Interesting Free Software from Microsoft

Here is a list of a few interesting pieces of development-related software from Microsoft in no particular order. Each is either free or at least has a free version available.

• Microsoft Express Editions (Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005, Visual Web Developer 2005) - "Free, lightweight, easy-to-use, and easy-to-learn tools for the hobbyist, novice, and student developer."

• Microsoft Robotics Studio - "The Microsoft Robotics Studio is a Windows-based environment for academic, hobbyist and commercial developers to easily create robotics applications across a wide variety of hardware."

• Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the 2007 Microsoft Office System Second Edition - "Install VSTO 2005 SE to create new application-level add-ins for six applications in the 2007 Microsoft Office system and five in Microsoft Office 2003. Use managed code to customize task panes and the Ribbon in the 2007 Microsoft Office system applications."

• ASP.NET AJAX (formerly ATLAS) - "ASP.NET AJAX is a free framework for quickly creating a new generation of more efficient, more interactive and highly-personalized Web experiences that work across all the most popular browsers."

• Microsoft CodePlex (think SourceForge for .NET) - "CodePlex is Microsoft's open source project hosting web site. You can use CodePlex to create new projects to share with the world, join others who have already started their own projects, or use the applications on this site and provide feedback."

• XNA Game Studio Express - "The XNA team is proud to announce the availability of the 1.0 release of XNA Game Studio Express and the XNA Framework, aimed at helping students and hobbyists build games for Windows and the Xbox 360. This release supports both Windows game development and Xbox 360 development (subscription to the XNA Creators Club is required in order to run XNA-based games on the Xbox 360)"

• Microsoft Expression - "Expression Studio, a key component of Microsoft's strategy for improving the user experience delivered by applications, provides designers with an end-to-end tools platform that boosts collaboration with developers in the delivery of next-generation user experiences for the Web, Windows Vista™ applications and beyond."

One Note 2007 / Adobe Reader 8 Bug

So, I recently finished installing Office 2007 Ultimate on my desktop and tablet. Very nice piece of software so far. I spent a few hours configuring One Note 2007. I use it for taking notes and scanning/organizing/searching technical articles, recipes, and projects from woodworking magazines. I should say that I use One Note 2007 for this. Prior to this version, it's capabilities were a lot more limited, and I was struggling with ScanSoft PaperPort 11 for my scanning/organizing needs. At any rate, I'm not writing this to give a review of Office. Instead, I would like to point out a bug that I found that may help others out there.

One Note 2007 has the ability to import various different types of documents. There are several ways, but I like to simply drag the document into a page in One Note and select the "Insert the file as printout so I can add notes to it" option. The result is that you get a "printed" copy of the document on the page in One Note. Then, you can scribble notes, full-text index it, etc. Behind the scenes, it appears that One Note actually launches the program it knows can read the file (e.g. Adobe Reader for PDFs) and then simply prints using a special driver that results in the file going into One Note. The bug I found was with Version 8 of Adobe Reader. I tried various things to get it to work. It seemed like it was printing, but the document never showed up in One Note. Then, I happened to go into my office and saw that there was a stack of paper in the printer outfeed, all copies of the same thing. Apparently, the PDF was going to the printer instead of One Note. I had an older version of Acrobat (6.0.1) on a different PC that was working just fine, so I ended up just uninstalling 8 and installing 6. Everything worked just fine after that. Other than simply reading PDF files, I don't use Adobe Reader for anything else. So, I wasn't deriving much benefit from 8 over 6 anyways. You can download older versions of Acrobat from Adobe's website.