Andrej Tozon's blog

It could have easily been called February CTP, but nevertheless, this CTP probably includes all major features, which will be available in the final Visual Studio 2007 "Orcas". Extensive [and somewhat impressive; WPF designer included] feature list is available on download pages:

• Self-extracting install
• VPC image

I'm going to try and go with VPC image this time, just to see how this newly released [and free] VPC2007 handles it. BTW: VPC2007 finally supports mounting ISO images, larger than 2GB, and, what's also important, supports Windows Vista as host and guest OS. MS also dropped the support for some earlier Windows versions and MS DOS 6.22, but those should remain compatible and still runnable under VPC2007.

Looks like quite a few "big" applications still have issues with Windows Vista OS. "Problems Reports and Solutions" Vista feature just notified me today about Adobe Acrobate Reader constant crashing, and reported that there's a new Reader version available, which "might address these problems". Following the provided link, I downloaded latest version of Acrobate Reader (8.0.0 for Windows Vista) and tried to run it. Here's what I got after initial setup files got unpacked:

Before investigating if this happened due to incorrect UAC setting or other security issue, I simply navigated to the folder where setup files were unpacked to [C:\Users\<User>\AppData\LocalLow\Netopsystems\temp\Adobe Reader 8.0\] and simply copied all the files to a new folder on the c:\ root. After running Setup.exe from there, Acrobat Reader installed correctly. Problem solved.

It's probably too early to really complain about issues like this, since Vista is still quite fresh, and this may only be an installer issue, but they certainly don't make it easy for users wanting to adopt Windows Vista right now.

If you're an old ZX Spectrum freak, there's a project going on a CodePlex site, which might be worth checking out. While browsing through CodePlex projects recently, I bumped upon SpecNix ZX Spectrum emulator. This emulator currently plays back recorded RZX files, and the UI part was made with WPF. The current version was designed as a screensaver [you can watch games playing back when you leave your computer idle], but it also works as a standalone app. Cool!

There's another ZX Spectrum emulator project on CodePlex [called zx360], made with Microsoft XNA and mainly targeting Xbox 360 - maybe that's why I haven't had much success running it on my PC [none of my keyboard keys worked].

I've released an update to my MessengerQuote Windows Live Writer plugin. The plugin should now work with non-English Windows, getting that "My Received Files" folder right this time [see the comments in the original post].

I'd like to thank Scott for offering and providing valuable help with this issue.
[Update: additional thanks go to Stephan for testing on German Windows XP.]

On a side note: another Live product, Windows Live Messenger [8.1] has been released a couple of days ago.