If you signed up for the XPe Feature Pack then you should have gotten this mail copied at the bottom. This blog page from a couple weeks ago has hints to some of the feature work we've done. If you haven't signed up yet, it's open to the public! Just follow these instructions, login and download the ISO image (backup your DB and repositories before installing): 1) Visit the Microsoft Connect...

Note: Mark Chamberlain is a guest blogger, he works for the Product Support team for XP Embedded , check his bio link below. If you call Microsoft for support on the XPe platform, there's a good chance you'll talk to him. Hopefully we'll see him here on the blog a lot, he's a wealth of information since he's seen so many issues and talked to many customers. On occasion, do you find it difficult...

Background: We've received reports from customers having problems installing the XP Embedded database after installing Visual Studio 2005. The default installation of Visual Studio includes a silent installation of SQL Express, which can cause problems with your XPe installation if it’s not configured in a specific way. Although it is possible to use SQL Express by changing the instance name according...

The question came up again recently regarding how to change the default user account password expiration settings. The steps below to apply a custom security template during FBA are from our online docs ... By default, when you add user accounts to your image, the user is prompted to change the password 15 days before it will expire. In some types of deployments, it is not feasible or desirable...

I was reading OS News this morning and came across an interesting article from Linux-Watch . It's the " Top five things Linux can learn from Microsoft " by Steven Vaughan-Nicholas . I wasn't quite sure what to expect at first, but it's insightful and after seeing MSDN as #1 on his list it's obvious he 'gets' it. It's about the developers, developers, developers (youtube video) - Andy

The team has been extremely busy the last 4 months working on a feature pack for XP Embedded and we're just about ready to loop you into what we've been doing by giving you early access to the product in the form of a Technology Preview (not quite a Beta). The bottom of this entry has participant information, by enrolling today you can get more details than I'm listing below. Among our biggest goals...

For those who have been anxiously waiting for the componentized version of the .NET Framework 2.0 and ASP .NET 2.0 features to be available keep an eye on the download page - it should be posted up there any day now. There will be a core package that contains a component for .NET Framework 2.0 and one for ASP .NET 2.0. There will also be 3 self-extracting packages for the MUI components (23 MUi...

While browsing one of my favorite IT sites ( The Daily WTF ), I came across this, erm, *interesting* Point of Sale database system in the thread " The X-Data Specialist ". Try to figure it out, I dare you <grin> - Andy