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After much anticipation, Windows 8 is now available to MSDN and TechNet subscribers. There are two versions to download. One version is Windows 8 which has Windows 8 Pro capabilities (with the appropriate key). The other is Windows 8 Enterprise which requires a KMS or adding the key using a script (as blogged about here).

If you are downloading the new Windows 8 Enterprise edition from MSDN or TechNet today (as a Volume License Customer) and plan on adding in your volume license, you can do so without the need for a Key Management Server (KMS). To do so, run a command prompt as Administrator and enter the following:

Much like Windows 8, many developers have been anticipating the release of Visual Studio 2012. Earlier today, Visual Studio 2012 and Visual Studio 2012 Team System were made available to subscribers of MSDN. Non-subscribers of MSDN can download a 90 day trial of Visual Studio 2012 for free at http://jasong.us/PoRAPn.

Now that Office 2013 is out, I wanted to check out the new SharePoint 2013. I downloaded the ISO, mounted it in my brand new installation of Windows Server 2012, and clicked setup.exe (no auto run executed on mounting). After a couple of minutes, I was greeted with the following:

Have you ever had a spreadsheet that you’d like to apply formatting, such as highlighting a row, if a certain value was within a particular range? It’s not that difficult to do. Below, I’ll walk through doing this in Microsoft Excel 2003 and again in Microsoft Excel 2010. Microsoft Excel 2010 adds additional features such as including icons in the cells.

Today I came across an interesting issue. I have a Silverlight project in which I’d like to be able to show the OpenFileDialog as well as a JavaScript alert. However, I was able to determine (and confirmed at StackOverflow), that the alert cannot happen first as the OpenFileDialog would be a second dialog on a single user action to the browser. By commenting out the alert, I was able to continue just as planned.

Earlier today, I received an email chain from a family member. I usually read these, but very rarely forward them off. However, this one brings up very interesting points. The tone of the email was against the current Obama administration. I’m going to try to do my best to remove the President’s office from this discussion. My reason for it is that whether or not I agree with the current Administration, I think this uncovers a larger problem with government spending.

The Visual Studio is constantly reviewing items that have been posted to their User Voice site. One of the items that I’ve been asking for, installation customization in Visual Studio, has been voted up to number 4 on the list. Keep the votes coming.

I figured you may ask. Since my last post, I have been working hard to prepare and organize Northeastern PA’s only true technology conference, TECHbash 2012. The event was great! Everything was a huge success and the attendees seem to be pumped up for TECHbash 2013. Although we’re still 11 months away from our next event, we are already planning for the next one. If you think you may be interested in speaking, sponsoring, or volunteering, please let me know. We’ll have our first meeting regarding the event in August to begin carving out the details.