Random Rants & Raves

We normally use what are called TrueType fonts on Windows machines for everything – whether in applications or when typing a document in Word. However, Windows Vista and above have had a new type of font system called OpenType.

OpenType is a scalable font format, built to be compatible with TrueType, but having many advanced typographic features like:

• Ligatures
• Numeric styling
• Fraction Styling
• Glyphs
• Style “sets”
• Contextual Alternates

You can read about the full specification of features here. However, the strange part has been that you couldn’t use the OpenType features in your Word documents… That is, till now. Word 2010 does have the ability to use the OpenType features in any document.

To do this, you will need to use an OpenType font. Some of these are Calibri, Cambria and the other “C”-fonts. But to really see the power of OpenType you need to use Gabriola. This is a script like font that has a number of cool features to it. Open Word 2010, change the font to Gabriola and add some text to the document. At first glance, the text looks pretty normal.

Select the text and press <Ctrl>-D to enter the font properties dialog. Click on the Advanced tab to reach the OpenType settings. The easiest way to see the changes is to change the “Stylistic sets” value. Change it to say “5” for now and see what happens:

You can now see that there are some nice effects starting to show up. Crank up the value to say 7.

The text effects become even more pronounced. You can also experiment with the other settings to see other features of the font. For instance, the Number forms for “Lining” and “OldStyle” change how numbers are shown like this:

The Contextual Alternates allow you to let characters change according to their relative position to other characters around them. Take a look at the “D” in the word “different” being typed below:

As you can see, the way that the character “d” is drawn changes each time surrounding characters change. You can turn this off or on if you want.

There are a ton of other features available in OpenType fonts as well and combinations of the settings can help you create extremely rich looking typography.

Do try out the OpenType features and with different fonts to see the effect of all the different settings you can do on them. You can add a ton of richness to your documents this way.

Here’s a small tip: If you’re using Outlook 2010, you can use these features when creating a new mail as well!

Yesterday Microsoft made an announcement that has extremely important implications if you are into Web application development. The WebsiteSpark program offers a ton of Microsoft software for free for web developers and web development companies that qualify. You get all these software for 3 years for both development and production usage. The list of software is:

• 3 licenses of Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition
• 1 license of Expression Studio 3
• 2 licenses of Expression Web 3
• 4 processor licenses of Windows Web Server 2008 R2
• 4 processor licenses of SQL Server 2008 Web Edition
• DotNetPanel control panel

You can read more about the program on Scott Guthrie’s blog post and at the main site.

What I want to explore in this post is what it means for Web development in general. Currently, there is a trend or impression that if you need to create a software for a SME, you need to use the LAMP stack to remain competitive cost-wise. While true to some extent, what you do lose out is in terms of productivity and time-to-market with tools such as VS2008 and the Expression suite. But the cost of entry to use these has often been a pitfall to getting individual Web developers or smaller Web project companies as well as for the SME.

With WebsiteSpark this so-called “advantage” of the LAMP stack goes for a toss. Not only do you get all the tools you need for free for developing projects for SME companies you also get a number of other additional options that help ease your development, such as:

• The Web Application Toolkits: A set of pre-packaged templates, samples, source code, etc. that can be simply plugged into your site to extend it with some extra features.
• The Web Platform Installer: Allows you to quickly set up a developer or even production machine with not just the base requirements but also a number of free Web Applications such as WordPress, Umbraco, SugarDRM, DotNetNuke, Moodle etc. by simply following the setup prompts. Take a look at the Web Application Gallery and see how easy it is to setup these without having to mess around with configuration files and database connection settings on Windows.

This basically means that setting up and using Windows as a platform for Web application development not only is easier and faster but also is now available for free! You can also run most of the open source Web apps on Windows with better performance and scalability. So is there any real reason to still go for the LAMP stack? Try the above stuff out and then decide.

One of the cool new features of PowerPoint 2010 is the ability for you to broadcast your presentation over the Internet for remote or networked viewers. This allows you to show presentations even if there is no projector available.

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Once it finally hit MSDN Subscriptions, I downloaded Windows 7 and went around installing it. One of the things I did differently this time is that instead of burning the ISO to a DVD and then booting my machine off it, I created a USB drive based install following these steps:

1. Plug in your USB drive (thumb, hard disk, etc.). Must be >= 4GB in size
2. Open a Command Prompt with Admin rights and run the following commands:
• DISKPART
• list disk [This will show a list of disks attached to your system. Note the # for the USB drive]
• select disk # [where # is the number of the USB drive selected above]
• clean
• create partition primary
• active
• format fs=ntfs quick
• assign
• exit
3. Now mount your ISO or open it with WinRAR and copy all the contents from it to the new drive partition
4. Use the USB to boot your machine (if your BIOS supports it) and start the installation

On my 3 year old notebook, the complete installation off the USB drive took just about 18 minutes from start to finish. I highly recommend that you use this technique to get up and running with Windows 7 fast.

Every single device on my machine was detected and drivers installed automatically. It also found the latest official nVidia drivers for my video card from Microsoft Update and downloaded them and installed too. I had a fully working machine in about 30 minutes and have started installing all the software I need. Kudos to the Windows team on getting this so right this time.

After a long wait and a couple of false positives, Windows 7 has finally hit RTM. Windows 7 is the biggest and most important release of Windows from Microsoft and has a huge number of new features – for users, IT administrators and developers – that allows maximum productivity.

I do know there are a lot of people out there who are still “happy” with Windows XP and hated Windows Vista (although I liked quite Vista since it ran well on my machine, till I worked with Windows 7). But this is the right time to start moving to the new OS. If your business is dependent upon technology (and whose isn’t these days), can you afford not to upgrade to the latest as soon as possible. I do realize that most corporates have a wait-and-watch policy towards any new technology, but you can wait till your competition upgrades and gains productivity while you still struggle along with an older technology. You can also read a nice post about this very thing here.

So when can you get your hands on Windows 7? Well, if you’re a MS partner, MSDN or Technet subscriber, you can get it as early as August 6! You can also read about the other dates of availability here. If you’re a consumer you can pick it off the shelves on October 22 (which itself has a digit-sum of 7 [2+2+1+0+2+0+0+9 = 1+6 = 7])!

Here’s looking forward to installing the RTM!

One of the things that I miss on Windows over Linux is the built-in ability to have multiple desktops. This is really useful feature that allows you to organize your application windows in different desktops for different types of work. For instance, you can go ahead and keep all your mail and IM windows on one desktop, your current work on another, your downloads on yet another and so on. The best part is that there are many programs for adding this feature to Windows as well.

I’ve been using a free application called VirtuaWin for many, many years now. It’s only recently after moving to Windows 7 M1 that I stopped as it did not support the new taskbar functionality yet and would give problems. The great news is that the latest release of VirtuaWin now finally supports Windows 7 as well!

I installed the VirtuaWin 4.1 Beta 2 on my Windows 7 RC machine. Not only does it recognize the new taskbar, it also works perfectly in it. The only issue you might have is the default settings to use the [Windows] key of your keyboard as hotkeys in the application. You will need to change this by going to the application’s icon in the notification area and selecting “Setup”.

Make sure that you modify each of the hotkeys to turn OFF the “Win” key option. This will enable you to use the hotkeys without conflicting with the built-in Windows 7 shortcuts.

If you like managing your windows even more than the defaults that you get in Windows 7, VirtuaWin is a great addition to your power user tools. Get it today to be able to add the ability of multiple desktops.

Ok, I admit it – I was a skeptic about the choice of theme for the new Star Trek movie considering that it was to be based in the Original Series time frame and with new actors playing the iconic characters we know. How could someone else play Kirk, Spock, McCoy and all the others – each with their own distinctive personalities and styles of playing the character. I watched all the trailers and read all the reviews of how well the new Star Trek movie is doing – becoming the top grossing movie of 2009 so far, beating Wolverine, Angels & Demons and Terminator Salvation. I was still not convinced.

It was after I watched the movie that I realized I had been wrong – completely so. The movie was not just a great summer sci-fi action flick – it was Star Trek. As a full fledged Trekkie (see what I wore to the show – thanks Binesh), I loved the new movie. Here are some thoughts around it.

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True to the name of my blog, here’s a list of rants and raves about the new Windows Virtual PC 7 that I’ve been using the past few days for some Windows 7 App Compat labs for ISVs.

What I Like:

• Love that the install size of WVPC is only a little more than 5MB.
• The new “Virtual Machines” magic folder is a cool way to organize all your VMs.
• The USB support is a great feature – all devices that I threw at it (other than 1 set of devices being tested by a particular ISP manufactured by a Chinese company) worked!
• The Desktop Integration mode is absolutely great – it even lets you see full Aero effects within the VPC. (However, also see next section.)
• Networking just works!

What I Dislike:

• Closing the VM doesn’t give me an option anymore to save or discard undo disk changes. I need to SHUTDOWN the VPC and then Apply or Discard it from the settings page. Ugh!
• No drag-and-drop into or out of the VM.
• Desktop Integration mode seems extremely flaky – at least with a Win7RC guest VM. It works sometimes, it doesn’t at other times. Not sure what are the steps to ensure this mode.

I can live with the first two issues – there are workarounds or a different way of doing the same stuff after all. But the last one is a pain – I just don’t know what is it that I’m doing or not doing to get it working.

I finally upgraded my blog with the latest version of BlogEngine.NET. This is a free, open source, implementation of an ASP.NET 2.0-3.5 blog. I was running v1.3 till now and have now upgraded to v1.5.07. There are a ton of new features in this release including new widgets, nested comments and more. I’ve implemented these features on the left column as you can see.

The theme that I use is called StarGazer created by Jason Lay. I’ve made massive modifications to this theme for my blog including:

• Moving the right side column completely to the left using CSS. This is because I sometimes have code and images that flow across the page and in the case of a right side column would cause the layout to go for a toss.
• Added the ability to use the first post as a Internet Explorer 8.0 WebSlice. This also requires a code change in the BlogEngine.NET core. I’ll be submitting this patch to the developers of BE soon.
• Changed a bunch of ASPX layout to add the nested comments feature of v1.5 of BE.
• Changed a huge bunch of CSS to get the styles correctly setup for different elements that didn’t even exist in the original theme but now appear due to structural changes in BE’s rendering.

For doing all this, it took me less than a couple of hours which included downloading, setting up and understanding the changes in BE1.5 on my local machine. I was greatly helped in the entire endeavor by Visual Studio 2008 and the Internet Explorer 8.0 Developer Toolbar. The latter was exceptionally useful in figuring out the classes and styles being used in any page and on the fly changing them to see what happens. Clearly a great tool to have for Web developers.

There are still some small changes that I need to do. The visitor info widget has a annoying icon that I want to get rid of and the Twitter widget doesn’t refresh automatically and the “Follow me” gives an error. I’ll need to look into this soon – but for now the blog is back up and running.

For anyone who is interested in the StarGazer theme, I’m putting it here to download:

I finished downloading the Windows 7 RC1 64-bit version yesterday. I was running the beta of Win7 with a dual boot of Windows Vista. I planned to wipe off Vista from my machine and use the larger partition for the RC. So I quickly popped in a blank DVD-R and burnt the ISO at max speed to the DVD.

Next, I rebooted the machine, chose to start from the DVD and started the Win7RC setup. The setup went fine till the point where it expanded the OS files. It got stuck at 50% for about 20 minutes and then died! With a horrible feeling I tried this again and the same thing happened. Tried rebooting the system from the hard disk and it have me a message of Boot Manager missing. Now approaching something close to panic – I have a Windows 7 App Compat workshop in Pune starting early Monday morning – I booted off the DVD again and chose repair automatically. Although the repair found my Win7 beta, on rebooting I still got the error message.

So yet again I booted off the DVD and this time did a manual repair and chose Repair Startup Problems. After performing some tasks, it finally rebooted and I was able to boot back into the Win7 Beta that was on my machine. I quickly copied the ISO off to an external drive and then wrote two copies of the DVD at the slowest speed possible. TIP: To ensure no data errors on DVDs with highly compressed data such as an OS install, ensure you do this – write at the slowest speed of your DVD burner. This was something I’ve always known but ignored due to the wanting to install the RC quickly.

Anyway, tried with the new DVD and I had the Win7 RC on my machine in about 20 minutes. Configured my personal settings and I was booted into the desktop. The setup had found all my devices other than the driver for the display card. A simply right-click and “Update Driver” action on the “Standard VGA Adapter” quickly got the latest WDDM drivers for my nVidia GeForce Go 7950 GTX – not really the latest/greatest card out there but quite good enough to play the latest games at 1920x1200!

Next, came the essentials. First, I tried installing the AVG 8.5 Pro for which I have a personal license. However, at the end of the install Win7 game me a “Compatibility Issue” message and rolled the install back. I then downloaded the latest release of the AVG 8.5 and this worked perfectly. Next came WinRAR and CloneDrive and both worked fine as well. Then I installed Office 2007 and the newly released Service Pack 2. And finally installed stuff like Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and SQL Server 2008 SP1.

Some noticeable changes are in the UI as mentioned in the E7 blog. Also, i see that the problem of connecting to Hosted Exchange as mentioned and solved in my earlier post no longer exists. So you can connect to Exchange with your email address as username again. A number of new themes, Aero effects and other changes are visible too.

I also installed the new Windows Virtual PC. It’s got a completely revamped interface that integrates well with Windows Explorer and finally get USB support! YAY!!!

Overall, the Windows 7 Release Candidate is a great upgrade to have and now I’m starting to look forward to the final RTM for Win7 as well.