ChangeBASE Linkbait: March 2012

My colleague Carl has been hard at work, furiously reading/reviewing articles for your pleasure.

Here is his update for March.

Windows 8 News

Windows 8 Consumer Preview Beta (hardware specs) (exe) (iso) (debug symbols) (server) has been released to try. Copies expire on 15th January 2013. Downloaded one million times on the first day.

I had no problems installing on Virtualbox but it failed on VMWare 7

Getting started guide.

Interview with the team behind it

Metro-style applications for Windows 8 should all have a touch-first experience

British English is a language and in Windows 8 you will have Favourites

Fun fact: The fish graphic used all over this release is the Betta fish.

Some new features and hotkeys

Here’s how you set up Windows To Go, the version that sits on a bootable USB stick

The end of ClearType and some subtle font changes?

Greg has installed it and gives his initial impressions

Wallpaper that can spread across multiple displays

Windows 7 themes: festivity, silliness… and serenity

Migration News

Discovery: The beginning of the Migration journey

Windows 8 has a compatibility centre showing the results of testing and where users can report apps not working.

New Server Logo Requirements doc says “The majority of applications that currently run on Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 should work on Windows Server 8 Beta with no changes.”, and then discusses the minority by saying shim, elevate or fix them.

Reset all IE shortcuts back to 32bit

Packaging News

Visual Studio 11 Beta and .Net Framework 4.5 have been released with a lovely new installer

Why Visual Studio 11 installer requires space on the system drive

Podcast interview with Rob Mensching

Want to be able to prevent filetypes from appearing in the recent documents, supress the edit verb or tell Windows 8 that a filetype is safe for elevation? It is all controlled in the edit flags

Part 3 of Matt Johnson’s ICE validation series (part1, part2)

Installing/removing Windows 8 Metro style apps from the commandline

Why do program files go into the Program Files directory?

Why doesn’t the Maximize button maximize across all monitors?

Virtualisation News

Learn about ThinApp and Default folder isolations in IE

ThinApp Conditional Installs

Office News

Office 15 Beta features and improvements

Browser News

Want a 64bit version of Firefox? Try Waterfox

IE10 changes in Windows 8

Mobile News

Nokia Microsoft Phone are attacking the budget market

iOS 5.1 is out

The iPad 3 has been announced

ChangeBASE news

Greg, Mike and Chris Jackson are presenting an “Eye-Opening Webcast” on March 20^th

Security News

The mystery of the Duqu framework

Other News

Immediately stop using your Lenovo ThinkCentre M90z & M70z All-In-One Desktop and unplug the power cord.

Suffering from any kind of computer problem? Try Microsoft Fix it Center Pro automated diagnostic portal. It appears to scan your computer and then run the results against a database looking for known problems.  There are different sets of rules to detect different sets of problems.  Sounds familiar?

Silly

Telecommunications services for the 1990s from 1969

New anti-virus software 'deadliest yet'