I haven’t done a Daily Tidbits in a while, so here goes with today’s technology news from around the web. Enjoy!
Just thought I would let everyone know that Microsoft is currently giving away a free eBook titled Moving to Microsoft Visual Studio 2010. It’s definitely worth checking out, especially since its free and if you are currently moving from a previous version of Visual Studio. The book clocks in at 336 pages and is available in both PDF and XPS document formats. Microsoft also offers the code supplements for free as well. Microsoft offers free eBooks quite often, so I’ll try to post these up here as I see fit.
PDC 2010 is just around the corner, literally. It goes from October 28 – 29. If you can’t make it, you can still watch the event live via Microsoft’s wonderful MSDN site. It starts at 9:00AM PST (or 12:00 EST). There will also be several other events that will be able to be streamed as well during PDC 2010. I should have some coverage on this site, but since I won’t be able to see the event live, it may be a bit behind.
Neowin is reporting that there are now over 1,000 apps on the Windows Phone 7 marketplace. Although it doesn’t compare to Apple’s 250,000 or some-odd apps, this does come after Windows Phone 7 has been available for less than a week in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand (recall, WP7 will ship in the US on November 8). Plus, I’m suspecting that there aren’t a whole lot of fart apps up on the Windows Phone 7 marketplace.
Office for Mac 2011 is now available! I’m personally not a Mac user; however, if you’re a student, you can get this must have Office suite for 50 percent off and pay only $99. The new Office for Mac 2011 offers the new Ribbon UI which has been present on the PC side since Office 2007. The criteria for the 50 percent off deal is to be attending a valid college educational institution and to provide a valid .EDU e-mail address. Office for Mac 2011 is also available on TechNet and MSDN. This is actually quite remarkable, as this is probably one of the first times Microsoft has done such a thing. So, if you have a TechNet subscription head on over and grab the latest copy (it still, however, only runs on a Mac!). According to Ed Bott, and I too have verified this, there is one caveat, currently it’s not possible to get a product key. It’s downloadable, but when you try to select a product key, it brings up an error.
As I mentioned earlier via Twitter, Microsoft has released RC1 of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1. As usual, I will be downloading and installing this on my PCs and will let you know if there’s anything major. Right now, it’s looking like the only major changes are applicable to Windows Server 2008 R2 and SP1 only offers update roll-ups for the most part with Windows 7.
That should do it for the day. Come back tomorrow when I’ll, hopefully, write another Daily Tidbits section.
WinQuire 