Microsoft, Dell and (RED) announced a partnership to help people living with HIV/AIDS in Africa. All the details are over on the Windows Vista blog . There's also some coverage of it over on Engadget .

If you have code that implements a deskband for the Windows Taskbar in Windows Vista, you may have noticed that it causes the taskbar to appear opaque when there is not a maximized window open, instead of being transparent, but darkly tinted which is the normal state of the taskbar. You can get around...

One of the features we added in Windows Vista was a platform to support for decoding camera raw images in Windows Photo Gallery (and later Windows Live Gallery), Windows Explorer, and Win32 & WPF applications. The camera IHV community has done a great job supporting this effort by creating codecs...

I recently discovered this project over on codeplex . It's a virtual desktop manager for Windows Vista that uses the live thumbnail preview API's exposed by the Desktop Window Manager. It's still very beta, but a great example of some of the innovation that can be built on the platform that the DWM provides...

When we did the visuals for Vista, we worked really hard to get a to a look and feel that was streamlined, efficient, and modern. We knew people would compare what we're doing to what other companies do, but I never expected this .

Scott wrote a quick review of some different Task Switching applications that have been written for Windows Vista using the new window thumbnail preview API's that are part of Windows Vista's desktop composition system.

A common question among folks who are upgrading to Windows Vista on slightly older notebooks, tablet PC's, and UMPC's is why the Intel 915 graphics chipset doesn't have WDDM support, as WDDM support is a prerequisite for Desktop Composition. The folks over at the Intel software blog have posted a video...

The folks over at RealWorld Graphics posted a nice write up on how developers working on native Win32 applications can create DPI aware applications for Windows Vista. For new applications, using Windows Presentation Foundation is a strong solution in that it handles a great deal of the work for DPI...

Ben Forta has a nice write-up about his experience using Windows Vista. Kind words from a senior guy at Adobe .

There is now an update available for Visual Studio that addresses many of the issues regarding using VS on Windows Vista. The details are on the download page .

I made a post about a year ago regarding how some applications have a side effect of disabling Aero. While it is still possible to create applications that have this side-effect (due to the underlying problem of applications accessing the primary display buffer directly), many of the applications that...

The Windows Vista blog links to some great Vista wallpapers.

I saw this yesterday. BillG was interviewed for Newsweek and the topic of Apple's advertising came up. The whole interview is a great read, but here's my favorite comment: "I don't even get it. What are they trying to say? Does honesty matter in these things, or if you're really cool, that means...

Tim Sneath has been maintaining a great list of new applications developed using WPF on his blog.

The folks over at howtogeek.com have compiled a great list of tips and tricks for working with Windows Vista.

In late December, I sat down for another interview on Channel 9 . It took a little while to "bake" over the holidays, but it finally got posted about a week ago. I know some folks are asking for the source code for the demo that was shown, you can download it from here . This sample was based on some...

In the USA Today Personal Technology Column this week, Ed Baig talks about his experience upgrading to Windows Vista . He has some really complementary comments about Aero in this write-up: The Aero interface is handsome. Users will appreciate translucent edges, live thumbnail images that appear over...

This site cracks me up. The offer is pretty incredible also.

As part of our launch activties for Windows Vista, Bill Gates will be on the Daily Show with John Stewart to introduce our newst product. Should be pretty entertaining.

A colleague recently pointed me to www.shareyourscore.com - this is a web service that lets you share your Windows Experience Index score, and query the scores achieved by different kinds of hardware.

The new Intellipoint Software for Windows Vista has a great feature that builds on the DWM API called "Instant Viewer". It allows you to remap the click-wheel to bring up a grid view of all your open Windows like this:

Ars Technica picked up a report on a study on Windows Vista performance that was conducted at Principled Technologies, a technology assessment company in North Carolina. There's lots of good data in the study about the performance of Windows Vista on a handful of different hardware platforms. One of...

If you're a system builder or just building a pc for yourself, and you want to make sure that your PC can run Aero, you'll be interested in this document . It describes the heuristics the operating system uses to enable Aero, and outlines some troubleshooting steps for getting Aero up and running if...

It's done! Windows Vista has released to manufacturing ! The Windows Vista page on Microsoft.com has the scoop on when it will be broadly available.

Dave has an interesting list of these over on the shell blog. Most enjoyable to read. :-)