Windows 7 (as of RC1) now supports a pretty spiffy new feature known as Virtual Windows XP or Windows XP Mode based on what article you read.  At its core, it is a new version of the Virtual PC product, now named Windows Virtual PC, installed closer to the OS, combined with a Windows XP hard disk image which allow you to run legacy applications under Windows XP on your Windows 7 machine in a pretty seamless way.

If you install the Windows Virtual PC add-on to Windows 7, you must first uninstall Virtual PC 2007.  By doing that, you remove the special network driver that is also required to use the Microsoft Device Emulator on the network.  The device emulator is typically used for Smart Device development.

So the puzzle:  The Device Emulator doesn’t work with the new Windows Virtual PC driver, and you can’t install the old version of Virtual PC 2007 and expect the new Windows Virtual PC to keep working.  What to do?

Welcome to the revolution in cloud storage…TwitterDrive!

Learn more at Coding4Fun:

• Author Interview
• Technical Article

:)

After finally finding a Community Server 2008.5 SP1 compatible theme I liked, I was able to upgrade my site to the latest Community Server version.  This theme is provided by Andrew Belon, who has several fantastic CS themes available on his site.  I’ve tweaked his basic Bliss theme (which he uses as his main theme) to my liking.

I’m a big fan of the new colors and layout, and I hope those reading this are as well.  I’ll continue to tweak over the coming days to make things a bit cleaner.

If you have any comments on the new site or you see anything out of place, please contact me and let me know…thanks!

Update: Running Surface SDK SP1?  See my other post on how to install it on a 64-bit machine...

The Microsoft Surface SDK was given out to some folks at PDC 2008.  I know the SDK is not out to the masses yet, however one of the questions/requests posted most frequently in the Surface forums is the ability to install the SDK on a 64-bit machine, and/or on Windows 7.  I’ve put together a quick guide that will show how to accomplish this.  But be warned…by doing this you are throwing away support from Microsoft.  This is an entirely unsupported setup and the Microsoft Surface folks won’t be able to help you.  So, if official support is important to you, this guide isn’t for you.  With that said, let’s continue…

Please note that you will still need to have Visual Studio 2008 Express or greater installed, and you will need to have the XNA 2.0 Framework runtime installed.

It’s time to announce the winner of my contest to win a copy of our Coding4Fun book!  15 people entered the contest via my forum.  I assigned each of them a 0-based index in the order in which they submitted their entry.  The final list was:

• leif902 = 0
• jcauble = 1
• krakerjak = 2
• RoryBecker = 3
• amrkamel = 4
• anonymous = 5
• Arrowofdarkness = 6
• qiuliocc = 7
• hanan = 8
• Amira = 9
• helpware = 10
• michaelb = 11
• FunnyX = 12
• John Bisschop = 13
• juanformoso = 14
• bringo = 15

Now, I did say you had to sign up using a valid user account, but the anonymous person linked to their blog which had contact info, so I decided to allow their entry in the mix….

To pick the winner, I wrote up a single line snippet in the ever-popular Snippet Compiler, pressed F5, and the result was…