Scott Stanfield and his amazing team at Vertigo has converted transformed the Mojave Experiment Website from Flash to Silverlight.  Simply stunning!

http://www.mojaveexperiment.com/

The Groupe d'usagers Visual Studio Montréal has changed name for Communauté .NET Montréal to better reflect it's activities.

What's new?  A 4th meeting each month, this time at lunch hour.  It's called @Lunch and it will be less formal and more of a discussion type of meeting inspired by Open Space and Alt.NET meetings.

Check out the new site here:
http://www.dotnetmontreal.com

RedGate has aquired Reflector, a must have tool for every .NET developer.  They promise that a free version will be available but didn't they made the same promise for SQL Prompt?

http://www.red-gate.com/products/reflector/

[From Richard Hundhausen]

Are you a trainer? Are you bored delivering the same content over and over?  Well, just play Trainer Bingo while you teach your classes!

http://www.visualstudiotalkshow.com

Grégory Renard: Le futur du Web

Nous discutons avec Grégory Renard de l'évolution du Web à court et moyen terme. Entre autres, nous abordons en quoi les technologies comme Silverlight, le GPS et les agents conversationnels influenceront positivement le futur du Web.

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Live Mesh Tech Preview is now available in Canada.

http://dev.live.com/blogs/devlive/archive/2008/08/18/393.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/cdndevs/archive/2008/08/18/live-mesh-in-canada-no-more-wait-list.aspx

Laurent Duveau has written a series of blog posts on how to use Mesh creatively:
http://weblogs.asp.net/lduveau/archive/2008/08/18/live-mesh-available-in-canada.aspx

Tim Huckaby and his team at Interknowlogy has created an amazing app for the Microsoft Surface.

The man himself:

The app that let doctors see a 3D rendering of a heart:

Check out a video here:
http://silverlight.interknowlogy.com/Videos/VitruView/default.html

Microsoft has released a WPF Datagrid.  What's interesting is that both binaries and source code are available on Codeplex.

Jaime Rodriguez has 3 blog posts on the topic:
http://blogs.gotdotnet.com/jaimer/archive/2008/08/13/dabbling-around-the-new-wpf-datagrid-part-1.aspx

On your mark, get set, download!

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=FBEE1648-7106-44A7-9649-6D9F6D58056E&displaylang=en

I buy my domain names at GoDaddy.com mostly because I have total control on the DNS and MX records, not for their somewhat questionable ads.  However, I had to buy my .CA domains from someone else because they didn't offered them but yesterday, I found that they are now offering .CA domains.  Nice!

Here's a KB article explaining clearly the SQL 2008 won't install unless VS 2008 SP1 situation:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/956139

If your installing SQL Server 2008 on a box that already has Visual Studio 20008 pre SP1, you need to apply VS 2008 SP1 before installing.  If not, you'll get this message:

VS 2008 SP1 should be available in a few days.

Thanks to Andrew Brust for pointing this out.

Microsoft has released SQL Server 2008 today!  MSDN subscribers can download it right now.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/aug08/08-06SQLServer2008PR.mspx

I wonder if the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 is included 

Here's a nice Office 2007 add-in that let you insert in your Word, Excel and PowerPoint document a Creative Commons license like the ones found here: http://creativecommons.org/about/license/

While not a DRM, it simply states how you'd like other people use your work like slides from a presentation you made at a user group meeting.

The add-in creates a new tab where you can create a set of licenses and add them easily to your documents.

Download the add-in here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=D1DDBDC8-627F-415A-9B0A-97362BC9B480&displaylang=en

Rob Boucher just informed me that the Patterns & Practices group has just released "Improving Web Services Security: Scenarios and Implementation Guidance for WCF", a free eBook available here:
http://www.codeplex.com/WCFSecurityGuide

If you read it, make sure to send some comments to the team.  Here's how:
http://www.codeplex.com/WCFSecurityGuide/Wiki/View.aspx?title=WCFSecurityCustomerQuestionaire&referringTitle=Home

I use offline folders in Vista to sync a set of folders located on my server so I can use the files when I'm not connected to my network.  What's great is that these folders are part of a nightly backup plan so I don't have to worry about backing them from my laptop.

However, if the computer you sync with is no longer available, you can't delete or change the sync partnership because Vista requires that both sides are up and running.  Dead end?  No, because you can delete ALL sync partnerships using a registry change.

WARNING: This will delete ALL sync partnerships so be careful because you may delete files forever, bring deadly plagues to the earth, render your dog blind, get your hair on fire, etc.  Don't do this unless you backup your sync folders, send flowers to your mother, give to United Way and learn to dance the salsa.  You've been warned!

From KB article 934160

To work around this issue, add the FormatDatabase registry entry to the following registry subkey:

Then, set the FormatDatabase registry entry to 1.

To do this, follow these steps:

1.	Click Start, type regedit in the Start Search box, and then click regedit in the Programs list. If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type your password or click Continue.
2.	Locate and then click the following registry subkey: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Csc\Parameters Note If the Parameters subkey does not exist, create it. To do this, follow these steps: a. Click the following registry subkey: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Csc b. On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click Key. c. Type Parameters, and then press ENTER.
3.	On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
4.	Type FormatDatabase, and then press ENTER.
5.	On the Edit menu, click Modify.
6.	Type 1 in the Value data box, and then click OK.
7.	Exit Registry Editor, and then restart the computer.

Credit: for the answer here

After doing this I found another way to delete or rename cached folders while working offline via a Windows hotfix.

Are you traveling to (or back) the US with laptops, hard drives, flash drives, cellphones, iPods?  Well, read this:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/01/AR2008080103030.html

I recently wanted to upgrade the BIOS on one of my PCs and I used the ASUS BIOS update Windows utility. 

I downloaded the latest BIOS and update tool from the ASUS Website then launched the update process.  After a few seconds, the tool reported an error so I tried to flash the previous BIOS version (that I saved earlier) but with the same result.  I ended up bricking the motherboard.  I then went to my local MicroBytes store and the first question the technician asked me was if I did the update from Windows.  Looks like it's very common problem using the ASUS Windows tool.  Yeah, great!

If you were thinking about sending sessions abstracts fro DevTeach 2008 Montreal, hurry!  The cut off is today!

More info here:
http://www.devteach.com/TechChair.aspx

I just upgraded from dasBlog 1.9.7 to the latest version (2.1) and everything seams to work fine.  Here's how I did it:

1. Downloaded the latest version from www.codeplex.com/dasblog
2. Extracted the Zip file to a temp directory
3. Copied everything over the existing folder except these sub folders: Content, SiteConfig, Logs & Themes

That's it!