VsVim

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This is a good day, because I discovered VsVim , a Vim emulation for Visual Studio 2010. The project page on GitHub features a Wiki and a section issues with feature requests and bug reports.

Interested in Windows’ PowerShell? Then the Windows PowerShell Language Specification Version 2.0 might be worth reading.

LWN’s article Storm Clouds warns about cloud based services.

In one of my applications I’m using the WebClient class (from namespace System.Net) to download a file from the internet. The syntax is pretty easy:

var client : WebClient := new WebClient();
client.DownloadFile(src, dst);

With src and dst being strings. This worked always fine for me until recently after I’ve installed a proxy. To have WebClient automatically use your proxy-settings (e.g. taken from the Internet Explorer) simply add the following line after instantiating WebClient:

client.Proxy := new WebProxy;

To learn more about automatic proxy detection read on here.

Recently I’ve purchased an Acer Aspire 5741G. It ships with Windows 7 pre-installed. Nowadays most manufacturers consider it a good idea to equip their notebooks with an extra partition which holds all data necessary to recover your Windows installation. So if your installation is screwed up (think of a virus or something) you can put your notebook back into factory default. Of course the operating system of my choice is Ubuntu rather than Windows 7. However, I wished to keep a functional Windows partition and recovery partition just in case I plan to sell the notebook in a few years. Thus I wanted my Windows partition to be repartitioned in order to install Ubuntu alongside Windows. Ubuntu’s installation guide explains here that this could be done as part of the installation procedure. And indeed this was dead easy. I just needed to to configure via a slider how big I wished the Windows partition to be. Installation succeeded without any problems.

After booting Ubuntu the Hardware Drivers application asked me if it should install and activate drivers for the Wifi card and the graphics card. Of course I accepted and within seconds my graphics card was configured and access to my WLAN was set up. A quick test of the keyboards function keys and he SD-card reader (I expected both to be problematic) revealed that everything works fine.

It seems we’re ultimately getting rid of Flash, thanks to HTML5 and
CSS3. The web sports interesting sites demonstrating the power of the
new technologies. The following demos are worth a look:

If you intend on jumping the train you might find the following
tutorials/books useful:

DiffPDF

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I’ve just come across DiffPDF, which is a tool helping you to compare PDF files. It provides two modes: textural comparison of the documents and comparison of the files’ appearance (for instance figures or moved items).

And here’s a list of news feeds.

Here’s a list of podcasts I’m regularly listening to.

Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 have been released. If you live in Germany you can try your luck in Microsoft’s lottery and win a Nokia E72 smartphone. Browse to http://www.microsoft.com/de/de/dynamicit/microsoft-virtual-launch-event-gewinnspiel.aspx and read how to participate.