Well, it had to happen sooner or later: after 8 years with IS Solutions, it's time to move on to pastures new - I'll be starting a new job with Clarks in the next few weeks as a Microsoft Architect. It's been an eventful time at IS and I'm going to miss everyone there, but the lure of a job on my doorstep as opposed to 120 miles away is too tempting.

Time to break out the farewell beer...

I installed Vista SP1 last night and all appeared to be well, but when I tried to access YouTube this morning, the Flash video player wasn't working; instead, I got a dialog pop up complaining that it couldn't load a DLL.

The solution however was very simple; download the Flash uninstaller from the Adobe site here http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_14157&sliceId=2. Once Flash has been uninstalled, go back to the Flash installation page and all should be well in a matter of minutes: http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash.

I was contacted the other day by someone who couldn't get my (now ancient) port of Repton 3 running under Vista; mostly because Microsoft seem to have hidden the .NET 1.1 runtime download (or made it more confusing than necessary for mere mortals to locate and install). Seeing as Vista comes with .NET 2.0 installed as standard, it seemed to make sense to rebuild the project using Visual Studio 2008 and targetting .NET 2.0.

You can download one of two flavours:

• Repton.NET.1.0.2.exe (471 KB) - If you're not certain what you need to download, use this version
• Repton.NET.1.0.2.zip (300 KB)

Enjoy!

Scott Guthrie's blog entry "Releasing the Source Code for the .NET Framework Libraries" details how Microsoft are finally going to allow access to the .NET framework source code without having to resort to using Lutz Roeder's fantastic Reflector utility - under the terms and conditions of the Microsoft Reference License.

To their credit, Microsoft are not claiming that this is an open source license; although naturally some on Slashdot are seeing this as further proof of that Microsoft == Satan (you'll find the discussion here: http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/03/1626209&from=rss)

Anyway, it does look being yet another compelling reason to move to Visual Studio 2008 when it finally gets released (along with .NET Framework 3.5 support, and the ability to target .NET Framework 2.0/3.0/3.5 from within the same IDE - about time too...)

The BBC News website has an excellent Q&A article up at the moment dealing with the implications of DRM infested music files in the wake of the closure of Virgin Digital. In case you've not heard about this yet, Virgin Digital is closing its doors which means that any Club subscribers will now have hard drives full of media content that they can no longer play.

The article points out that we've "... been here before, most notably with the video wars between VHS and Betamax. When Sony's Betamax format lost the battle, Sony threw in the towel and started making VHS recorders instead, leaving Betamax fans reliant on aging machines."

All perfectly true, except when Sony threw in the towel with Betamax, they didn't instantly invalidate any media content that had been stored on Betamax tapes - which is precisely what's happening here.

I feel very sorry for any Virgin Digital subscribers that have been affected by this fiasco, but hopefully they'll start telling their friends to avoid DRM infested music in future and the music industry will stop treating their loyal customers as criminals.