To use the Regedits:  Save the REG File to your hard disk. Double click it and answer yes to the import prompt. REG files can be viewed in Notepad by right clicking on the file and selecting Edit.

To use the VBS Files: Download .vbs file and save it to your hard drive (you may want to right click and use Save Target As).  Double
click  the vbs file. You will be prompted when the script is done.

NOTE: If your anti-virus software warns you of  a “malicious” script, this is normal if you have “Script Safe” or similar technology enabled.  These scripts are not malicious, but they do make changes to the System Registry.

Read more: Registry Edits for Windows XP

We are excited to announce the immediate availability of version 3.3 of the Metasploit Framework. This release includes 446 exploits, 216 auxiliary modules, and hundreds of payloads, including an in-memory VNC
service and the Meterpreter. In addition, the Windows payloads now support NX, DEP, IPv6, and the Windows 7 platform. More than 180 bugs were fixed since last year?s release of version 3.2, making this one of
the more well-tested releases yet.

Official site: Metasploit

If you have a reasonably new laptop with an Intel WiFi chipset then I have some good news. A set of new Intel WiFi drivers made available just a couple weeks ago, version 13.0.0.107 if you’re playing along, finally adds the necessary driver-level support for the new native Virtual WiFi technology in Windows 7.

After downloading and installing the drivers (32-bit here, 64-bit here), assuming your WiFi chipset supports the functionality (which I can verify the 5300 can but 3945 cannot), a new “Wireless Network Connection” with the adapter name “Microsoft Virtual WiFi Miniport” will automatically appear in your network connections.

Read more: i started something

I’ve been using this software for the last couple of months. Would I go back to 2007?  Only if you prised it from my cold fingers – it’s that good.  Solid and stable, you really, really shouldn’t miss this.

Read at: UK Academic Team Blog
Official site: MS Office 2010 beta

At the Microsoft Professional Developer (PDC) conference, Scott Guthrie announced the availability of Silverlight 4 Beta.

WHAT?!

That’s right, we’ve released an early beta of the next version of Silverlight.  It’s really amazing to think what the team is accomplishing at the pace they are accomplishing it!  Silverlight 3 released just over a year ago and here we are with yet another release full of features that our community has been asking for.

This beta release is a developer release.  This means that this is a preview mostly for developers to understand the new features and continue to get feedback.  No “end-user” runtime is available for this release, nor is a “go-live” license for customers wishing to put their applications into production.  If you have questions on this, feel free to leave a comment here.

Enough blabbing, here’s the goods.  WARNING: Long post ahead…but filled with information.

Download Silverlight 4 and tools
Silverlight 4 Resources
What’s new in Silverlight 4 – feature review

Read more: Method ~ of ~ failed

After reading a recent post by Steve Souders concerning a free tool called dynaTrace Ajax, I was intrigued. It claimed to provide full tracing analysis of Internet Explorer 6-8 (including JavaScript, rendering, and network traffic). Giving it a try I was very impressed. I tested against a few web sites but got the most interesting results running against the JavaScript-heavy Gmail in Internet Explorer 8.

I typically don’t write about most performance analysis tools because, frankly, most of them are quite bland and don’t provide very interesting information or analysis. dynaTrace provides some information that I’ve never seen before – in any tool on any browser.

Read more: John Resig

Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework November 15th 2009 update.

Download: http://cfx.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectRelease.aspx?ReleaseId=35920

We newly added the following samples in the release.

CSASPNETMVCCustomActionFilter

The CSASPNETMVCCustomActionFilter sample demonstrates how to use custom ActionFilter to intercept the ASP.NET MVC processing pipeline. They include intercepting the Controller Action’s execution (preprocess and post process) and modifying the Model data before the View rendering.

VBASPNETImageMap
CSASPNETReportViewerExport
CSASPNETFormViewUpload
CSASPNETCacheAPI
CSASPNETAjaxScriptControl
CSSL3HTMLBridge, VBSL3HTMLBridge
CSWPFDataBinding
CSWPFMasterDetailBinding
(more…)

Read more: All-In-One Code Framework

This tutorial explains how you can install the Google Chrome browser on Ubuntu 9.04 and how to enable the Adobe Flash plugin in it. Please note that Google Chrome for Ubuntu is still in alpha state and should not be used on production systems.

This document comes without warranty of any kind! I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

Read more: HowToForge

Go! is a multi-paradigm language — it has a strong foundation in object oriented programming, functional programming and procedural programming as well as logic programming. In addition, it is a multi-threaded language with communication capabilities. This is a powerful combination aiming to solve the hard issues of complex software development.

The aim of this book is to introduce the programmer to the features of Go! and to programming in the language.

Read at: Lulu

As a cursed “magpie developer” I can’t help but read up on every new thing I hear about.

And the latest shiny thing is Google’s “Go” language. (Google Wave is sooo last month).

One of the authors is Ken Thompson, creator of Unix and the ‘B’ Language (pre-cursor to C).

I’m fascinated by little details, and here’s one that I like:

    If

    In Go a simple if looks like this:

    if x > 0 {
        return y
    }

    Mandatory braces encourage writing simple if statements on multiple lines. It’s good style to do so anyway, especially when the body contains a control statement such as a return or break.

No parens required for an if… but braces are required. This is the opposite of other languages, but makes great sense to me!

It’s kind of like Visual Basic, if anything.

In fact, there a whole bunch of things that are reminiscent of Visual Basic:

    var s string = “”;

    This is the var keyword, followed by the name of the variable, followed by its type, followed by an equals sign and an initial value for the variable.

This is more than a little reminiscent of VB:

    Dim s as string = “”

Although with GO:

    we could go even shorter and write the idiom

    s := “”;

Similarities continue…

Read more: secretGeek

Charlie talks about the tile engine and the quest engine.  The tile engine supports several layers to create a complex final level.  The first layer allows you to define a basic landscape or the interior of a building. A second layer allows you to decorate it with trees, chairs, or other objects. A third layer contains your sprites, and a fourth layer defines the boundaries inside which the sprites can move.

Read more: Coding4Fun

   Microsoft has released part of its .NET Framework – the part for internet-connected smart devices – into the open-source community.

   The company said on Monday that it’s releasing source code for the .NET Micro Framework under an Apache 2.0 license. Microsoft is also creating a community of “interested and involved members to help shape the future direction of the product.” The community’s web site was still under construction at time of the announcement.

   But don’t get too excited. You won’t be getting the full .NET Micro Framework stack, as Microsoft’s open-source code donation will lack the TCP/IP stack and cryptography libraries. Microsoft said the former has been licensed by a third party, so Microsoft can’t release the code, while the latter Microsoft has decided is “used outside of the scope of the .NET Micro Framework.” You’ll have to use your own alternatives.

Read more: The Register

Text Sharp extension allows you to adjust text clarity in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 IDE (Professional, Premium and Ultimate)

Read at: Text Sharp

At his lecture at the PDC’s “Windows 7 Developer Boot Camp”, Landy Wang showcased many of the memory management changes done in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 kernel, one of which is highlighted below. These changes, on average, lead to performance increase of up to two times in memory constrained systems – for free. All you have to do is move to the new operating system.
Removing the PFN Lock

The Page Frame Number (PFN) lock, up to Windows Vista (including), is a single lock in charge of almost all operations regarding page allocations in Windows memory, and as such it is a huge bottleneck when it comes to memory intensive applications and systems. For example, on a machine with 128 cores, SQL server reaches 88% contention over this lock, meaning that almost every second operation is stalled and takes precious time.

This lock has been removed and replaced with finer-grained locks on an individual memory page basis, achieving an up to x15 performance increase on a 32 processor machine. Note that this improvement comes for free to the developer who only needs to swap to the new OS.

Read more: Stiller’s Blog

Google has just released a new programming language, called Go. Written by Russ Cox, amongst others, it wraps a custom programming language around low-level functionality very similar to that present in his libtask. With the ability to launch functions as microthreads, and the ability to switch between them using channels, they provide functionality similar to that of Stackless Python.

This post is intended to serve as a comparison of how microthreads and channels are used in two languages that feature them. It is not intended to advocate the choice of one over the other, nor is it guaranteed to be full and complete.

Starting a worker function as a microthread

The availability of lightweight threads that can be used without regard for the resource usage they might incur, means that among other things work can be farmed off to other microthreads while the current microthread does its own thing.

Read more: Stuff What I Posted