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SixRevisions has posted an article on 12 Excellent Free Text Editors for Coders. For the record, I don’t actually use a “free” editor for my primary development. However, since I do web development I’ll end up on a remote session with clients and need to debug something at their location… installing Visual Studio isn’t an option. Luckily, there are some really good free editors and my favorite one ends up first on the list.

You can make writing code as complicated as you want, but at the end of the day, all you really need is your favorite, trusty text editor. You can use a simple one like Microsoft’s Notepad, but oftentimes it’s helpful to have a text editor that has syntax highlighting/coloring, support for multiple languages, a robust find and replace feature, and other features and options that make writing code just a tad bit easier.

NOTEPAD++

(Windows)

NOTEPAD++ is the premier replacement for Microsoft’s Notepad. It has an auto-completion feature (for most supported languages) that guesses what you’re trying to write, a tabbed interface which is great for working with multiple files without cluttering your task bar, a powerful RegEx find-and-replace feature, code folding, support for a large array of languages (even Assembler!) and much more. These are just some of the features that make NOTEPAD++ my personal default text editor.

Check out the rest here!

Windows 7’s user interface overhaul, there’s is a lot of hype about this right now. We know what’s going to change, we know what it looks like, but there’s one important question that has not really been given much stage time: why? At PDC, one session was dedicated to just that question. Speaking was Chaitanya Sareen, part of the windows user interface team. He placed the changes in Windows 7 into context, talked about Windows’ user interface history, and explained why certain changes were made. An interesting insight into the goals of the Windows 7 interface.

Watch the video here.

Microsoft has been hinting that even though it had no plans to make major changes to the Windows kernel, it did have a scheme up its sleeve to make Windows 7 and Windows 7 Server better suited to working on multicore/parallel systems. Now details are becoming clearer as to how Microsoft plans to do this.

During the debut of the pre-beta of Windows 7 this week, Windows Engineering Chief Steven Sinofsky made a passing reference to Windows 7 being able to scale to 256 processors. But he never said how this would be enabled.

Mark Russinovich, Technical Fellow in Microsoft’s Core OS division, explained in more detail how Microsoft has managed to do this in a video interview published on Microsoft’s Channel 9 Web site. Russinovich said that Microsoft has managed to break the dispatcher lock in Windows — a task that had stumped even the father of the Windows NT operating system, David Cutler. When Cutler designed Windows for the server, systems beyond 32-way seemed far, far away, Russinovich said.

Presented below is video of Mark Russinovich (of sysinternals fame… ya seriously the guy is a geek hero) enlightens us on the new kernel constructs in Windows 7. One very important change in Windows 7 kernel is the dismantling of the Dispatcher Spin Lock and redesign and implementation of its functionality into separate components.

Mark Russinovich: Inside Windows 7

Windows 7 pre-beta hits BitTorrent. What you’ll find is the pre-beta version of Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system released to developers at the Professional Developers Conference. Note that this isn’t the latest “beta” build who’s screenshots are making the rounds (the one with the new taskbar, etc) but you can find it in 32-bit and 64-bit versions out there on the net. At the time of this writing Windows 7 Build 6801 seems to be the latest available.

Comments seem to indicate that it runs well in VMWare and is working for most people. If you wanna take a gander and don’t mind running “unreleased”, pre-beta code then you can find it on bittorrent by looking on BTJunkie.

Download Windows 7 here.

Who would have thought… but the new Microsoft Web Platform Installer is designed to help get you get up and running with the most widely used Web Applications freely available for Windows Server. The new installer (which is beta currently) will install popular open source and .NET solutions. Included in the beta release will include DotNetNuke, Drupal, Gallery, Graffiti, osCommerce, PHPBB, and Wordpress. My first thought was… “seriously?” IIS is an awesome platform, and it’s nice to see Microsoft embracing that it can serve up more than just Microsoft languages (yes in fact it could for a long time, but it wasn’t easy or direct to do so).

What will be interesting, in regards to Wordpress, is how IIS will handle permalinks and having to use index.php in the url (sometimes, not always). Only time will tell, still exciting that Microsoft is moving in this direction.

Wubi is an officially supported Ubuntu installer for Windows users that can bring you to the Linux world with a single click. Wubi allows you to install and uninstall Ubuntu as any other Windows application, in a simple and safe way. Are you curious about Linux and Ubuntu? Trying them out has never been easier! With Wubi you have a safe and easy way to give Linux a shot without damaging your Windows installation. No terminal commands, disk partitioning or disk formatting is needed. The best part is that the installation itself takes about one hour. So why try Wubi?

• No need to burn a CD. Just run the installer, enter a password for the new account, and click “Install”, go grab a coffee, and when you are back, Ubuntu will be ready for you.
• You keep Windows as it is, Wubi only adds an extra option to boot into Ubuntu. Wubi does not require you to modify the partitions of your PC, or to use a different bootloader, and does not install special drivers. It works just like any other application. Wubi is spyware and malware free, and being open source, anyone can verify that.
• Wubi keeps most of the files in one folder, and if you do not like it, you can simply uninstall it as any other application.
• Wubi and Ubuntu cost absolutely nothing (free as in beer), but yet provide a state of the art, fully functional, operating system that does not require any activation and does not impose any restriction on its use (free as in freedom).

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The Mono project was first conceived by GNOME cofounder Miguel de Icaza as a means of accelerating desktop Linux application development and enabling Windows developers to bring some of their existing skills and code to the Linux platform. Although the Mono project has generated some controversy and has received criticism from a small but vocal cadre of Linux users, the development framework has been enthusiastically embraced by a rapidly growing number of application developers.

This release includes compilers for C# 3.0 and Visual Basic 8. It comes with a comprehensive set of Microsoft-compatible APIs, including a cross-platform implementation of Windows.Forms 2.0 for desktop application development. Mono 2.0 also includes its own desktop API stack based around open-source technologies like GTK+ and Cairo.

Mono is also being adopted increasingly by major software companies that want to bring the power of an embedded multi-language runtime to their cross-platform applications. One such adopter is Linden Labs, the company behind the Second Life virtual reality system. Integrating Mono into the Second Life platform as its primary scripting engine has dramatically improved the performance and reliability of script execution.

Mono is licensed under a combination of the permissive MIT/X11 license and the Free Software Foundation’s Lesser General Public License (LGPL). The source code is available for download from the Mono web site. For more information, check out the detailed release notes and a blog entry published this morning by de Icaza.

The new Digsby is here!  We just released Build 32 (r17926) which is the culmination of a massive effort to improve performance, improve connectivity, fix most of the remaining bugs, and add some new functionality to boot. Major changes in this release include:

• RAM Usage: We optimized from the ground up and fixed memory leaks to lower RAM usage by almost 75%.  This has been the number one complaint since our launch and we are proud to introduce this massive improvement.
• Performance: User interface elements draw twice as fast for better performance. We have made changes to the architecture that will improve GUI responsiveness and CPU utilization across the board.
• Connectivity: Every IM protocol automatically tries multiple connection methods and ports to improve the odds of getting through restrictive firewalls and proxy servers.
• LinkedIn: Digsby now supports LinkedIn in addition to the other social networks.  Functionality includes a full newsfeed, alerts when new messages arrive, and the ability to set status right from Digsby.
• Bug Fixes: We have fixed hundreds of bugs, making Digsby more stable than ever.  There have been almost 3,000 revisions in our codebase since the last release so there are too many fixes to list in our changelog.

Digsby
Build 32 - Better than Ever! [Digsby Blog]

“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

A Windows only experimental Firefox extension called FoxTab introduces a new tab switching interface to Firefox. FoxTab comes complete with five different thumb nailed views and man is it awesome.

FoxTab provides a new fascinating and elegant method for finding and selecting a tab in the browser.
FoxTab is designed to be suitable for many types of users, those with only few tabs opened and
those out there (like me) who usually have tons of opened tabs to select from.
The idea behind FoxTab is to provide new visual methods for quick tab switching.

We already know that FireFox 3.1 will have a new tab switching interface. But why wait, this thing is awesome. Take a look at these screenshots:

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