh. The bummer is that it doesn’t work with FireFox.

The AJAX Control Toolkit is a joint project between the community and Microsoft. Built upon the ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions, the Toolkit aims to be the biggest and best collection of web-client components available. I’ve been using several of these on an internal .NET project and I’m pretty impressed. A few of the control produce nice effects, but take a bit more to implement than I care for, but it’s still worth checking out.

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Clone Detective is a Visual Studio integration that allows you to analyze C# projects for source code that is duplicated somewhere else. Having duplicates can easily lead to inconsistencies and often is an indicator for poorly factored code.

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Microsoft Office Labs releases the first community prototype from Office Labs: Speed Launch. Community prototypes are projects Microsoft employees work on in their spare time. The goal of Speed Launch is to provide lightning quick access to all the documents, files, and websites you use often. It runs on either XP or Vista, but note that it requires .NET Framework 3.0.

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Executor is a multi purpose launcher and a more advanced and customizable version of windows run. It allows you to pretty much ignore your start menu and do all kinds of time saving stuff from the Executor itself.

No doubt I’ve been in love with a similar application called Launchy for quite some time. Launchy is a free windows and linux utility designed to help you forget about your start menu, the icons on your desktop, and even your file manager. It indexes the programs in your start menu and can launch your documents, project files, folders, and bookmarks with just a few keystrokes!

Many have come, but Launchy still stands as the king. But Executor brings with it many features that Launchy doesn’t have and it might be time to make a switch.

One of the major differences between the two is Executor’s emphasis on keywords. Although it does text search for just about anything, Executor gives priority to user-assigned keywords for launching apps, documents, and folders. What’s more, you can assign a keyboard shortcut to any keyword for quick launches without even invoking Executor. It’s also has a small footprint on your system clocking in at just about 10 megs.

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Windows Vista from Microsoft takes a lot of resources, we all know that. vLite provides you with an easy removal of the unwanted components in order to make Vista run faster and to your liking.

This tool doesn’t use any kind of hacking, all files and registry entries are protected as they would be if you install the unedited version only with the changes you select.

It configures the installation directly before the installation, meaning you’ll have to remake the ISO and reinstall it. This method is much cleaner, not to mention easier and more logical than doing it after installation on every reinstall. It allows for Service Pack slipstreaming too!

Grab vLite and check out more at the vLite site.

If you find the popup notification balloons in the Windows Vista system tray to be annoying, you might be interested to know that you can completely disable them. Typically you can just turn them off in the applications causing the notifications (probably you’re best bet), but if you want to disable them across the board, this is the solution.

Note: I’m not necessarily recommending that everybody do this… you should only bother with it if you need to solve this particular problem.

Manual Registry Hack

Open up regedit.exe through the start menu search or run box, and then browse down to the following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced

Right-click on the right-hand pane, and create a new 32-bit DWORD with the following values:

• Name: EnableBalloonTips
• Value: 0

You’ll have to logoff and back on in order to see the change.

Windows 7 (formerly known as Blackcomb and Vienna) is the working name for the next major version of Microsoft Windows as the successor of Windows Vista. Microsoft has announced that it is “scoping Windows 7 development to a three-year timeframe”, and that “the specific release date will ultimately be determined by meeting the quality bar.” Windows 7 is expected to be released sometime in 2010. The client versions of Windows 7 will ship in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. A server variant, codenamed Windows Server 7, is also under development.

Microsoft is maintaining a policy of silence concerning discussion of plans and aspirations for Windows 7 as they focus on the release and marketing of Windows Vista, stating that Microsoft does not want to promise features and then fail to deliver, as happened with Windows Vista Ultimate, though some early details of various core operating system features have emerged. As a result, little is known about the feature set, though public presentations from company officials have disseminated information about some features. Leaked information from people to whom Milestone 1 (M1) of Windows 7 was shipped also provides some insight into the feature set.

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