SteveX Compiled

Larry Osterman’s blog is good Raymond Chen type stuff.

This quote on Slashdot sums up my thoughts on this: That’s right folks, no more of that annoying consistency between GUI applications, now anything that the guy down in marketing can draw is a workable GUI – just think of the possibilities. Microsoft is not a believer in consistent elegant or intuitive GUIs, Micorosoft is […]

This is very cool, and a little bit scary. The start.com portal that Microsoft is building now lets you write “Gadgets” that plug into the site. A couple of interesting things about gadgets: You don’t need to get your gadget approved for users to be able to use it. Anyone can write a gadget, put […]

Today’s the last day, and it’s a short one. It’s going to take a while to digest everything… I want to write more about a lot of things, but I knew I’d have no time during the PDC itself. There are lots of folks who have been able to attend the daily sessions, the evening […]

Go get Monad Beta 2.

Even better than TxF, there’s a transaction manager that the registry participates in as well. An installer can start a transaction, and then start installing an app, including registry keys and files.. and if the installation fails, gets cancelled, etc., everything gets rolled back. This is a huge change.

This is something important: NTFS is gaining transaction support. That would make this possible: BeginTransaction Copy *.* OverThere\ CommitTransaction If your system crashed or the copy was stopped for whatever reason before the CommitTransaction was done, it would all be rolled back. Transactional NTFS (TxF) has almost zero overhead when not using transactions, and “single […]

There’s an XBox hooked up in the track lounges, but generally there’s not much mention of it. Of course that’s GDC territory, not PDC territory, but given that the official release date of November 22nd was just announced, you’d think someone would have mentioned it here. Day 3 going on now; I just went to […]

My Rogers sim card works in the JASJAR.. That’s good news. It’s a European device (it came with a power adapter) so I didn’t know if the phone network here would be happy with it, but it is. They demoed Avalon running on it. It’s got a half a gigahertz CPU in it, which is […]

Well PDC day one had some pretty cool stuff, including Bill Gates’ keynote and Jim Allchin demoing Office 12, but the highlight for me has to be that I got to buy an i-mate JASJAR PDA for an amazing price. They made them available for a short while and I made it on the list… […]