When people hear ‘The Build List’, they tend to think of one of those plain-text lists of build strings that show what people think might have come out of MS.

This build list could not be more different, yet still contain the same core purpose. The build list is simply a small client application. The actual information is stored on my server, under a new domain of mine, as an XML file. The client simply parses the XML file and displays the information as shown here. I also have an XML Schema, so that when it’s ready for public distribution, people can submit their own additions as an XML file, which can be subsequently validated against the schema. I intend to add some extra functionality over the typical build list - for example; Keys and BIOS dates for builds and possibly Screenshots or links to screenshots, again all from my server. This means that it will automatically update each time the list is refreshed. However, I’ve also added support for reading the same data from XML files on the hard drive.

Currently, the extra features are not in the Schema or Application, but what is in there, is the basic support for the information you see on the screen below, whether it’s leaked (and denotes if it’s privately leaked if there is evidence such as screenshots, or publicly leaked if the build is generally available), and now support for Modified builds, as you can see in the screenshot below. The next steps for me is probably starting work on the UI, and then bringing the features such as keys and BIOS dates.

The build list intends to not actually just be a list of builds - but integrate the entire information network about Windows Builds through the power of XML. At the moment, it uses just a single XML file, but I suspect by the end, we’ll be using multiple XML files, to minimise bandwidth usage for the user and the server, and to reduce loading times.

Currently, the only way to gain access to pre-release versions is to contact me to gain access to the invite-only Milestone 1 forums. I’ve developed this for the .NET 2.0 Framework using C# in Visual Studio 2008.

Thomas Hounsell

A recent development build of 'The Build List'

BETAArchive, the forum dedicated to a range of betas and alphas, has launched v2 of their site, taking it from it’s aging phpBB2 base up to phpBB3, bringing a whole load of new functionality with it. As a moderator there, I’ll be enjoying the vastly improved Moderator tools.

Andy’s put a lot of work into the look of the site, and I think everyone agrees that the new version looks much better, without deviating too far from the theme that everyone has come to associate BA with.

You can visit now at http://betaarchive.co.uk/ and if you haven’t already, I recommend you register :)

Thomas Hounsell

WinFS Beta 1

Microsoft released WinFS Beta 1 some time ago now, at the PDC 2005 where they showed off the progress they had made since the troublesome Longhorn days. Sadly, just as Beta 2 was being prepared, in 2006, Microsoft cancelled the project, making it the the lost pillar of Longhorn that never actually made it to the market.

Now, WinFS Beta 1 is actually a complete and fully working engine. And it shipped with a pretty impressive and useful SDK. Enough, in fact, for a Third party developer to take the WinFS engine and use it as the Longhorn Development Team originally intended. As a great way to organise your files.

And that is where we come in. The explorer implementation is hardly worth mentioning, and no doubt the reason that until now, it’s been a largely ignored release. The WinFS engine has the entire file type support of Longhorn, but the explorer implements just a generic filetype, losing much of WinFS’s power, and explorer can not show the contents of true WinFS files.

So it seems what we need, is a new explorer-like shell, allowing is to manipulate WinFS, and use it to it’s full power. And Microsoft provided us with everything we need: Sample Code, Documentation, a great SDK and a tonne of DLLs to reference that allow us to use WinFS as it was originally intended. So what’s stopping people?

Exactly.

-Thomas Hounsell and Daniel Steiner

Sorry, but I’m not that excited. I know a lot of you are over the moon, and consider it the greatest thing since the transistor and the new Longhorn and whatever, but I just can’t see the appeal in it. Sure, it looks nice and will make a nice improvement over Vista, but it’s not something I’m going to actively seek and get.

I can explain why. Lets take Windows NT 6.1.6933, one of the demonstration builds at the PDC. It was evidently an improvement over Vista. It took Vista’s UI and polished it to make it shine better than any other OS today. It really was a huge improvement over Vista. I saw headlines of prominent journalists proclaiming ‘What Vista SHOULD have been’.

But that’s the problem. Windows 7 is what Vista should have been, not what Windows 7 should be. And we already got a lot of Vista in Windows NT 6.0.6000.16386, which became a more usable proposition with the move to Windows NT 6.0.6001.18000. Windows 7 should take this to the next level, but really, Windows 7 should be moving things to a whole different game.

Don’t get me wrong, Windows 7 is a great OS, and I can’t fault it. But it’s not what it should or could have been. Microsoft have been forced into a quick response by the market, who refuse to use Vista. It’s the marketing departments best dream, They already have a great product, they just need to change the branding, get the product team to tweak how it looks and feels, and even though it’s the same product underneath, for less work and less cost, they have a better-selling OS.

But not a better OS.

Microsoft are doing this as they see it’s the best way to stay competitive. Really though, they should look to their increasingly-successful rivals at Google. They let the products do the speaking, not the marketing team. They work by making great products, not by responding to what the marketing wants.

Did anyone want a 3D Rotable Earth that you could look around using satellite images downloaded as and when they were needed over a broadband connection? Certainly, it wasn’t high on anyone’s priority list. Yet it’s become a popular tool as Google Earth.  Did the market feel they needed a webmail service sporting 1GB of storage for free? No, but GMail became one extremely popular Webmail service very quickly, only held back at first by the need for invites. Did anyone think we needed another Web Browser, especially a minimalist one which only served as a development mule for next-generation technologies? No-one. Yet Google Chrome holds a stable 0.8% market share, which is surely the highest for any Browser in a very early alpha form.

And maybe that’s where Microsoft are going wrong. They aren’t using their financial muscle and huge power that comes with being one of the biggest IT companies in the world, to create outstanding products with features and capabilities that people didn’t even dream they might need or use, they bow to market pressure as if the market knows how to create a great Product, which for the large part, it doesn’t.

Thomas Hounsell

It’s my first holiday period at college this week, and I was so looking forward to the prospect of being able to relax and get the final 3718 WIMPack out.

But it seems Holidays are to be a period of work. I woke up late monday morning, about 10:45am, only to find that my Wireless Network was simply refusing to work with a number of the computers on the network. I spent some time solving and fixing each computer (It was a different configuration issue on each computer that had somehow not manifested itself up to that point). Unfortunately, a driver issue with my Eee (it seems that SP3 and my Wireless drivers are buggy together to say the least) meant I had to reset it a number of times, leading to the corruption of my SDHC Card, which I have still yet to recover.

Never mind, I finally got onto the internet, having a quick look around Joejoe and BetaArchive before being bombarded with complaints that my server was down. I checked and it was indeed down. I’d recently implemented a workaround that restarted the server every 30mins, because of a bug in Abyss that caused it to crash with a specific PHP error. The 30mins past, so I decided to see what was up on the server. 15 Abyss Processes were all running, and all fighting over Port 80 and slowing the server to a halt. It seemed the batch was no longer up to the task. I just simply killed all the Abyss processes, posted on forums to let people know that something was up, and discussed the matter with Daniel Steiner. We decided that the best option would be to move to IIS, rather than wrestle with Abyss. So I spent some hours again piecing that together.

Just to cap the day off, In some freak accidental deletion, I lost all my Windows NT builds from the very first NT 3.1 builds right up to Windows NT 6.0.5231. I was pissed off, but I guess these things happen. After a number of attempts using different software to recover the data, I’ve given up now and resorted to downloading it all again. I think I should be able to get it all back, here’s hoping that I do.

I’m going to produce one final Build 3718-based repack. It will provide the ultimate user experience of any Longhorn customisation, with great out of the box hardware support, and a simplified, no-shit install that anyone can use.

The ISO will be comprised of four major components:

• The Pre-installation Environment (PE) - to boot and start the setup. This will be either a 3718-based WinPE 1.2 or a custom ‘Lite’ PE built using WinBuilder, subject to me finding a script that plays nicely with 3718. Also, a number of storage drivers will be integrated
• The Setup - Lifted from 4074’s system and subsequently modified and resource-hacked to fit more in the 3718 style and provide a better user experience.
• The Installation Image. Again, with a number of drivers integrated into the base installation, allowing great out of the box hardware-support. It’ll be pre-cracked for both the Timebomb and Activation and sysprepped to provide a partially automated mini-setup for the user on first boot. This will redetect all the hardware for the user, and allow them to set the administrator password, computer name and workgroup/domain for the machine.
• The Recovery environment. This will allow the user to easily boot from the optical media and perform a number of common fixes, such as bootsector and MBR fixes, Disk partitioning and other accessories, such as defragmenting (which is best performed when the hard drive is not in use, so when Windows is running in RAM and from a CD), and potentially Password Recovery.

So there you have what will form the basis of the Windows Longhorn Build 3718 ‘WIMPack’. As to whether it will include one or two of the styles previewed in my earlier protoPlex Project, I haven’t quite decided as of yet, but I suspect that it will include at least the login, customised Sidebar/Taskbar and branding.

I may also look to include some extra goodies, such as a Plex-styled browser, .NET Frameworks and it will certainly include the extra optional Media Center and Tablet PC components.

It’ll also be the last Longhorn-based Release from me, as I’ll be migrating onto some aspects of XP, Server 2003 and Vista/Server 2008 customisations, probably starting with some Server 2003 SP2 and XP SP3 repacks bringing some exciting new developments that will soon be coming.

So, welcome to the end of an Era.

Thomas Hounsell

After my Longhorn 3718 WIMPack, I’m wondering where to go next. Would you prefer another Longhorn build, or maybe something based around XP or Server 2003?

What do you want to see in a custom wimpack? Just comment below.

Thomas Hounsell

Yeh, Graham was the one who sent this piece of insane rambling to my server on my MSN account. Apparently, he is indeed a human, despite people’s beliefs that he is something entirely different.

I know my posts have been a bit empty today, but I’ve had a bit of college work, supplemented by a lot of Server work, and then Graham persuading me what I really needed was The Orange Box. So Blame Graham.

Thomas Hounsell

Yeh, my new gallery, officially entitled ‘Milestone 1 Windows Gallery’, is coming along nicely. Until now, I’ve kept it kinda quiet, as I build up the screenshots, but it now has a substantial amount of content, so I thought I’d spread the word :)

Milestone 1 Gallery

Thomas Hounsell

Once again, Apple have refreshed it’s notebook, line, offering the new MacBook at the fantastic price of £950.

Yep, that’s right. In the middle of an economic crisis, Apple increases the prices of it’s laptop range. With the increasing popularity of the netbook, Apple press forward with their ‘What our laptops need is MORE POWER!’.

And Apple are probably one of the few companies that can get away with it. They have this loyalist base, who believe that Apple can do no wrong, and that Apple products are expertly made, and great value for money.

And really, Apple just aren’t that great. Their hardware is amazingly overpriced, their software is frankly poor. OSX is not a great OS. If it was better than Windows, it’d be as popular as Windows. Apple don’t let others use it on a PC because they know that creating an OS that is stable and featured on all hardware is too much work. When you consider that they don’t have to test it on a wide range of hardware at all, it even looks overpriced. They save themselves 90% of the cost of developing OSX, just because they only have to make it work OK on the last few ranges of Macs. 

And what do you get for your £950 of hard-spent money? 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD, 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo, OSX. That’s it. Oh, not to mention the ‘British Penalty’ is a mere £196 extra on the price. So, if you’re in America, you could buy one of these shitty overpriced laptops, and still have enough change for a laptop you’d actually want - An ASUS EeePC. Thanks a fucking lot Apple.

OSX is something pretty uninteresting anyway. They hammered on about the new Macbooks ‘Graphical Power’ (At the price point, it’s still pretty weedy from what I hear), but wait, you can’t play games on OSX. Looks like you’re gonna have to bag yourself a copy of *gasp*Vista*choke* to play games. Damn, then what will all you Mactards do? Oh, you won’t. You’ll just stick to OSX. 

And what is it with OSX? It’s not a great operating system, it’s lacking in features, isn’t half as user-friendly as people would like you to think, and really not a patch on Windows Vista or the upcoming Windows 7 (NT 6.1 - See my previous rant on that whole event).

Anyway, I hope you Mactards who read my blog no longer exist, and that you’ve all been converted to the versatile tool that is Windows on a PC.

Thomas Hounsell