First look – Internet Explorer 8 (RC1)

Microsoft made available Internet Explorer 8 RC1 (release candidate 1), which means that as far as Microsoft is concerned, IE8 is cooked and that barring anything major, this will become the final release. So, what’s the new browser like?

A new release of IE is always important because this is the browser that many millions of Windows users will be surfing the web with daily. Like it or not, by the very fact that IE is knitted into every Windows installation makes this an important event.

After what seemed like years of stagnation, Microsoft is continuing the tradition of kitting out IE8 with features that users of other browsers take for granted. According to its team blog, the latest version of the browser includes some general performance improvements, plus added security to avoid clickjacking attempts and some very nice features built-in, including:

* Smart Address Bar
The address bar isn’t now just a place to type URLs into. The Smart Address bar in IE8 tries to make sense of what the user is looking for by retrieving sites visited from the history and bookmarks. This is handy for those times when you want to find something but can’t remember where you saw it.
* Enhanced find
Sometimes it’s not finding the site that’s difficult, but finding where on the page you need to look for the information that you are after. IE8 offers a broad range of enhanced and improved tools to help you spot the information you are after. One such example if this is result highlighting.
* Tab groups
When one tab is opened from another one, the new tab is placed next to the one from which it was opened, and both are marked with a colored tab. This is a good way to keep track of your open tabs.
* InPrivate
Along with keeping track of stuff that you might later want to refer back to, IE8 also gives you powerful tools that allow the browser to have temporary amnesia in relation to the sites you’ve visited by temporarily halting the writing of information to the cache and history.
* Crash recovery
If your IE locks up of crashes while you’ve a shed-load of tabs open, with IE8 there’s a good chance that when you fire up the browser again that it will remember what what sites you had open and fire them up again. It can also reload information that you had typed into forms.

The RC1 version of IE8 is compatible with Windows Vista, Windows XP and Windows Server releases. It’s not currently compatible with Microsoft’s Windows 7 Beta operating system, which comes with its own version of IE8.

Its Official: Windows 7 Beta Available

Microsoft last night officially released the first beta of its Windows 7 to MSDN and TechNet subscribers. The beta will be open to all testers sometime today afternoon.

Windows 7 has been there Out in the Wild (Torrents, etc) since December. Windows 7 features and screen shots can be viewed here.

The release of the beta had been widely expected in recent days but CEO Steve Ballmer made it official Wednesday night in the opening keynote address at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

In his CES keynote, Ballmer indicated that he wants a broad swath of users and developers to test Windows 7 Beta 1 Build 7000. “We are on track to deliver the best version of Windows ever, we are putting in all the right ingredients — simplicity, reliability and speed and working hard to get it right and to get it ready,” Ballmer said.

A recorded video of the keynote address can be viewed here.

Add Nuke to your DotNet Applications

If you are creating DotNet Applications using Microsoft Dotnet framework, here is a fully compatible alternate to the same. DotNetNuke is an open-source Web Application Framework ideal for creating and deploying projects such as commercial websites, corporate intranets and extranets, online publishing portals, and custom vertical applications.

DotNetNuke is provided as open-source software, licensed under a BSD agreement. In general, this license grants the general public permission to obtain the software free-of-charge. It also allows individuals to do whatever they wish with the application framework, both commercially and non-commercially, with the simple requirement of giving credit back to the DotNetNuke project community.

DotNetNuke is built on a Microsoft ASP.NET (VB.NET) platform, and is easily installed and hosted. With a growing community of over 440,000 users, and a dedicated base of programming professionals, support for DotNetNuke is always close at hand.

DotNetNuke is designed for use on the Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0, 3.0, and 3.5 platforms using Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studio 2008, or Visual Web Developer.

Key Features:
Easy to install and to host.
Fully extensible and scalable.
Clearly licensed under a BSD-style license.
Constantly evolving through real world trial.
Simply efficient and manageable.
Priority on security.
Fully customizable.
Fully localized.
User-friendly interface.
Easy to access community support.

View the Video Introduction to DotNetNuke (this will open in Windows Media Player)
Download the Video for Offline viewing

You can also check DotNetNuke’s Online Demo

Website: http://www.dotnetnuke.com

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First Look: Windows 7 (Pre Beta)

Microsoft has officially revealed the name of the successor to Windows Vista, and it’s not Vista II, ReVista or AltaVista. Its Windows 7. No definite release date for Windows 7 has been announced by Microsoft.

The shocking revelation on Microsoft’s Vista blog is that the final name of what we now call Windows 7 will be… Windows 7. Mike Nash, corporate vice-president, Windows Product Management, says: “Simply put, this is the seventh release of Windows, so therefore Windows 7 just makes sense.”

More screenshots of Windows 7 here:-
- ZDNet Gallery
- Windows7 News

So what’s in Windows 7?

The most visible new features are enhancements that streamline core Windows tasks like connecting to a wireless network or organizing a digital music collection. But the new OS features are more than just skin-deep; there are also improvements to core components, such as an innovative way to stream music and other media directly to network-connected media players.

Some of the tweaks to the Windows interface are blindingly obvious, at least in retrospect. Explorer windows now include a button that toggles the preview pane on and off; in Vista, you have to drill three levels deep into a menu to enable or disable the preview pane. Much cooler is the new technique for maximizing, restoring, and resizing a window. Drag the window’s title bar to the top of the screen and it maximizes. Drag the title bar of a maximized window away from the top of the screen and it restores to its former position. Drag a window to either side of the screen and it resizes to fill half the screen. Drag another window to the opposite side and, voila, you now have two windows arranged side by. side

Some other key enhancements-
For starters, the Quick Launch bar is gone; its capabilities are now integrated directly into the taskbar. If you recognize some similarities to the Dock in OS X, you’re half right.

You can permanently place program icons on the taskbar, where they allow one-click access to programs. Running programs appear on the taskbar as well.

You’ll find that other common tasks have been greatly simplified. For example, it;s now much easier to connect to a wireless network: when a wireless network is available, a tray icon glows. Click to pop up a list of available networks, and click again to choose a network and enter a passphrase or connect to a browser-based logon screen a a hotspot or airport.

Networking is tricky, especially for home users. With Vista, Microsoft tried to consolidate networking features in a single location, the Network and Sharing Center, with decidedly mixed results. In Windows 7, the Network and Sharing Center gets a radical overhaul designed to make it simpler to set up and manage small networks. In Windows 7, the Network and Sharing Center includes four links to common tasks instead of a long list of detailed options.

Homegroups also offer an interesting capability that digital media fanatics should love: From within Windows, you can stream media to any DLNA server or to a Media Center extender, without jumping through a bunch of configuration hoops.

Enterprise customers will have plenty of new stuff to chew on, as well. The PowerShell scripting language is part of Windows 7, as are a host of new troubleshooting and administration tools.  Special mention for the new Program Compatibility Troubleshooter, which lets you fix programs that fail to run correctly because of permission problems or hard-coded version checks.

BitLocker also gets a new features: the capability to encrypt the contents of a USB flash drive or other removable storage device. This is a logical extension of the BitLocker feature, which first appeared in Vista and was enhanced in Vista Service Pack 1 to allow encryption of hard disks other than the system volume.

Take a look at the Windows 7 Features, Screenshots & Demo in a YouTube video

OpenOffice – A free alternative to Microsoft Office

OpenOffice.org (See what Wikipedia says)is an Open Source, community-developed, multiplatform office-productivity suite. It includes the key desktop applications, such as a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation manager and drawing program, with a user interface and feature set similar to other office suites.

Sophisticated and flexible, OpenOffice.org also works transparently with a variety of file formats, including Microsoft’s. Localizations of OpenOffice.org are available in 27 languages with more being constantly added by the community.

OpenOffice.org runs stably and natively on Solaris, Linux (including PPC Linux), and Windows. Additional ports, such as for FreeBSD, IRIX, and Mac OS X, are in various stages of completion.

Written in C++ and with documented APIs licensed under the LGPL and SISSL Open Source licenses, OpenOffice.org allows any knowledgeable developer to benefit from the source.

And, because the file format for OpenOffice.org is in XML, interoperability is easy, making future development and adoption more certain.

OpenOffice Components
Writer – Equivalent to Microsoft Word
Calc – Equivalent to Microsoft Excel
Impress – Equivalent to Microsoft Powerpoint
Base – Equivalent to Microsoft Access
Draw – Equivalent to CoralDraw
Math – Equivalent to Microsoft Equation Editor

System Requirements for OpenOffice.org for Microsoft Windows
* Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows 2000 (Service Pack 2 or higher), Windows XP, Windows 2003, Windows Vista (enhanced Vista integration from version 2.2)
* 128 Mbytes RAM (I would recommend 512 MB)
* At least 800 Mbytes available disk space for a default install (including a JRE) via download. After installation and deletion of temporary installation files, OpenOffice.org will use approximately 440 Mbytes disk space.
* 800 x 600 or higher resolution with at least 256 colours
* Java runtime environment 1.4.0_02 / 1.4.1_01 or newer

Download versions

Stable version available is OpenOffice.org 2.4 -
Download links: Full Install &  Portable version
The release candidate 2 of OpenOffice.org 3.0 is now ready for testing -
Download Links: Full Install &  Portable version

But, will Microsoft Office users be able to open OpenOffice Documents? Answer is YES!
There are OpenOffice plugins available which, after installed will enable Microsoft Office users to open documents created in OpenOffice.
ODF-Convertor : These free add-ins for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint enable those apps to open and save their ODF counterparts (which typically have .ODT, .ODS, and .ODP extensions, respectively). They’re compatible with Office XP, 2003, and 2007.
ODF Plugin from Sun : Read and write ODF files in Microsoft Office.