EasyBCD DLL & API

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As you all may know, NeoSmart Technologies’ Computer Guru was head of the VistaBootPRO project, and now with the rest of the NeoSmart team is working on the EasyBCD project – both (the first is now deprecated) to manage the Windows Vista bootloader.

In writing these programs at the NeoSmart Research & Development center we’ve found the WMI ill-fit for interfacing with the Windows Vista BCD Store for anything other than grabbing information. The WMI is mainly an interface for getting information and not originally made for writing to the sources, making it too difficult for most BCD-related uses. In developing EasyBCD, our team started off by creating a programmatic framework for BCD interface that plugs directly into bcdedit.exe and does all the work from there.

This is just a ‘feeler’ announcement, to find out if any of Windows Vista programmers or general software developers would be interested in such a DLL (written in fully managed .NET code) that would have functions to add, remove, delete, and modify various bootloader options (i.e. do most things the EasyBCD project focuses on)?

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CSS & Vista's New Fonts

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As we reported and reviewed in our article “A Comprehensive Look at Microsoft’s New Fonts”, Vista has some spectacular new fonts – but we have a few issues with them now that we’ve tried them and implemented them with mixed success here on The NeoSmart Files and on the Forums, and here’s the problem.

They just don’t fit. The new fonts are mostly too small to be plugged right in to an existing CSS file. If you tweak the CSS so that it looks right for, say, Calibri; ten minutes later someone that doesn’t have that font is going to come around and ask your server for that CSS file – but since they don’t have Calibri installed, their browser will use the next one on the list, and unfortunately, your sizes are going to be all wrong.

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Announcing EasyBCD

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VisualBCDFollowing our “decomissioning” of work on VistaBootPRO by a series of under-handed tactics by PROnetworks culminating in a Cease & Desist on even using VistaBootPRO, we contacted NeoSmart Technologies’ legal advisors and asked thim if it would be OK to continue work on VistaBootPRO under another name.

Their response was slightly disheartening, but after a day of non-stop work, EasyBCD 1.1 has been released – a visual bootloader modification utility written from scratch and without referring to or copying from the VistaBootPRO source code. Not only is EasyBCD under new management and officially free of legal misgivings, it has also taken bootloader modification to the next level, with a much nicer, cleaner, and easier-to-use GUI; tens of new features; and all the bugs ironed out.

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GoodBye PROnetworks

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NeoSmart Executive Announcement!

NeoSmart Technologies has reached a parting of ways with PROnetworks. Since the release of VistaBootPRO, PROnetworks has become increasing uncomfortable with its agreed-upon role in the publication of VistaBootPRO and the ratio of attention and recognition for VistaBootPRO at NeoSmart Technologies compared to that at PROnetworks; and it seems as a result they have served NeoSmart Technologies a Cease & Desist order.

When VistaBootPRO was first released, the agreement was that the Computer Guru (NeoSmart Technologies’ founder) would receive full and unrestricted credit/rights as VistaBootPRO’s original author, creator, and maintainer; whereas PROnetworks would retain the copyright and sole publication rights to VistaBootPRO. Unfortunately, since then PROnetworks has decided to renege on its former position, and have served us with a C&D order asking us to

..which withdraws any right by you to claim to be the publisher and author of this application and you must Desist from using VBP, or attempting to distribute VBP under the aforesaid name.

This unfortunately poses a problem for NeoSmart Technologies. Continue reading →

Slow News Week – But that's not Stopping Us!

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It’s been a slow week for bleeding-edge technology news, it seems everything making the front pages of most sites is legal mish-mash or corporate talk – not exactly NeoSmart Material..

With that in mind, we’re just taking this chance to keep our faithful members posted on what’s happening at NST, so without further ado:

  • New FeedBurner URL – we are no longer on http://feeds.feedburner.com/guru/ but rather on http://feeds.feedburner.com/neosmart/. As always, the best way of keeping up-to-date is to subscribe to the redirect feed at http://neosmart.net/blog/feed/ – that way no matter where we go you’ll always be in touch.
  • Upcoming Story – “The Blending of the Browser,” we can’t say much right now, but here’s this: in keeping with the tried-and-tested NST tradition, it’s going to be really innovative and intellectually-inspiring (whatever that means!).
  • Upcoming Story – An alternate OS (not Linux, not Mac, not Solaris, and most certainly not Windows) is lined up and being readied – keep checking!
  • Product Release – VistaBootPRO 1.1 is slated for release sometime really soon – check the VistaBootPRO forums.

There’s more to come than this – but just in case you thought we were quitting or something we wanted to make sure our readers realized that NST isn’t going anywhere just because it’s been a slow news week!

Digg v3 and its New Algorithm

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Digg has a new design: it’s nice & clean. Digg v3 also has a new backend – that happens to be the exact opposite. It seems that in adding support for new non-tech categories and changing the algorithms to match the lesser traffic and activity in those sections Kevin Rose and his team managed to mess up the algorithm for the rest of the site, leading to much trouble.

The new digg algorithm seems to ‘solve’ something that had previously irked many people: the difficulty of getting a story on the homepage. But maybe there was a reason why it’s difficult. It used to be that a story posted by the right person and dugg by the right people at the right time in the right place could get to the homepage after 50 diggs. For everyone else it took a lot more – something closer to 100 just to make it to the homepage.

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Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3 Reviewed

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Internet Explorer 7

This week Microsoft released Beta 3 of Windows Internet Explorer 7, and NeoSmart Technologies has a review (with screenshots!) ready for our faithful readers and members.

Since Windows Vista was first announced, for many users Internet Explorer 7 was actually the big reward: a new version of what used to be the world’s favorite browser, and – for the most part – they weren’t disappointed. Despite the progress issues in Windows Vista, Internet Explorer 7 has been coming along fine, and this new version brings its (Lion’s) share of features and improvements. In short, this browser has come a long way and promises to put up a real fight against the competition that only so recently overtook IE7, namely the latest versions of Firefox and Opera. Beta 3 makes subtle changes to the GUI and display that give it a nicer, more “exotic” appeal; with IE7’s focus on softer highlights and shadows, it’s begging for Web 2.0 – but can it handle it?

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10 Steps to Vista Upgrade Success

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Since Beta 2, Windows Vista has had a fairly versatile and reliable upgrade path from Windows XP to Vista, and in Build 5456, it’s been improved on even more – now you rarely hear of people that couldn’t upgrade, but nevertheless, people suffer as a result of upgrades whether they know it or not.

The most common “symptoms” include patchy Aero performance (if at all), frequent BSODs, drivers refusing to install, and general system unresponsiveness. The problem is that even the experts tend to forget that there is a difference between a clean install and an upgrade, even if everything else worked. When an upgrade is performed, evil things may brew just beneath the surface, waiting for the user to forget that an upgrade is the root of all those problems.

Fortunately there are quite a few steps you can take to protect yourself from buggy upgrades and their corresponding headaches, and they’re not too hard either.

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Digg, Slashdot, OSNews, and More!

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Just when we decided we’re going to take a break and re-organize, we get hit by our biggest traffic surge ever.

In the past 48 hours, NeoSmart Technologies has been featured on the homepages of Digg (twice!), OSNews (twice!), and Slashdot (once) for three different articles we published. It seems even our amazing host with their equinix data centers couldn’t keep up with the demand, and unfortunately we experienced a 12 hours of downtime as a result (from 2200 to 1000 UTC).

If anyone is interested, the featured articles were “Windows Vista 5456 Released” on OSNews.com and Digg.com, “WinFS: What’s the Big Deal Anyway?” on Digg.com and OSNews.com, and “What XSS isn’t” on Slashdot.org.

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What WinFS is all About

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WinFS has been officially pulled out of Microsoft’s road map for products and services – permanently. People all around the web are shocked and complaining. But the thing is: who didn’t expect this?

OK, sure, maybe Mr. & Mrs. John Q. Public didn’t expect this, and maybe Joe Blogg didn’t either, but then again, does it really matter to them? But for everyone else, WinFS was gone. Although no one came out and said it directly, no one spoke of WinFS except as a distant memory, it was quite obvious that people didn’t buy Microsoft’s story of it shipping separately. If people had believed it, the shock and outrage today would be ten times as big as it was when the LH project was rebooted and WinFS torn out with the veins strings still hanging.

But the question many people are asking these long years later is: What is WinFS anyway? And what’s the big deal if everyone already knew it wasn’t coming?

WinFS was the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle. Anyone that is familiar with the term “Cairo” should know immediately what we’re talking about. For 15 years now, Cairo was Microsoft’s vision, almost every single decision made for the desktop operating systems came from a vision of Cairo becoming a reality, and over the years, Cairo began to take shape. Everything was in place, and only WinFS was left.

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