It shocks me as a devoted Firefox user to say this, but Internet Explorer 9 could very well leapfrog the competition in the race of next-generation of web browsers in 2010 thanks to a groundbreaking platform-wide implementation of a hardware-accelerated renderer that I think is quite literally “a free upgrade for the web”.

What makes IE9’s implementation of hardware-acceleration so compelling is that it has major real-world benefits and its completely transparent to both end-user and developers. Using the new capabilities in Direct2D instead of GDI, IE9 is able to rendering all the visual elements of websites much faster and smoother. One example of where this really shines is in the Bing Maps demo where continuously panning the map is just as smooth as navigating a map in a 3D strategy game.

During a meeting with IE general manager Dean Hachamovitch, he explained that this feature hasn’t already been implemented in other mainstream browsers today is because by no means this is an easy feat to accomplish. At least one issue he pointed out was the fact that there may be other components inside a frame that handles its own rendering, like Adobe Flash for example.

Having already overcame the major implementation issues, Dean was able to confirm this feature does not actually introduce any incompatibility issues besides a subtle difference in the layout of text as fonts are rendered by the more advanced DirectWrite engine.

Essentially, this feature coupled with an already improved and continued investment in web standards and overall browser performance until it is released, IE9 is in great shape to become the browser with the best browsing experience in 2010 when one might expect it to ship as a standalone download.

I may very well make the switch back.

But before we dive into this new version of the Windows Code Pack let’s better understand what this Windows API Code Pack is all about.

Windows 7 offers new features like the taskbar, libraries, and the Sensor and Location platform, to name a few. These features enable new scenarios and create new opportunities for developers to make their applications shine on Windows 7. All these great features are exposed via the Win32 native API. Currently there is no “Windows 7” namespace in the .NET Framework, and no easy way to use these features from managed code applications. To help managed code developers access them, we released version 1.0 of the Windows API Code Pack for the .NET Framework in August (just after Windows 7 RTM).

The Windows API Code Pack is a free, managed Source Code Library provided by Microsoft as is. You should consider this library as if you wrote it yourself, as if it is your own code. It is a great starting point and provides a really good and solid solution for managed code developers. It covers a lot of the new Windows 7 features as well as some more fundamental core features from the Windows Vista timeframe. You may think of the Windows API Code Pack as the closest thing to an “official” managed API for Windows. But you need to remember that it’s not a product with 24x7 technical support available from Microsoft Customer Service and Support. We believe it is a great solution, and that the codebase is very solid and high quality.

Our goal with the code pack is to enable managed code developers to take advantage of Windows APIs that are not part of the .NET Framework. We feel that as a shared source that is separate from the .NET runtime libraries, the Windows API Code Pack provides an optimal compromise between the Microsoft Win32 managed wrapper, short time-to-market -we released the Windows API Code Pack just a month after the Win7 RTM, and we ship full source code of the library.

The Windows API Code Pack includes a great deal of managed API for Windows (7). For example:

• Extensive integration with the Windows Shell namespace, with support for the Windows Shell property system, providing control like explorer browser and access to Windows Libraries
• A completely 100% feature parity with the native Taskbar API including (but not limited to) JumpLists, Icon Overlay, Progress bar, Thumbnail, custom switcher, Thumbnail Button, etc…
• Windows Task Dialogs , other controls
• Support for Direct3D 11.0 and DXGI 1.0/1.1 APIs
• Support for the Sensor Platform APIs
• Extended Linguistic Services APIs
• Windows Restart Manager
• Power APIs
• And many other features

Each technology represented in the Windows API Code Pack has multiple demos and examples (including source) in C# and VB. We are planning on releasing updates to the Windows API Code Pack roughly every three months. We will be investing mainly in stability (meaning fixing bugs), fundamentals, testing and documentation, as well as new feature support (based on customer feedback).

You may ask yourself, “Why isn't the Windows API Code Pack part of the .NET Framework?”

We ship open source code that we might bring into the runtime sometime in the future, if we feel it's sufficiently core to the entire framework to be worth the size increase. Remember the .NET Framework runs on both Windows Vista and Windows XP. However, Windows 7 is here now, and we want to enable you to access this set of free, open source library sooner rather than later. We’re shipping this library in a community-supported form and, as you can see, we intend to keep updating it. While this version (1.0.1) is a minor release, we are planning on another release in the next few months. In the meantime, you get the best of both worlds in a package that you can use as a whole or in parts without restriction.

Another question you may ask is, “Will .NET 4 replace the need to use the Windows API Code pack?”

When .NET 4 ships, you will be able to use its Windows 7 features such as Taskbar and multitouch integration with WPF, DirectWrite support, and the location API via the Devices namespace. Continue to access other features such as libraries, Restart Manager, and Sensors via the Windows API Code Pack.

Last but not least, we are looking for feedback from the community – that is you the .NET developer using this library to write managed code applications for Windows 7. On the Windows API Code Pack site, you can ask questions, provide feedback, report bugs, and follow open bugs. Your input is critical for the continuation of this library, so please send us your feedback and questions.

To learn more about how to use the Windows API Code Pack check the Windows 7 Training on Channel 9

This laptop promotion is the result of a collaborative effort with Acer, whom we worked closely with to have these laptops ready for PDC. This PC is not yet available in the US (Acer has not yet announced pricing and availability for this PC) so that makes this “PDC Edition” of the laptop exclusive to PDC attendees.

The Aspire 1420P PDC Edition comes with the following specs:

• Windows 7 Ultimate x64
• Processor: Intel Celeron CPU SU2300 @ 1.2GHz
• Memory: 2GB (Supports up to 8GB)
• Display: 11.6” Widescreen |1366x768 Resolution
• Graphics: Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 4500MHD
• Network: 10/100/1000 Ethernet | Intel Wi-Fi Link 1000 802.11b/g/Draft-N
• Mobile Broadband: 3G
• Storage: 250GB

For a more complete and detailed list of specs, click here.

The Aspire 1420P comes with 3 USB ports, 1 HDMI port for connecting to HDTVs and monitors, a VGA port, Ethernet port, and a headphone and microphone jack. The laptop features a unique design with a metallic textured design just above the keyboard and a metal hinge for converting the laptop into Tablet mode. Its design is essentially a small laptop with Tablet PC features. It’s slim, light, and has a small footprint – making it easy to carry around. This laptop features a CTRL+ALT+DEL button and a Flip 3D button. Also, the Aspire 1420P uses the Windows 7 Sensor and Location Platform to adjust the screen depending on which way you hold the PC (in Tablet mode). For example: if you’re holding it a landscape position, the screen will display in landscape for you. Vice versa if you hold it in a portrait position.

We worked with Acer to image the laptops with some great software – including the beta release of Office 2010.

• Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 Beta
• Microsoft Touch Pack for Windows 7
• Windows Live Essentials
• Windows Virtual PC with Windows XP Mode
• Microsoft Security Essentials
• Corel Paint it! touch

Because the Aspire 1420P supports Windows Touch, we’ve included the Microsoft Touch Pack for Windows 7 as well as Corel Paint it! touch.

Corel Paint it! touch allows you to use your fingers to draw and paint. You can also turn your photos into paintings too.

One application I’ve written about recently is Amazon’s Kindle for PC. Amazon has released Kindle for PC and it works great on this laptop. You can download the beta of Kindle for PC today here. You can use multitouch gestures to move from page to page on the Kindle book you are reading. You can also zoom in and out with ease. For more on the Kindle for PC app, check out my demo video here on this post. In Tablet mode, reading books with Kindle for PC is very nice.

The Aspire 1420P also sports Mobile Broadband. With Windows 7, using Mobile Broadband is easier than ever before. Windows 7 will automatically detect if a Mobile Broadband connection is available (after inserting your SIM card).

You can choose to connect to the Mobile Broadband connection where you will be required enter subscription details from your mobile carrier. No need to mess with 3^rd party Mobile Broadband connection utilities.

Not only can you use multitouch with the Aspire 1420P, you can also use it as a Tablet. The Aspire 1420P is perfect for writing down notes using Microsoft OneNote 2010 (my favorite Office app).

Overall, this PC will be great for all the developers attending PDC to experience many of Windows 7’s new features and to be able to develop with those features in mind.

* This promotion is for full-conference attendees who are onsite at PDC. It is not available to Microsoft attendees, members of the media, government employees, staff, speakers, crew, volunteers, day pass attendees, guests, or Workshop-only attendees.

As you can see, there is compatibility status listed for both 32- and 64-bit versions of Windows 7, plus each application’s major and minor version numbers are listed to help normalize your data queries. Since October (yes, last month) we have already collected more than 5500 applications and the list is growing every day. If you are working through a list of hundreds or thousands of applications, this list will help you validate your applications more quickly. We will be updating this list regularly, so keep checking back to avoid any unnecessary testing. Click here to download the spreadsheet and get started.

If you are in the process of testing in-house developed applications, download the Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT) and use its in-box evaluators and test tools. Although we released ACT 5.5 back in April coinciding with Windows 7’s RC release, there were no changes needed to support the RTM version of Windows 7. Even though you will see an occasional “RC” in ACT’s reports, ACT 5.5 is the RTM-supporting version.

To access these and other application compatibility resources, check out the Springboard Application Compatibility Zone where we host the latest application compatibility content for Windows 7.

Jeremy Chapman
Windows Deployment

A few weeks ago, just two days before Windows 7 become generally available, Visual Studio 2010 hit its own major milestone with the release its second Community Technical Preview of Visual Studio, known as Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2. To me, it is always exciting to see how the different tools and frameworks evolve and add new features.  It seems that with every release the products get bigger and better, offering an even

greater number of programming  languages, and addressing an ever growing number of areas of development such as Web, client, mobile, parallel, consoles, and devices.

Despite being a “beta” product, it is much easier to work with Visual Studio 2010 than with VS 2008. It is much easier to control your solutions and, even more importantly, much easier to write and document code. The user interface is much improved; it uses the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) to reduce clutter and visual complexity, and modernizes the interface by removing outdated 3D bevels. Using WPF enables us to help developers focus on content areas by opening up negative space between windows and drawing attention to the current focus with a dominant accent color and a distinctive background. There are also some cool, small, and simple perks like the ability to control the size of text. You can also drag a single window from the main Visual studio application to a second monitor (just like that) and with that you have multi-monitor support via the VS client application.

Improvements to the IntelliSense allow it finally to work well for C++ projects. And let’s not forget the new debugger window that supports parallel computing debugging and lets you view your parallel stacks.

There is even a new language, F# (F stands for Functional programming), and numerous upgrades to C#, like support for dynamic keywords. Dynamic objects' operations are resolved at runtime (check out a good post about this by Scott Hanselman). There is also support for the next version of the C++ language specification, C++X0, like Lambda Expressions. Speaking of C++, we've built the C++ solutions using MSBuild, which should make everyone happy.

As always, backward compatibility is super critical, and it is important to mention that Visual Studio 2010 supports multi-targeting. Visual Studio 2010 can target .NET 2.0 through .NET 4.0 on a per-project basis, which means you can work with your older project on the new VS 2010 and enjoy all the goodies mentioned above (and many more).

But I want to focus this post on using Visual Studio 2010 to program Windows 7. There are quite few technologies and features in Visual Studio 2010 to help you write better applications targeting the specific features of Windows 7. Below are just a few of the Visual Studio 2010 features that we’ll write more about really soon.

.NET 4 and Windows 7

Visual Studio 2010 brings a complete new CLR version – version 4. This is not just an incremental upgrade on top of CLR 2 (.NET Framework 2). This enables new language enhancements like the dynamic keyword. And the new WPF brings support in a few other areas like shell and Taskbar integration, and multitouch.

WPF & Taskbar Integration

As you know, you program jump lists using the JumpList class. This exposes several methods and properties that manipulate the exposed jump lists for the application. It also has an attached property that you can apply to your application class to create, modify, and remove jump list items. If you work with specific files, you can use the JumpList.AddToRecentCategory method to add that file to the recently used file list managed by the shell.

There are two types of jump lists – tasks and items; you work with each using a JumpTask, or a JumpPath respectively. You can work with these in XAML, code-behind, or a combination of the two. The following code snippet shows a simple integration of tasks into a jump list.

<JumpList.JumpList>
   <JumpList>
      <JumpTask ApplicationPath="notepad.exe" 
                         CustomCategory="External Tools" 
                Description="Take Notes" 
                Title="Start Notepad" 
                IconResourcePath="notepad.exe" 
                IconResourceIndex="0" />

      <JumpTask ApplicationPath="calc.exe"
                         CustomCategory="External Tools" 
                         Description="Perform some calculations" 
                        Title="Start Calculator"
                        IconResourcePath="calc.exe" 
                        IconResourceIndex="0" />
    </JumpList>
</JumpList.JumpList>

In a similar way, you can use XAML to add Thumbnail Toolbar buttons as shown by the following code snippet.

<TaskbarItemInfo.ThumbButtonInfos>
   <ThumbButtonInfo DismissWhenClicked="True" 
                    ImageSource="images/booktrip.png"
                    Command="{Binding BookItinerary}"
                    Description="Book the itinerary now" />
</TaskbarItemInfo.ThumbButtonInfos>

WPF Common File Dialog Supports Libraries (Finally!)

For some strange reason, WPF 3 and 3.5 Common File Dialog (CFD) didn’t support the updated version of the CFD introduced with Windows Vista. The CFD was upgraded in Windows 7 to support libraries and provide a better user experience. It now allows seamless search integration as well as some advanced user functionality. With WPF 4, applications enjoy the power of the “new” CFD directly from WPF, and don’t need to import CFD from the WinForm namespace (which was the only way to show the updated CFD from WPF 3 and WPF 3.5).

WPF Supports Multitouch

WPF 4.0 introduces multitouch support directly into the WPF API– with no need to interop to a native service. These new features are only available on Windows 7 and are automatically deprecated when running under older operating systems, so you don’t have to detect the operating system yourself. WPF 4.0 adds a new manipulation API to the UIElement base class. This new support allows developers to track multiple touches and generate both cumulative and individual manipulations across the touches. Basically, this enables you to transform your object on the X and Y coordinates, rotation, and scale.

WPF will supply these manipulation events if the IsManipulationEnabled property on the element is set to true. It defaults to false, so you will need to turn on this property for each element where you want to manage manipulations. This is as simple as adding IsManipulationEnabled=true to your XAML as shown in the following code snippet.

<Border Margin="10,5" 
    BorderBrush="DarkGoldenrod" 
    BorderThickness="2" 
        CornerRadius="10" 
    MinHeight="75" 
    IsManipulationEnabled="true">

Optionally, you can also hook the ManipulationStarting and ManipulationCompleted events to provide code behind the implementation of these events.

WPF 4 also supports low-level touch messages, or raw touch input. You can interact with the raw touch events on any UIElement using TouchDown, TouchMove, and TouchUp events, all of which have preview event versions. This can be useful if you are trying to track multiple touches that are not manipulating the same object, or if you want to provide different behavior for touches and the mouse. We’ll soon write more about Windows 7 multitouch in general and WPF specifically.

MFC Updates

In Visual Studio 2010, C++ and MFC received a healthy dosage of “coolness” factor, adding useful features such as IntelliSense enhancements and C++0x features. The MFC Library received a major upgrade, especially in regard to the Taskbar, Multitouch, and Restart and Recovery:

Taskbar

The MFC Taskbar provides all the functionality that the native taskbar COM API provides. There is nothing that the one can do that the other cannot. The MFC simply wraps the Win32 APIs (as it always does) into a more “MFC-like” API that corresponds to the MFC Framework programming style guidelines. For example, the following code snippet sets the overlay icon.

CMainFrame* mainFrm = 
dynamic_cast<CMainFrame*>(AfxGetApp()->GetMainWnd());
if (mainFrm)
    mainFrm->SetTaskbarOverlayIcon(IDI_ICON_INFO,L"Info");

First you need to obtain a handle (a pointer) to the application's main window (the top-level window), which corresponds to Win32 HWND. Then, simply call the SetTaskbarOverlayIcon passing HICON and a string that provides an alt text version of the information conveyed by the overlay to meet accessibility requirements. Simple, right?

In MFC, the CFrameWnd class provides the functionality of a Windows single document interface (SDI), overlapped, or pop-up frame window. With the new MFC, this class was updated and now supports Taskbar functionality such as icon overlay, progress bar, jump lists, and thumbnails.

In MFC, Taskbar thumbnail preview support is built in, so the Taskbar thumbnails will show any rendering within the views. Therefore, other than implementing your own View drawing, you need not provide any explicit code to update those Thumbnails.

To enable Taskbar Thumbnails in an MFC application while using the MFC application wizard, all the user needs to do is select the “Multiple documents” application type with the option “Tabbed documents” enabled. When the application runs, MFC will take a snapshot of each view and send it to the Taskbar APIs to display as thumbnails.

And the output could like this:

Multitouch

In Visual Studio 2010, MFC also supports multitouch. By default, on a touch-enabled device (such as touch screen), Windows 7 sends gesture touch messages to any application; that is, by default Windows 7 sends WM_GESTURE messages to the target windows. All that MFC is doing is mapping these messages to its own message handlers. MFC provides a number of message handler overrides that can receive each of the gesture types, and each returns a Boolean value. If a gesture input is processed by the application, the corresponding override should return TRUE; otherwise, it returns FALSE. Therefore if you wish to handle the zoom gestures, all you need to do is implement the relevant handler. Here is the list of supported handlers.

// Gesture handlers
virtual BOOL OnGestureZoom(CPoint ptCenter, long lDelta);
virtual BOOL OnGesturePan(CPoint ptFrom, CPoint ptTo);
virtual BOOL OnGestureRotate(CPoint ptCenter, double dblAngle);
virtual BOOL OnGesturePressAndTap(CPoint ptFirstFinger, long lDelta);
virtual BOOL OnGestureTwoFingerTap(CPoint ptCenter);

Similarly, you can register to receive raw touch messages and the default gesture messages. In Windows 7, gestures messages and raw touch are mutually exclusive. If you register to receive the raw touch messages for a particular window, that window will stop receiving gestures messages. If you opt-in to handle raw touch messages, you need to implement the following handler:

virtual BOOL OnTouchInput(
                        CPoint pt, 
                        int nInputNumber, 
                        int nInputsCount, 
                        PTOUCHINPUT pInput);

MFC makes your life easier by providing a lot of the information per each touch point, for example, the client coordinates for the actual point where the touch-enabled device has been touched. MFC also provides the ID of the touch point, that is, the first, second, or third finger, as well as the total count of current touches.

Restart and Recovery (Restart Manager)

In Visual Studio 2010, MFC also provides native support of the Restart Manager. Restart Manager is a feature introduced by the Microsoft Windows Vista operating system. It can help applications maintain their data when an update needs to shutdown the application or when an unexpected software error or crash occurs. Instead of shutting down abnormally, Restart Manager enables an application to perform an application save before it is terminated. Furthermore, it can re-invoke the application, enabling it to restore its state from before the shutdown or crash.

For new MFC applications, you can get the application restart and recovery feature for free by using the MFC Application Wizard as you can see from the following image:

All configurable parts of the restart manager API are exposed to the user through virtual members that can be over-ridden. Needless to say, you can expect some more blogging about this feature.

.NET 4 and Location

.NET 4 has a new Device namespace that supports the Windows 7 Location API (part of the Windows 7 Sensor and Location. The System.Device.Location namespace allows application developers to access the user's location easily using a single API. Location information may come from multiple providers, such as GPS, Wi-Fi triangulation, and cell phone tower triangulation. The System.Device.Location classes provide a single API to encapsulate the multiple location providers on a computer and support seamless prioritization and transitioning between them. An application developer using this API does not need to know which location-sensing technologies are available on a particular computer and is freed from the burden of tailoring an application to a specific hardware configuration.

To begin accessing location, you need to create a GeoLocationProvider. This object is the main “location manager” object through which you can register for LocationChange notifications and synchronously read the latest location information. Next you need to call Start to start the acquisition of data from the current location provider. You can check the Status property to determine if data is available. If data is available, you can get the location once from the Location property, or receive continuous location updates using the LocationChanged event. The following code snippet is a VERY simple code sample showing how to retrieve the current GeoCoordinates (latitude, longitude).

GeoLocationProvider provider = new GeoLocationProvider();
provider.Start();
GeoCoordinate coordinate = provider.Location.Coordinate;
if (coordinate != GeoCoordinate.Unknown)
{
  //Business logic here
}

Unfortunately, .NET 4 supports only the Location API and not the full Sensor and Location Platform – meaning that the .NET location implementation is still missing the Sensor piece. Use the Windows API Code Pack to access sensor from managed code.

Parallel Computing and Windows 7 Multi-Core

Parallel programming in Visual Studio 2010 has many aspects, for example, Parallel LINQ and other .NET enhancements for supporting parallel computing, including statements like Parallel.For that use System.Threading.Tasks.Task. C++ developers will be happy to learn that the Task concepts also exist in C++ Version 10, which ships with VS 2010. For native code, Concurrency Runtime (ConcRT) has implicit knowledge of Win7 processor groups and will schedule work on up to 256 cores; ConcRT also takes advantage of User Mode Scheduling of threads. Therefore, any workload that sits on top of ConcRT immediately benefits. In other words, because both the Parellel Pattern Library (PPL) and Asynchronous Agents are included in Visual C++ 10 CRT and are built on top of ConcRT, any workloads you build on them will scale to 256 cores--

just like that! (Well, you will still need to write the code, but the scaling is free.)

For managed code applications, the story is less bright. Management of the managed stack thread sits on top of the .NET ThreadPool (System.Threading.ThreadPool) by default. This does not use the new processor group APIs in Windows 7, and therefore doesn’t automatically benefit from the Windows 7 ability to scale. The maximum number of processes that the threadpool can utilize is 64. But not everything is lost, it is possible to write a custom TaskScheduler that targeted more than 64 procs, and use the rest of the Task Parallel Library with that special scheduler. This would be a cool CodePlex project, right?

Overall Visual Studio 2010 includes tons of new technologies and improvements--all of it icing on the Windows 7 cake!

Windows 7 builds on past collaboration by adding next-generation Dolby Digital Plus technology to offer high-quality multichannel audio. Available in Windows 7 Home Premium, Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate, Dolby Digital Plus brings home theater–quality audio to the PC, improving the listening experience of music, movies, and TV.

When it comes to the small, discreet speakers built into a PC or laptop, how can audio really be optimized? Dolby Digital Plus, a multichannel audio standard for DVDs and select HD broadcasts worldwide, is a high-efficiency, next-generation audio codec that maintains the quality of Dolby Digital at a lower data rate and is fully compatible with all current Dolby Digital A/V receivers. From the movie and music producer point of view, this means that Dolby Digital Plus offers more channels and better compression, making it easier to create higher quality content at lower bit rates to experience on the PC.

Dolby Digital Plus is already the broadcast audio standard for HDTV services in Europe. France is currently using Dolby Digital Plus, with Poland and other countries following closely. Users in these countries watching streaming broadcast content on their computers get to experience next-generation sound.

Microsoft’s diligence in working closely with Dolby engineers to fully enable the PC to be a more sophisticated, dynamic entertainment device is evidence of the company’s broad vision and steadfast commitment to revolutionizing the role of the PC. The next generation of PC enthusiasts can enjoy their computers as their primary home entertainment device—and Dolby Digital Plus will play an important role in that experience.

Spinal Tap fans will recall the restaurant scene in which David St. Hubbins’s interfering girlfriend, Jeanine, informs the band that their album wasn’t “mixed right” because it wasn’t mixed in “Dob-l-ey.” We may be biased, but we tend to agree with that statement. Content is never quite right without Dolby audio technology. Fortunately, PCs with Windows 7 will never have that problem.

To check out the latest on Dolby Digital Plus in Windows 7—including Dolby videos and a dedicated Windows 7 web page—visit Dolby.com and Audiodolby.com. For a complete Dolby PC demo and other PC videos, visit www.audiodolby.com/#/motion/pc. For press releases and news about Dolby technologies, visit investor.dolby.com/releases.cfm.

Robin Selden
Senior Vice President, Marketing, Dolby

One thing lacking from this solution is email notification. How do we know if the backup job started? Or finished?

There is a free and open source tool that can be used to solve this problem, it is called blat. It consists of an executable, and a DLL.

You can find it at http://www.blat.net/

Download it, and extract the files to a place where your scripts run. In my case, I put it in c:\backups

To start, you will need an SMTP server that you have access to. That is probably the most difficult part of getting it to work – which means it is very easy to use.

If I just want to send a simple email that tells me a batch script has started, I could call it like this:

blat.exe -f batch@intelliadmin.com -to support@intelliadmin.com -server 192.168.1.1 -subject "Batch file started" -body "The very important batch script has started"

You have five required options to get your email to send:

-f [FROM] (This is the email address that the message will come from)
-to [TO] (This is the email address the message will be sent to)
-subject [SUBJECT] (Subject of the email. Uses quotes if you have spaces)
-body [BODY] (Body of email. Use quotes if you have spaces)
-server [SERVER] (IP Address or host name of the server)


That is for a simple message. Blat is filled with powerful options. For example, I could run a robocopy in my script, and redirect the output to a text file like this:

robocopy c:\backup \\server\c\backup >> output.txt

Then, when I send my notification I could attach the output text file to my email like this:

blat.exe -f batch@intelliadmin.com -to support@intelliadmin.com -server 192.168.1.1 -subject "Batch file started" -body "The very important batch script has completed" -attach c:\backup\output.txt

Once the command runs, the output will show up as an attachment in my inbox:

Like I said, it is loaded with options. Check it out, and when you do just type blat.exe -help to get the entire list of command line parameters.

Original Article from www.networksteve.com

While on stage with Ray, Loic announced the launch of Seesmic for Windows.

With the vast majority of Seesmic users coming from PCs running Windows, the move to the Windows Platform made sense. By moving development to focus primarily on the Windows Platform, it will allow Seesmic to focus on providing the best user experience to the majority of its users. This includes addressing issues with performance. Loic also announced that Seesmic for Windows will allow developer to write plug-ins that can run securely within the application.

As part of today’s announcement, Seesmic is releasing a Preview release of Seesmic for Windows. Seesmic for Windows is Seesmic’s brand new desktop client developed on the Windows Platform. They have been working aggressively to have this Preview release ready for you today.

Seesmic for Windows provides an excellent way to manage tweeting on Twitter. It helps you stay on top of what your friends are tweeting and what the latest trends on Twitter are.

Seesmic for Windows provides a “tabbed” UI (left-side of the app) that lets you filter your Twitter “stream” of tweets. You can filter by account as Seesmic for Windows supports having multiple Twitter accounts signed in, searches and Twitter’s latest new feature called lists. Everything can be filtered into specific columns. You can drag the columns into whatever position you like and scroll right to left to view your columns. And the new posting bar in Seesmic for Windows makes it easy to switch from one account to multiple accounts.

I’ve had the pleasure of using Seesmic for Windows for the last few weeks now and it works great! I’m currently managing 2 Twitter accounts, a few lists and use the Twitter Search capabilities track tweets on Windows 7, Windows Live, and more. I am very excited about what’s to come for Seesmic for Windows. You can expect to see Seesmic for Windows take advantage of the Windows Taskbar enhancements in Windows 7 and when Twitter adds support for dynamic location, it will use Windows 7’s Location and Sensor Platform!

Seesmic for Windows was released to all Team Seesmic members during the keynote this morning. If you are a Team Seesmic member, you should have an email from Loic in your inbox with a link to download Seesmic for Windows. If you’re not a Team Seesmic member, don’t worry. Join Team Seesmic to download the Seesmic for Windows Preview and receive the latest and greatest builds. You can also head on over to Seesmic.com right now and sign-up to receive Seesmic for Windows when it becomes available as well. Give Seesmic for Windows a spin and be sure to follow @windowsblog and @mswindows!

Loic also demonstrated Seesmic ported over into Silverlight and running as a Silverlight-based app. Seesmic is also excited about the possibilities Silverlight will provide in regards to eventually creating a cross platform application.

For more on today’s announcements from Day 1 of PDC09, click here. 

UPDATE: For more information on Seesmic’s announcements today including Seesmic for Windows, check out Loic Le Meur’s blog post!

Join Ed Bott, Mary Jo Foley, Kip Kniskern, Paul Thurrott, Rafael Rivera, Tom Warren and I in our always-quirky liveblog commentary below. You can also tune in the live video stream and recording after the event at the PDC website.

Disclosure: I am attending PDC09 as a guest of Microsoft Australia.

To help you find this information quickly and easily, we have updated the Enterprise Learning Framework (ELF) with content for Windows 7. ELF is a is a web based tool that helps corporations develop a training and communication plan for employees during a Windows 7, Windows Vista, and 2007 Microsoft Office system deployment. The tool helps you find content for three different audiences, Information Workers, Influential Information Workers, and Support. It also helps you find the right content for topics you are interested in, within particular deployment timeframes. ELF even gives you the ability to generate customized email messages or a Microsoft Office Word document that you can send to your users with all content you find.

The Enterprise Learning Framework is a  great tool to help you prepare your end users and your support staff for Windows 7. You can find the tool here.