Microsoft is currently running a promotion for free copies of Vista Business Edition and Office 2007 Professional. The deal looks a bit like this:  You watch 3 videos, answer some questions about the videos, then fill out a form with a bunch of personal information. Sounds to me like a great deal. This is quite similar to a promotion some time back for a free copy of Visual Studio.

Here's the downside: If you are a member of the Microsoft Partner Program, or Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN), you aren't eligible for these offers.  

The site is currently loading very slowly, as it seems word of this offer is spreading fast. Once I get more information on this, I'll pass it along.

Update: I forgot to mention, this offer is only open to US residents.

For those of you that have followed the famous (or now infamous) Optimus keyboard, the project has just lost a major feature (the latest in a series of many to be cut) that will substantially cut into the number of people that would buy one. In a few short words, many lost interest:

Optimus-103 will use black and white displays

The once great design has now crumbled into a shadow of its former self. Sporting few of the features once promised, the current design has alienated many of the loyal supporters and made many vow to not buy the product. While the Optimus has lost much of its glory due to these feature cuts, it is still a revolutionary product.

While personally I'm very disappointed that I may never have the Optimus I fell in love with a couple years ago, it's still a great idea, and still a unique product. They may have failed to delivery for now, but maybe someday, maybe.

A new version of the popular debugging proxy Fiddler has been announced. The new version, dubbed Fiddler2, adds support debugging HTTPS traffic just as you would unsecured HTTP traffic. Per the FAQs, this new version effectively runs a MITM attack to do its job, while this is the most effective way of doing this, there is the downside of the browser showing a error, though you should be able to continue by ignoring these warnings. 

If you develop or maintain secure web sites, this enhanced version of Fiddler will be a great help. Though this is still an alpha version, it's based on a fairly stable code base and seems to work well. This is one to keep an eye on.

I installed Vista last night twice; the first was an upgrade from XP Pro on my laptop, the other a fresh install on my desktop. The experience was quite interesting for both; here are a few thoughts about the process:

Laptop 

My laptop has a fairly modest configuration, 1.73GHz Pentium M, 512MB, 80GB hard-drive, and Mobil Intel 915 64MB for the graphics. It's been running Windows XP Pro, last night I went through the upgrade process to Vista Business. It checking for compatibility it found a couple applications it had issues with, but it seems it wasn't happy just telling me that they might not work, but they had to be removed before I could go on.

This required exiting setup and uninstalling both Nero and the freshly released Windows PowerShell so that I could continue. Once the offending applications were removed, I started the process again (including the 15 minute compatibility check). From here on, the process went well, although surprisingly slow. From start to first boot into Vista was a bit over three hours.

Once Vista was finally running I had my first taste of Vista, as I had not installed the betas, this was the first time I had used it. The first few minutes were full of disappointing surprises, such as the two INI files adorning my desktop, or the new 'home' folder full of permission errors and various configuration files. It'll take me a fair bit of time to clean my hard drive up from that, it's really quite a mess. On the upside, pretty much all of my software worked fine, except for the various drivers and utilities to adjust things just as power profiles and wireless network settings, but Vista includes enough to cover the functionality of everything that stopped working.

Impression: Overall positive, it's a nice operating system, but I'm disappointed in how long it'll take to get things cleaned up, get the permissions corrected and back to a similar setup to what I had before. 

Desktop

My desktop is a bit more beefy, but still nothing special, it looks something like this: 3.0GHz Pentium 4, 1.0GB of RAM, 80GB system hard-drive (plus a separate data drive), nVidia GeForce MX4000 128MB (PCI) and a ATI Radeon 7000 64MB (AGP). This box was also running XP Pro and had been in need of rebuilding for a couple months at least.

This was a fresh install, and surprisingly quick. I made it to the first boot into Vista in around an hour, a third of the time required for the upgrade. This one went a fair bit smoother than the upgrade process and seems to be a fairly pleasant one. Once the system was up and running, I found the file system to be a fair bit cleaner than the upgrade produced. 

Among the first things I checked was the 'Experience Index' to see where my computer ranks, and what the odds would be of getting Aero working. With a grand score of 1.0, I knew that wouldn't happen. So, I check and sure enough my hunch was right, it was my graphics cards that were to blame. Me being the geek I am, I had to have Aero, so a 10PM run to the local Best Buy, and picked out a ATI Radeon X1600 Pro. I figured this card would have plenty of power for Aero.

Thankfully, Windows was able to identify a driver so I didn't have to do any searching. All I had to do was reboot, and there was Aero, in all its glory. If you've not seen Aero yet, you don't know what you're missing. This new shell is great, very different, but really nice.

Impression:  Quite positive, much better than the upgrade. System is stable and almost all of my normal software is working. If you're going to install Vista, make sure your box has some beef, and start fresh. I'd advise against doing the upgrade, while it does work, it leaves a bit of a mess.

For those interested, Windows Vista is now available via MSDN Subscriber Downloads. Hurry up and get your copy while there's still bandwidth left.

Have fun :) 

At long last, Windows has a real, power user's shell; and it's been officially done. PowerShell is the new, highly flexible and extremely powerful shell for Windows (XP SP2+). From my first experiences with it, I'm quite impressed. This is a great tool for developers, system administrators, and just about any other power user.

While PowerShell doesn't offer the power or flexibility that a traditional *nix shell does, the power is impressive. I've been looking forward to this being released, now that I've played with it, I've even more excited. This is a great tool, just trust me, get it, you need it.

For those interested, and those that have an MSDN subscription, Office 2007 Professional is now available for download. The 411MB ISO contains the following applications:

• Microsoft Office Access 2007
• Microsoft Office Excel® 2007
• Microsoft Office Outlook® 2007 with Business Contact Manager
• Microsoft Office PowerPoint® 2007
• Microsoft Office Publisher 2007
• Microsoft Office Word 2007

Hopefully the Ultimate edition will be made available soon.

Update: Microsoft has announced that Windows Vista will be available on Nov. 17th. 

We all know that Google is PigeonPowered™ - now, we have a search engine ran by trained monkeys. Well, not exactly monkeys, but semi-trained people. Yes, you heard that right. When you do a search, it doesn't hit some massive database containing every web page known to man, it goes to a human for them to figure out.

If I didn't know better, I'd call it an April-fools' joke. But, alas, it's not.

Here's how it works: You type your query in a very Google-like homepage, but when you hit 'Search with Guide' (pressing 'enter' will get you a glorified set of InfoSpace results) instead of getting a list of results, you get a chat window. In that chat window you can tell the guide more about your search, and you might, eventually, get an answer. While there is some value to a human edited directory such as DMOZ, I can't see a human built search engine working out.

I have to wonder how this will work out from the business side, this doesn't seem to be the greatest business model, as it can't be cheap to have an army of people sitting around searching for other people. It looks like their business model is based around selling ads, and while that is a high profit market, I can't see it being enough to cover the expense of having the guides. It'll be interesting to see how long they last.

Sorry for the rant, but I found this one just too odd to ignore.

The Sandcastle team just announced a new toy for users of Visual Studio, the Power Toys for Visual Studio Pack Installer. This is a unified installer for the various Power Toys released; no more downloading a dozen installers to get what you want, this one does it all. If you like pushing VS to be all it can be, this is worth looking at.

Yup, it's here! The next version of the .NET Framework has been released, while this isn't a major release (as not much has changed), it is a milestone. This release adds support for the WPF, or Windows Presentation Foundation, the new presentation framework that will enable a new generation of remarkable interface designs. 

If you're a developer, get going and get started - this is going to be fun.