Unboxing Windows 7 Ultimate “Signature Edition”

I was excited to read all about Windows 7 and how it is better than its predecessor Windows Vista. I have a desktop system (AMD 64 x2 with 8GB RAM) running Vista.
Today I received the Party Pack for Windows 7. I was excited and have captured on video the “ultimate unboxing” :-) using my Vista laptop and a sorta good & loyal Web Cam (lasted me about 4 yrs now :-)).
The pack includes Windows 7 Ultimate “Signature Edition” (32 & 64 bit versions – but only one product key which is stated to work only once for either 32 or 64). By the way, when I heard of “Signature Edition”, I thought it may contain something more than the regular Ultimate edition available. As of now, all I saw was that the cover has Stevie’s signature on it. Need to install it to see if there is anything more to it.
Apart from this, the pack contains:
poster with Windows 7 desktop design
One deck of playing cards with Windows 7 design
One puzzle with Windows 7 design
Couple of streamers, balloons, napkins & Tote bags with Windows 7 design
One table top centerpiece
I guess that is all good, but what really needs to be seen is if Windows 7 really lives up to its hype….of being much better than Vista.
In the next few days, I plan to install it on my desktop and see how it is as compared to Vista. I will post my review of the same soon. Till then, enjoy the video.

BTW, no matter what people say about Vista, I have been using it for development in Visual Studio apart from browsing and games and I have not yet faced the problems reported by many. Frankly, I guess it all depends on how well a user knows how to tweak it :-) which I agree should have been made more easily available to the end users.

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Internet Explorer 8 (Release Candidate 1)

Microsoft has released RC 1 for IE 8. You can find it here. I had installed IE 8 Beta on my Windows XP box and played around with it. I was having multiple issues  - one being that it was pretty slow and other being that many sites were not compatible with IE 8. But major was that it used to crash often.

Some of the features of IE 8 which I like are WebSlices, InPrivate Browsing, Accelerators, Compatibility View, Caret Browsing and Tab Grouping. One other feature is adding headers within the Sites, based on which automatically the Compatibility View is triggered and the site which normally would not have been viewable properly in IE 8 is displayed within IE 8. The Compatibility view emulates IE 7 for those pages which have the following added header:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />
WebSite Admins can set full site to be IE7 compatible for IE8 viewing by adding new header with name="X-UA-Compatible" and value="IE=EmulateIE7".

All these features have been maintained with the release of RC1. Areas where I could immediately see the difference were the speed and stability which is way better than on Beta 1. This was anticipated as RC1 is usually much better in many aspects than Beta 1.

Head on to Microsoft and download Internet Explorer 8 (Release Candidate 1)

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BizTalk 2009

I have just got to download the public beta evaluation version of BizTalk 2009. Some of the improvements in BizTalk 2009 are

• Simplify Interoperability
• Support for .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and Visual Studio 2008 SP1 - take advantages of the latest developer tools.
• Support for Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 – full support of Hyper-V, and increased performance and scale.
• Extend To The Edge
• EDI - enhanced out of the box support for the most commonly used EDI schema and trading partner management tools.
• Simplify development of mobile applications that expose relevant, real-time business information (RFID Mobile).
• Enhance Productivity
• ALM – new support is provided for Team Foundation Server (TFS), allowing development teams to leverage the integrated source control, bug tracking, support for team development, Project Server integration and support for automating builds via MSBuild.
• Enhanced Developer Productivity – improved underlying project system enhances debugging support for artifacts, pipeline components and orchestrations, and enables support for unit testing.

I will be playing around with this version in the next few days and will keep updating you about my experience. Feel free to share your experience on the same.