Visual Basic and .Net News and Resources
Microsoft wants more students using its software tools and it thinks it has hit on the right business model. It’s going to give away its software.
Starting this week, college students in 10 countries will be able to get Microsoft’s Visual Studio and several other programs for free as part of an effort dubbed DreamSpark. Over the next year, Microsoft plans to offer the program worldwide for college and high school students.
In addition to giving away its Visual Studio tools, Microsoft is also providing no-charge access to its Expression Web design tools and its XNA studio for developing Xbox 360 software. Microsoft already provides discounted academic versions of its software, as well as a free “express” version of Visual Studio. Students can also get free copies of Windows Server and the developer version of the SQL Server database.
You can read the rest at cNet.
Microsoft made good on its promise to offer .Net Framework 3.5 source code this week, three months after Scott Guthrie, a general manager within the Microsoft Developer division, posted Microsoft’s intent on his blog. The source code to classes such as System, IO, Windows.Forms, and others is now viewable from within Visual Studio. When the announcement was first made, however, some developers viewed it as a Pandora’s Box because the source code would be released under a “Reference” license, which meant developers could view the code but not use or modify it. On Wednesday Guthrie revealed a small change in the licensing which addresses those concerns:
“We made a small change to the license to specifically call out that the license does not apply to users developing software for a non-Windows platform that has ‘the same or substantially the same features or functionality’ as the .NET Framework,” he wrote. “If the software you are developing is for Windows platforms, you can look at the code, even if that software has ‘the same or substantially the same features or functionality’ as the .NET Framework.”
You can read the rest here.
Shell MegaPack.Net 8.0 recreates the entire Windows Explorer shell browsing UI functionality in your app in just a couple of seconds.
It provides a familiar yet powerful file/folder browsing UI right inside your own forms and dialogs and is a perfect replacement for the plain, inflexible, modal APIs which UI developers are currently limited to. Consisting of a folder tree control, a file/folder list control and a drive-selection control, it mimics every Windows Explorer UI feature including Thumbnail/Details/Group Views, dragdrop, icons, context menus, virtual items, infotips and renaming.
DART PRO 24 is a powerful new tool used for maximizing audio quality for music and speech, new and old recordings. DART PRO 24 is the latest in a succession of many releases spanning several years of DART products.
This product has several new features including DART DeCrackle and DART MaskNoise that brings to a total of eight different and powerful tools for various types of audio restoration and sound quality improvement.
Scimore UAB, a developer of distributed/parallel high-performance RDBMS, today has announced availability of embedded database “ScimoreDB Embedded database” that delivers high throughput in heavy workload applications, small memory footprint, and easy-to-use interface and yet a full set of high-performance RDBMS features. Plus, competitive price of the database offers OEM/ISV significant cost savings.
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Delmont, Switzerland - March 16, 2006 (Xtreeme) - The fourth incarnation of a search engine creator has been released. This software makes creation of search engines easier than ever! Whether for an offline CD-ROM/DVD distribution or local disk, or for a web server (Intranet/Web server), a search engine can be created within minutes with this software. A wide range of features allows for a high level of customization.
IconLover 4.10 is a comprehensive suite of icon tools with a telling name. Essentially, its a full-cycle software package that takes care of anything and everything that has to do with icons and other types of small graphics.
First, IconLover 4.10 can be used to search PC for icons and cursors, including the ones inside executables. The software is also capable of extracting icons from other applications and libraries.
Second, IconLover 4.10 comes with a fully packaged icon editor can be used to create new icons or tweak the existing ones. The editor has a very familiar image-editor interface and a standard set of tools and effects, like drop shadow, opacity, smooth, negative, grayscale, colorize, rotate, roll and mirror. It can even be used to create animated icons.
Finally, IconLover 4.10 can be used as icon manager to take care of icon libraries and image lists. The application has an option to download icons from the Internet. There is also a batch processing option that allows users to apply effects or convert multiple icons at the same time.
The program converts all popular image file formats (including Adobe Photoshop PSD files) to icons or cursors and visa-versa. Folder icons and Mac OS icons (ICNS and RSRC files) are supported as well.
This fully supports Microsoft Vista icons and is capable of creating 265×256 icon files containing PGN images that are only 25 KB or less. This is very important, because new Microsoft Vista OS requires realistic 265×256 images that normally take up to 400 KB in Windows XP.
IconLover 4.10 is available at http://www.aha-soft.com/iconlover/ for free evaluation. The price of registering the program is 49.95 US Dollars
Aha-Soft is a well known maker of icon and cursor processing applications. Besides IconLover, the company developed and actively markets AhaView, Any to Icon, Icon to Any, ArtCursors, ArtIcons, ArtIcons Pro, CustomIcons, IconUtils and IconXP.
If you would like to get a comment, request a reviewer copy, have a businesses proposal, want to become an authorized reseller or have any other inquiry, please contact Aha-Soft support team.
System Requirements
Operating system: Windows 98/ME/NT/2000/2003/XP
RAM: 64 MB
Hard Disk: 8 MB
Company Website
http://www.aha-soft.com/index.htm
Product Page
http://www.aha-soft.com/iconlover/index.htm
By a few easy steps you can make your PC run faster, cleaner and error-free with the help of a new award-winning tool Smart PC. The software fixes stubborn errors, cleans-up space-wasting junk and debris making your PC more efficient and reliable. Special features of the new software ensure your personal privacy while surfing through the Web and protect your PC from information theft.
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