Alright, it's almost 4 pm, and I am giving up. When I upgraded to beta 1 of Community Server I wiped out my assemblies and forgot to put back the blogging service API DLL. I can't seem to successfully download it either, so there goes my attempt to blog on the road from my beta device that I have been testing for the past month or so and which I have to return next week, thus totally breaking my heart. So anyway, I'm using the little web text box to come to you Live! (whee!) from Philly where the Visual Studio/SQL Server 2005 launch event is winding down. It's certainly anticlimactic after all the CTP builds, and some of the sessions are a little sleep inducing. Plus the demo gods aren't smiling down on the presenters today either. But hey, we got our free software and T-shirt, although come on Microsoft, where is my freaking free VS/SQL pen?! These events always have free pens! And the consensus from the female half of my group is that there really should be T-shirt sizes smaller than large. Oh well, at least it was a day away from the office.

Update: well, apparently the problem wasn't caused by a lack of assemblies, since I just found out that CS 2.0 now includes the blogging API files right out of the box. Bummer, that means my blogging software is broken.

So I upgrade to Community Server 2.0, go into the million places that need to be enabled in order for ink posts to even work, I change my user roles and permissions...only to discover that I have to force IE not to use .NET 2.0 just to see the ink control. Sigh. Anybody else out there with the same problem?

Ning is pretty fun. You know, after you dust off those long lost PHP skills, cry over the fact that it should be ASP.NET and Atlas based, and so on and so on. So just for fun, check out Tablet PC Duel! - my creation of a few minutes ago. It's rough, it's basic, but it seems to work. Now if only we could attach some wheels, gripper claws, and buzz saws to the tablets and have a real Tablet Battle League. One day...

Dine for America: On October 5, 2005, restaurants across the country will band together in a "Dine for America" day, a national fundraising effort for the American Red Cross to help the survivors, victims, their families and other arising needs from the Hurricane Katrina and Rita disasters.

So find your local participating restaurants and go out on the town, all for a good cause.

Phew, that sure took a while to do! (One of those "start it in the morning...wham I missed lunch!" things.) I present to you a gallery of 123 Windows Vista Beta build 5219 screenshots. Most of them naturally focus on new and enhanced Tablet PC functionality, and the others show miscellaneous other features that I found interesting. You know what gets the "most improved tablet feature" award in my opinion? No, the newly trainable handwriting recognition is a close second. Give up? It's the flashy new tutorials, tips, and demonstrations that show you how to use the pen, the TIP, flick gestures, and so forth. I wish Microsoft would just rip those out and graft them onto TPC Edition 2005, because they are sorely needed, and anybody buying a new tablet should have access to them. Like right now. And don't stop there, I want to the whole OS (but especially all the "weird" functions like pen input) to have a ton of neat interactive help available when it ships.

Although it's almost tomorrow here (and definitely in France), I wanted to put in a quick congratulatory note to the team at Tablet PC Corner, which turned 3 years old today. It is by far one of my most favorite tablet sites, and bar none, the one with the best tablet hardware reviews. I think they have managed to cover pretty much every reasonably available Tablet PC that most people could think of. And the reviews aren't two-paragraph affairs with one picture either. Plus the place points to uncommon little tidbits like this article referencing a QuickTime video of the Vista TIP in action. All good stuff, all top notch quality, and always up to date.

So happy birthday, Tablet PC Corner, and may you stick around for many years to come! Cheers!

So Microsoft Max is...interesting. Sure, the app is a memory hog, the WinFX installer failed the first time around, and the interface has been called too simple by some. Then there is the fact that the section claiming to have other people's lists has no such thing (presumably until somebody shares their list with me - any takers?) and the "news from the team" box was empty for a long time before it pulled in the blog entries. But just having a self-updating blog section within an app is somehow inherently cool.

As are the different 3D views, the fact that it runs pretty nicely on my Toshiba M200, with WinFX being retrofitted onto Windows XP SP2 - that last feature seems very cool to me. And just sliding things around, making the pictures zip around and rearrange themselves provides hours of fun. Somehow the "oversized" UI with its sliders and big icons "feels good" on a tablet.

But the most intriguing nugget is the fact that the Max installer itself looked quite like a Windows patch update - and then I found out that Microsoft Update can automatically update it! Is this the first non-mainstream app from Redmond capable of this? Will we see more - perhaps all new apps could be integrated with MU? Then Vista could simply have a control panel that lets you see the latest revisions of your apps, and update them from there. And third-party software - say Adobe Acrobat - could just integrate right into that panel with its own update server. At any rate, I can't wait for some Max updates to come down the pipe!

From Paul Thurrott's Vista build 5219 features gallery: Windows Calendar screenshot. Again with the Apple features - now we have iCal in Windows. I wonder if an appropriately redesigned Outlook Express will become the new Mail app.

The Sidebar will be back when Vista ships. Here's an interesting question that I hope somebody may be able to answer: when I switch to portrait mode, will the Sidebar still be on the side, thus taking up quite a lot of my now narrow screen width, or can it be repositioned horizontally on the top or bottom, making Vista look even more like a Mac with its Dock?

Some more Vista screenies. I really like the IE 7 tab window overview feature. Now they need to make it possible to rearrange the tabs by dragging and dropping. And the overall IE 7 UI seems a bit more "normal" compared to the current beta version.

Robert Scoble points out some of the newest Channel 9 videos about Vista and Office 12. I guess I'll have to catch up this weekend and fire up the (relatively) trusty Media Center. Did I ever mention that NewsGator for MCE running on a nice TV set rocks?

Larry's reaction to Office 12: "No sign of ink, as a matter of fact, the only sign was that the “ink comments” button in Word is still there, hinting that there’s not any further support." Looks like folks like Josh and Loren will still have to work hard to satisfy all of our Office ink needs.

Lora's take on new tablet bits for Vista. Flicks are a two-year old plus concept. However, TIP Autocomplete - finally! Tablets will now be able to do what PDAs have made possible for years and let you write even faster. About time.

I like the new Digital Locker concept. Now how about every tablet sold coming with its own locker full of ink-enabled demos and the occasional free license for something neat here and there.

Buy a Tablet PC during the month of August 2007 and receive a complimentary copy of OneNote 12 in your Digital Locker.

I guess Microsoft's take on Yahoo's Konfabulator widgets and Apple's Dashboard widgets are gadgets. Microsoft Gadgets even. Sounds cute. It's interesting how the same "class" of app will run on the desktop, on the web, and on auxiliary displays. I hope regular folks will have some simple to use SDK or "gadget creator" program to quickly whip up their own creations. Speaking of aux displays - "SideShow" makes me think of the circus.

I wonder what the first ink-enabled gadget will be.