Darren Straight's Blog

ICT Enthusiast and photographer.

By - Darren Straight

My 21st Birthday and First Blog Anniversary!

Hey and welcome to my 21st Birthday party, that’s right today I’m 21 years old, and it’s not just my birthday that I’m celebrating as I’m also celebrating the creation of this website and blog, as it was exactly a year ago today on my 20th Birthday that I decided to start this website and blog. And wow what a

By - Darren Straight

Windows Vista Beta 2 Coming soon to TechNet Virtual Labs

Windows Vista Beta 2 is coming soon to Microsoft’s TechNet Virtual Labs. VIRTUAL LABS Test out product features in a fully configured environment. Experiment with the newest features of Windows Vista in a sandbox environment—without installing software or dedicating additional computers to the project. (Coming soon) TechNet Virtual Labs is basically as Microsoft Hosted Lab in which you can try

By - Darren Straight

Virtual Tech-Ed 2006

Are you not able to attend Tech•Ed this year? If so then you’re in luck because Virtual Tech•Ed puts you to as close as Tech•Ed as your nearest Internet connection. On Virtual Tech•Ed you can listen to TechNet Radio, watch  video blogs, sign up for MSN Alerts, subscribe to RSS feeds, and watch the Session of the Day Webcast along with commenting on

By - Darren Straight

Windows Live Dev launched at dev.live.com

The Windows Live Developer community site has now launched at dev.live.com, a few days before the start of Tech-Ed 2006. Windows Live Dev is your one-stop shop for the Windows Live Platform, including information on getting started with Windows Live services, latest documentation and APIs, samples, access to community areas and relevant blogs, and announcements of future releases and innovations.

By - Darren Straight

Windows Live Messenger – General Availability

According to Bink.nu, Windows Live Messenger will be made available to the general public in 8 days from now, Friday the 16th of June 2006 to be exact. Now though Bink are generally correct about their dates, I can’t be 100% sure that this time they are correct, so I’ll let you decide on yourself whether or not this date

By - Darren Straight

MSDN Product Feedback Center now on Microsoft Connect

The MSDN Product Feedback Center is now hosted on Microsoft Connect, heres a bit about the migration and why it took place: Connect Migration FAQ Why Connect? Microsoft moved the feedback at the Product Feedback Center (PFC) to Connect. We made this change so our systems can grow and scale with the increase of customers and feedback we see from

By - Darren Straight

The MSDN Wiki Beta is Live!

The MSDN Wiki beta is now live at http://msdnwiki.microsoft.com/! What is MSDN Wiki? The MSDN Wiki site experiments with ways we can integrate community contributions into the Visual Studio 2005 and .NET Framework 2.0 documentation.  This is phase one.  On the current site you can add content and edit other people’s contributions in a wiki-like fashion around the official Microsoft-authored

By - Darren Straight

Windows Vista Beta 2 Public Download now Available!

The Microsoft Windows Vista Beta 2 Public Download is now Available! So all you need to do now to get a chance to play around with the cool OS, is to obtain a windows vista beta 2 key and then download Windows Vista which you can then install on your computer, note however that Windows Vista Beta 2 is time-limited pre-release

By - Darren Straight

My Information Technology Degree Modules for next year!

Finally some news on what Modules I will be taking or can take next year for my last year on my Degree in Information Technology with the University of Kent have finally emerged from a meeting held yesterday morning with us students. The mandatory and optional modules are as follows: Preterm Foundations of Information Technology and Computing Autumn term Computing

By - Darren Straight

Get your Windows Vista Beta 2 keys early!

Ok so would you like your Windows Vista Beta 2 keys early? well now you can! I heard about this earlier today but I wasent going to publish it until later tonight as I’m still trying to finish of my course work, but hey as I’ve just noticed that Barty has already posted about it, I might as well post my one too