The Unauthorised Autobiography of Marc Holmes

Microsoftie thinking about dialogue with developers. Brit in Seattle. Windswept and Interesting.

Filed under: Windows 7

Magpie: Sony Vaio Z12V9E/X

Ah yes – finally I have a new laptop. And it’s a peach. Thanks to LaptopsDirect for another great delivery and thanks to Sony for building it in the first place.

It’s packing a Core i7 processor, 6GB RAM, 128GB SSD, stonking graphics and it’s tiny 13” screen has a 1600x900 resolution. Sweet. It also weighs slightly less than the cup of coffee that’s sitting next to me at the moment.

In terms of business laptop, it has a TPM chip which needs enabling, then once bitlockered it complied with all the security requirements for DirectAccess which means that I don’t need the PCMCIA slot (which it doesn’t have) once I’ve done the one time certificate enrolment.

And it’s fast. Very fast. (That’s my best scientific benchmarking effort).

via Writerous

Rebooting the Client Platform Blog

It’s been a while, but it’s nice to see Tim Sneath’s blog spring back into life. “The Client Platform” is a big old topic to talk about but from the posts of the past couple of weeks it looks like HTML5 and IE9 are the current order of the day.

Take a look and there are some nice videos covering some of the recent IE9 Beauty of the Web launch. Like this one.

Making Of : Never Mind the Bullets from Steaw Web Design on Vimeo.

Oh yeah – Tim is also looking to hire someone to be an IE9/HTML5 Technical Evangelist. He says it’s the best job in the company, but I thought that was mine…

via Writerous

Exploring Win7 and WS2008 via sketching and SongSmith

The talented combo of DeepFat and JamesOne have been exploring the features of Win7 and WS2008 via the medium of art, some YouTube annotations and then some slightly random videos. You can start here and then click through to the stuff you're interested in.

The music is by SongSmith, which is a shame as I'd envisaged some kind of lounge-suited DeepFat/JamesOne combo jamming away into the early hours.

UK Technical Launch of Win7, WS2008 R2 and Exchange 2010

On 6th October we'll be hosting the technical launch for Win7, WS2008 R2 and Exchange 2010 (a tri-launch!) at Wembley and it would be great if you were there.

There's space for 1000 folk and there'll be two tracks covering Desktop and Server so you can pick your pleasure and think about messaging, deployment, virtualisation and the like.

If Sunderland can't get me there, maybe TechNet will...

Silverlight and Windows 7 Firestarters

Some good looking events on the Firestarter site:

Signup here for: September 17th, there's a day of Silverlight with speakers including ScottGu, Tim Heuer, Adam Kinney, Brad Abrams and Karl Shifflet - not bad going.

Signup here for: September 18th, there's a day of Windows 7 which looks to be focused on deployment and migration for IT Pros.

Although these events are actually hosted out of Redmond then the links above will sign you up to the live webcast instead which is a great option.

Win7, MCE, Hauppauge, Satellites and a spot of Home Networking

I spent last weekend upgrading the two static PCs in the house (my workstation and the media center) to Win7 RTM. It was no probs as they've been running Beta and RC for ages.

Now they're RTM'd though, it does mean that they're stable and I won't be rebuilding again anytime soon, so I can turn my attention to getting them all playing nicely together.

The picture above shows the basic set-up of the house:

MarcZone has my workstation, a Windows Home Server, the printer/scanner/fax combo and the main wireless ADSL router. There's also a Netgear HD powerline adapter so that I can get better connection speeds from the MCE to the WHS.

Living Room is just MCE with a nice BluRay player. (I'm using Harmony One and my lovely Logitech diNovo keyboard for control).

The Back Room has my XBOX which extends the MCE and also has a powerline connection.

Then there are 3 floating machines: my netbook, my wife's Macbook (it's a handy way of keeping an eye on Apple without needing to use it!) and usually my work laptop lurking somewhere. And then the usual raft of network aware devices: phones, Zunes, iPods and the like.

Not hugely complicated and not that difficult to keep going. My old router died recently and it wasn't much bother to bring a new one online.

Some more technical details:

My MCE started life with an Hauppauge 2200 which was fine for Freeview. But I get a fairly rubbish Freeview signal (what with living in a valley, birds nesting and the constant constant rain that is the hallmark of this summer). So I've just put in a Hauppauge 4400 (DVB/S2 capable) card. I was a bit dubious about it working with MCE as I'd heard conflicting reports on compatability with Freesat and all that. Anyway, it turns out that it can't do full Freesat, but for my purposes I get all of the Freeview-y channels and some extras for nothing (the card finds around 1000 channels across Astra and Eurobird satellites but of course most are nonsense and/or encrypted). These all integrate and work fine through the MCE shell exactly as you might expect with a couple of missing EPG files (but it's only ITV4 and honestly... have you ever tuned in?)

Also on the MCE, I'm using Cyberlink PowerDVD 9 which has full shell integration to view my BluRay stuff.

I link the MCE to the WHS (where we keep pictures, videos and so on) for additional storage and access but don't do much else with it. Some stuff I might do:

My boss (who's a bit more geeky than me on this) pointed me towards MyMovies which has an MCE and WHS component and enhances the movie library capabilities of MCE.

Also, there's the PowerPack 3 Beta for WHS which provides some interesting archiving and linking 'n' syncing capabilities (such as saving versions of recorded TV for playback on Zune - which will be nice when I get my hands on the Zune HD). It also adds Win7-specific features like support for libraries.

So this is all fine and I'm now thinking about syncing and sharing material across the network. Here's where I am with this:

One of the things that working with constant OS betas has taught me is the need to be 'stateless' so you can flatten and rebuild a machine with confidence at any time (I know I could virtualise and so on). So I've always successfully used Mesh to achieve that.

The Libraries feature in Windows 7 is something I'm only just switching on to but the combined, shortcut view (and the handy 'default save' location is something I'll be making more use of for those same 'stateless' reasons).

With HomeGroup, the only other user on my network is LadyH and as she uses a Mac then the HomeGroup is not much use (and I don't really need it as I'm fully Meshed for documents and centrally served for larger files). That said, I'll probably want to do some remote media streaming, so there'll be some advantage to having this HomeGroup stuff set-up I think.

And there we are - a quick lap around my own set-up. I remember the days when all you had to do was figure out how to keep those Blue 'Squid' ADSL adapters from dropping their connections...

Windows 7 for MSDN and TechNet Subscribers

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Today is the day that you get your hands on the goodies as Windows 7 should be available across MSDN and TechNet.

I'm doing my bit as I've waited until today to begin my own upgrades - Netbook is done, and just the 2 PCs at home to sort out (especially excited about the Media Center as I'm installing a Hauppauge HVR4000 at the same time...)

Don't forget that if you're installing on a Netbook then this useful video explains how to config your USB stick and so on.

Other useful resources could be the Windows 7 for Developers blog, or if you want to reflect on the journey to get us this far, then the Engineering 7 blog has been a great read (I checked, there's no E8 blog yet...)

Get ready, get set...