Another New Free Version of Vixer?

Incredible, indeed. A new version crept onto the www yesterday with an expiry date in November, so we'd suggest you replace your current version with this one.

Your projects will still work - nothing at that low level needed to be changed, and if it did we'd have made sure your work was safe.

So.. download it, play with it, create superb videos, become internationally recognised and ludicrously wealthy, and... ah... drop us a note about it...

Windows 7 XP Mode - Very Cool Indeed

It's been a while since I needed to use Virtual Machines - they used to be a big part of my life, and suddenly they are again. I really feel the need to congratulate the Windows team on the new Virtual PC and XP Mode options in Windows 7 - what a truly superb job they've done.

One minor gotcha was trying to read an existing VM though - to enable the integration capabilities (so your VM can see the host machine and the internet), the VM starts asking for device drivers for USB (this being some of the clever stuff the new version has added). Where are those going to come from? Your Windows XP disc of course. How are you going to read that without the integration capabilities working? You ain't.

Unless someone knows better? Holler if you do...

Skype impact on ASP.NET!!!!

Moving to Windows 7, a couple of weird things happened, so (just in case you see them too) it turns out that the new Skype client (4.1) listens to http on port 80, as an alternative to its default port, and that's enough to prevent ASP.NET debugging your dev site. It's the kind of interaction between applications you'd never look for, and I'm hugely indebted to Martin Kulov - if you see the not terribly helpful "server committed a protocol violation" message, there's a very real chance if you kill the switch in Skype that lets it listen on 80 all will be well.

Also I suddenly discover I need to enable Windows authentication for VS2008-generated web sites - not sure whether that's fall out from the move to Windows 7 or not...