Well it seems as though its finally happened-Service Pack 3 for every-ones favourite OS, Windows XP has been released to manufacturing (however not available to the public just yet-expect to see it on April 29th).

Service Pack 3 updates all 32-bit versions of Windows XP from Starter to XP Professional (the x64 edition of XP is based on Server 2003 and requires the Service Packs for that product). The complete package from the Download Center will reportedly be some 320 MB. Downloads via the Update function will be around 70 MB according to Microsoft’s current plans; this update can be so much smaller because only the data required for a specific XP version are downloaded, not the entire package.

Support for Windows XP without any service packs expired long ago and officially SP2 has to already be installed before SP3 can be installed, despite the fact there is no technical reason for this requirement. However Microsoft is inconsistent and SP3 can in practice be installed on XP with only SP1. Strangely, the complete SP3 contains all of the patches you need to update even a fresh base version of XP. Microsoft says that a slipstream

The following is targetting towards Malaysia residents:

So you’ve been talking and hearing about the super duper cool Start.NET program that Microsoft Malaysia is currently running….  but have you been getting the anticipated attention from your friends and colleagues? 

How? 

Read on for more details. 

 Who are we looking for? Anyone who share the passion and excitement on .NET, and do it in the most creative and interesting ways.  Someone who can create a sparkle of getting to know more about .NET!  What do you need to do? 

·         Create a VideoBlog about .NET (between 30 – 60 seconds). You may obtain the facts and information from: http://www.microsoft.com/malaysia/press/archive2007/linkpage4361.mspx·         The ending frame of your VideoBlog must include the URL: www.startdotnet.info

·         Upload the video on your blog or online

·         Email your Name, Company, Telephone number and Email Address, together with your VideoBlog URL to blogdotnet@crystaledge.net  

But… what do I VideoBlog about?

VideoBlog the coolest, slickest, cutest, or most elegant styles you have to drive the excitement of getting to know .NET.  VideoBlog about what you LIKE, who

I stumbled accross the Shipping Seven blog today… Its a blog from someone on the Windows 7 team who isn’t afraid to make their true feelings about Microsoft and Windows and general heard (all be it annomously )

 Check out this interesting post off the Shipping Seven blog: 

In almost every Windows OS release so far, we’ve changed something major in the OS subsystems, to improve the Windows infrastructure. And that generally screws up application or driver compatibility:
Windows 95
Long file names - Application developers had to fix their applications to support long file names. (A good thing, though: What is in 1NTINPRS.AVI?)
Windows NT
Driver developers had to write drivers for a new driver framework because of the hardware abstraction layer. Actually, most of them just stayed away, and supported Win9x only.

Windows 2000
A major annoyance for driver developers, who could ignore the NT driver models up to this point. Win2k ran on NTFS, and had locked-down permissions - developers couldn’t install their application’s files in \windows\system anymore.
We were telling corporations to set up their users as non-admins on their machines,

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2008 Is here, its now time to face the truth… The clock is ticking on Microsoft’s Windows XP. And whilst Microsoft may view this as a natural stage in the evolution of a product that was RTM’ed (released to manufacturing) all the way back in 2001, a healthy proportion of people will fail to see eye to eye with the company on this one. In this context… Windows Vista.

Vista In 2007

Even with Vista hot off the presses, XP did not give one inkling that it was going to give up the fight, with Microsoft focusing on winding XP up for good-Ending support for SP1 and soon to be SP2.

-Microsoft’s Windows Product Management vice president Mike Nash on September 27th: “with more than 60 million licenses sold as of this summer, Windows Vista is on track to be the fastest-selling operating system in Microsoft’s history.”
They had done it-sold over 20 million licences in the first month since RTM, passing 40million within the first 100days and 60 million by mid 2007. The last statistics made available to the public, dating back to the end of October, pointed to over 88

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BARCELONA, Spain — Nov. 5, 2007 — Today, during the keynote address at Microsoft TechEd Developers 2007, S. “Soma” Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft Corp., announced that Microsoft will release Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 by the end of November 2007. Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 enable developers at all levels to rapidly create connected applications that offer compelling user experiences for Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, the 2007 Microsoft Office system, mobile devices and the Web. Soma also unveiled plans to open new opportunities for Visual Studio partners, as well as to deliver new tools and resources for developers, including a first Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the Microsoft Sync Framework and new capabilities for Popfly Explorer.

“The highly social and visual nature of the Web has fundamentally changed what users expect from all applications they interact with, regardless of whether it’s on a customer-facing Web site or Windows rich client application, or a desktop business application built using Microsoft Office,” said Somasegar. “Traditionally, organizations have been hard pressed to deliver the richer, more connected applications and services they need to boost productivity, drive revenue and stay ahead of

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Microsoft has announced that support for the F# functional programming language will be fully integrated into Visual Studio. This marks a bold new commitment to facilitating functional programming on the .NET platform and could potentially help legitimize functional programming in enterprise environments. Microsoft’s promotion of F# to a fully-supported language in Visual Studio is also indicative of the extreme versatility of the .NET platform and Microsoft’s Common Language Runtime.

F# began its life as a Microsoft Research project to demonstrate the efficacy of .NET as a platform for mixing multiple distinct programming paradigms. F# is heavily inspired by the OCaml programming language, and a subset of F# and OCaml are largely compatible. F# offers developers many valuable and compelling features without sacrificing much runtime efficiency. F# supports type inference, pattern matching, high-order functions, and currying. F# also supports interactive execution, which means that F# programs can be run like scripts or inputted in an interactive top-level environment similar to the Python shell or Ruby’s IRB. F# also has full access to the .NET APIs and components written in other .NET languages.

The advantages of functional programming

Unlike imperative or procedural programming languages, in which computation is typically performed by altering

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