Nothing says rock and roll like a song about Microsoft Silverlight.

Head over to Dan Wahlin and Spike Xavier’s blog to listen to the song

http://weblogs.asp.net/dwahlin/archive/2008/04/27/silverlight-the-song.aspx

• ActiveWin Windows Vista Infocenter
  
• Dell's Windows Vista Center
  
• Ed Bott's Windows Expertise
• Extended64.com
• ITsVISTA
  
• PROnetworks
• The Elder Geek on Windows Vista
  
• The Road to Know Where
• Vista4Beginners
• VistaRewired
• Windows Connected
  
• Windows-Now
  
• Windows Talk
  
• Windows Vista Forums
  
• Windows Vista Magazine
  

Messenger Group, developed with Windows Live Messenger platform, is a service for a group of Messenger users chatting together in real time. Maybe you think that Windows Live Messenger supports multi-conversation, but this multi-conversation is temporary, will be dismissed with the finish of conversation.
Compared with multi-conversation, Messenger Group is an existing group with each member in, members can talk together at any time without creating a temporary multi-conversation. Messenger Group makes a group of people connecting closer, no matter whether they are on your Messenger contact list. You can create a group for a team, a department or a company to chat online together.
Now if you have a Windows Live ID, then go to Messenger Group website (http://www.messengergroupchat.com) to create your own Messenger Group.

• Free to create Messenger Groups
• Each Messenger Group can have 900 members at most
• Group manager can change group name and display picture
• Group manager can set an administrator to help manage group
• Group member can change their nickname in the group

At present there are more than three million users and 500,000 Messenger groups have been created.
Screenshot: >> Click Here <<
News source: Messenger Group official website

Neowin.net - Messenger Group – Enjoy group chat on your WL Messenger!

The first naturally occurring superheavy element has been found. An international team of scientists found several nuclei of unbibium in a sample of the naturally occurring heavy metal thorium. Unbibium has an atomic number of 122 and an atomic weight of 292. In general, very heavy elements tend to be unstable but scientists have long predicted that even heavier nuclei would be stable. The group that found unbibium in thorium say it has a half life in excess of 100 million years and an abundance of about 10^(-12) relative to thorium, which itself is about as abundant as lead.

Read the full article here

I posted a few weeks ago about some Vista Springboard. Continuing that series of posts, I wanted to talk about the first part of Springboard program which is: Discover. Now I'm sure many of you have already "Discovered" Vista, I thought I had too, but the great thing about the springboard site is it concentrates a great deal of information into nice digestible categories.

So as most readers have probably already discovered the technical aspects of Vista, I wanted to highlight some of the great tools that are provided. If you have ever been asked to deliver a report on how much is something is going to cost, and to figure out its ROI, and TCO, and all those non technical acronyms that our favourite accountant is concerned with, If your like me your eyes gloss over, and your brain starts hurting.

Fortunately Microsoft know's that we're all lazy admins, so they made us a great tool: Microsoft Windows Vista Cost and Benefit Estimator.

First the calculator starts out by asking some simple questions. For instance how many computers do you have in environment. Then what the current OS distributions are.

Once you have entered in your information a highly detailed report will be generated that also includes a laundry list of benefits. These are the kinds of numbers that impress decision makers, and that can take hours to generate. Now a big Disclaimer that most of the data is generated based on the information you enter in to the tool. This means you need to be confident in the information so that the report generated is going to accurate.

example of benefits:

So take a look at the tool: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsvista/ROItool/Default.aspx

And don't forget to discuss your Vista deployment issues in the Forums. To encourage some lively discussions, the best posts, answers and contributions (as decided by a qualified panel of qualified judges, err.. Lazy judges) will receive a copy of Windows Vista SP1, You have to post to win! 

Microsoft Office Labs, probably best known for their concept video of the future of personal health which was shown at MIX08 (video), have just launched their public website today at www.officelabs.com. Similarly to Microsoft’s other product-development group Live Labs, Office Labs aims to test ideas for Office by building prototypes and collect usage data from the people who risk testing them. It’s win-win for everyone.

One of the tools they are making available today is the long-awaitedSearch Commands, codename “Scout” . For those who remember, the same tool made a cameo on the IEBlog about a month ago.

The Office add-in as of today supports Word, Excel and Powerpoint and like what was shown in a concept a year ago allows users to search for commands in the Office applications directly from the Ribbon. They can then quickly those commands by a numbered keyboard shortcut, giving quick access to commands or tools if you don’t know where they are in the Ribbon bar.

What’s interesting is that for this release they’ve also added “Guided Help” functionality. Guided Help was a feature in the beta releases of Windows Vista (but mysteriously taken out of the final release and still missing), it allows the system to “show you” how to troubleshoot tasks by highlighting what you need to click. Here, it offers a quick tutorial on how to use Search Commands.

I’ve only played it for a few minutes, but it seems to do exactly what it says it does and the results show up pretty instantly. However the only feature that’s missing is a As David kindly noted in the comments below, “Win+Y” is the quick-access shortcut key that jumps focus to the search field. Very cool.

Go download Search Commands and try it for yourself.