Hello, I'm   Jason

The edition line-up for Windows 7 seems to be more streamlined then the list provided for Vista. To summarize, there are now 2 main editions for home users: Windows 7 Home Premium and Windows 7 Ultimate. There are also 2 editions for businesses which are Windows 7 Professional and Windows 7 Enterprise (Enterprise will be for customers that have Software Assurance and is similar to Ultimate). For more information, be sure to check out the press release at Microsoft.com.

I received Telerik’s monthly newsletter this morning and noticed that they’ve added support for ASP.NET MVC to their AjaxControls. Now they’ve taken it a step further to produce an MVC forums application using their control suite. If you are a Telerik subscriber, you can download their demo application from their website.

First off, congratulations to the Microsoft ASP.NET team for their hard work on the MVC out-of-band releases over the past few months. It’s nice to see these OOB releases on Codeplex. Earlier, Scott Guthrie announced that the team has released the ASP.NET MVC 1.0 RC1. A release candidate is very similar to an RTM release except for the fact that a few minor bugs still may be fixed between the current release and RTM. Scott has a list of the new features in the RC on his blog. Be sure to check it out!

Since SAP purchased Business Objects for $6.7 billion in 2007, Crystal Reports deployment for Microsoft Visual Studio has become more difficult to deploy. Instead of choosing a built-in merge module, you now much visit the SAP site and download the necessary files for your environment.

Last week, Microsoft released a version of the Malicious Software Removal tool (MSRT) that can help remove variants of Win32/Conficker and other resources.

Just to be clear from the start, Team Foundation Server is not supported on x64 machines.

What is a Web Slice?**

One of the most interesting features in Internet Explorer 8 is the ability to subscribe to information you frequently check on a website. This is called a web slice (). I find myself frequently checking sports scores and news on ESPN, weather on the Weather Channel, stocks at various online sites (and searches), and auctions at eBay. Now these sites could easily serve content without me having to visit the site. If you have Internet Explorer 8 installed, you can visit a website such as msn.com to see what a Web Slice looks like to the end user. I’ve attached two screenshots below to show how one would subscribe to a webslice:

Ok. So for years now I’ve been using TechSmith’s Camtasia Studio. I’ve always thought their software was great to dictate and record the screen. Now they’ve gone completely silly. Oh, and I mean in a good way. About two weeks ago I asked their Evangelist Activities Coordinator, Kristina, about their support for editing MP4 files. It was quite simple. I just picked up a new Flip MinoHD camcorder and wanted to edit the clips I recorded in Camtasia by inserting screencasts. At the time, she told me I couldn’t do it. So, I converted my video using Adobe Premiere Pro. I got this bloated piece of junk out and into Camtasia. It ended up working for what I needed, but I was very disappointed.

What fitting way to end 2008 than a list of my own version of technology-related highlights of 2008.

A group of 7 researchers have been able to successfully hack an MD5 encrypted security certificate. While this is a critical security risk, most security certificates do not use MD5 encryption in their generating processes. The more common security certificate and digital signature encryption type is SHA-1. One thing you’ll note is that the attack is on PKI as MD5 is a crypto hashing algorithm and not an encryption type.