The purpose of this post is to highlight the most common current title issues and, where possible, supply work-arounds. For general troubleshooting see the previous post first : the most common problems are described there. Items will be listed in reverse...

[Player version list now moved to separate post ] As of 2am this morning, the latest software for the Xbox HD DVD player is now available via Xbox Live (and will be posted on xbox.com in due course). The three teams involved (HD DVD, Xbox and the Codec...

I thought it might be useful to post about general troubleshooting on the Xbox 360 HD DVD drive. For issues with specific movies, see my other post , this one covers the more general case. (I use the term "title" which you can read as "movie", its a habit...

It shouldn't be this hard, but all I want is a power strip with switches on each outlet. In my garage I have no less than six different chargers, and I don't want or need them to be on all the time. If I still lived in the UK, I could find such a device...

Here my wife and I are in Mexico having a super-relaxing holiday, and we both just finished The Da Vinci Code, a truly awesome book. Over some find food we were discussing who should be in the inevitable movie, and here are our choices: Langdon: George...

The VS debugger since 7.0 has put most debugger windows on the Debug menu, under the Windows sub-menu. I say 'most' because the Output window lives on the View menu, under Other Windows sub-menu. Where do you expect debugger windows to be on the menu...

We have a continual battle with Marketing about how much RAM we should have on our Performance Test machines, so I would love some feedback from Visual Studio developers. Our current perf machines are Windows 2000 / 500MHz / 128M of RAM. It is my opinion...

The "File and Settings Transfer Wizard" is either a life saving piece of software, or a pile of junk. Allow me to explain. My father inherited one of my old machines and needed to get his files & settings from his old XP Home machine to his new-ish...

Here I will try and document the various releases of the Xbox 360 HD DVD player, in reverse chronological order. Major releases are in bold (a major release either has new features or has a boat-load of changes, minor releases are pure bug fixes). To...

I received an email from Bill T. who was asking why C# wont be doing Edit & Continue (EnC as we refer to it) in VS “Whidbey”. He asked “I've always wondered WHY that's so much more difficult in C#. Perhaps you could write something in your blog describing...

As promised, I thought I'd rant a bit about the Bluetooth (BT) support in Windows. In the beginning there was Windows XP and it had its BT support cut before release, as the standard was very new, and I think that was the right decision at the time...

I have just posted a full review of my brand-new new Hughes HR10-DVR250 HD TiVo on my ControlAV site. If you have any comments on it, feel free to use this blog.

[Update June 29: Problem solved ! Also updated h/w config to 1G of RAM as it should have been] Short story: installing Vista for me was a catalog of problems, some mine and some not. It started out with not being able to open the box, and went downhill...

Since forever it seems that there is this idea that Blu-ray is "more technically advanced" than HD DVD. This was based on Sony's PR as far as I can tell, so now I feel it is necessary to call out the gaping holes in Blu-ray to prove how much more technically...

At last I have succeeded in getting ripped DVDs to play from my Xbox 360's Media Center Extender, and here is how I did it. First off let me explain my goals: I want to be able to play my kid's DVDs via my home network, so they can avoid trashing...

Every new release of Visual Studio comes with changed key bindings. Excuse me, “better” key bindings, as the designers would have you believe. I don't buy it. I still use the VC2 key binding set, because for me F8 is Step Into. We should...

Many of us at Microsoft have hated our own keyboards for a number of years. I personally am a natural keyboard fan, and I hoarded the original "good" Natural Keyboard and the only decent follow-up, the Natural Keyboard Pro. Since these great keyboards...

I have created a prototype Breakpoint Helper that deals with the most common issues that Visual Studio Debugger users have when their breakpoints don't work. This is only a prototype, but I hope people will still find it useful. If the feedback is...

Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 is announced at last! Previously known as Whidbey (and internally it will forever known as Whidbey, as 7.1 is forever Everett, as 7.0 is, er, 7.0) this beta is going to be available to MSDN Universal subscribers, and some other...

My third blog entry in a row which is a question, and its becease we really want your input on these things. Do you use dbgclr? If you dont even know what it is, then the answer is clearly no. For those folks, dbgclr is a GUI managed debugger that ships...

There has been much confusion over multi-channel audio and HD DVD, so I thought I would try and explain how this works. As a side-effect you'll see why you don't need HDMI for the highest quality audio, and why you certainly don't need HDMI 1.3 for audio...

We just got some goodies on our team: Xbox 360 HD DVD drives in black! These limited-edition drives were made especially for those of us who helped work on the product, and come along with a black remote control. All I need now is an Xbox 360 at...

A few months ago we switched at home to Vonage VOIP, and we’re loving it. Even without dumping our phone line, we’re still saving money, over $250 a year before we even make a call! Why We Switched Our local phone service and DSL is provided by Verizon...

[Update: SSDP is WORKING now: all code updated] I have been on a mission for maybe six months now to get something resembling a UPnP stack working on Windows Phone Mango. This post covers Discovery. First off some basics: read the UPnP spec (download...

Since leaving Visual Studio, I have been using MSDN Online as my Help system. (I don't use integrated Visual Studio Help for reasons I'll spare you). As a Win32 programmer, I find MSDN Search a huge PITA. Its not that it can't find things, but the order...