Corsair recently announced the release of a new 64GB flash drives. The new 64GB USB Flash Voyager has enough capacity for a library of HD movies. This is actually more space than my laptop or my gen 1 Zune. I am assuming that the next generation of Zune and iPod flash devices will match this much needed growth in capacity.

“In addition, Corsair 64GB USB Flash Voyager drives are bootable, which means users can actually store full versions of operating systems and applications in order to quickly “re-create” the necessary software environments to troubleshoot system problems.”

Here is a full datasheet on the Corsairs Voyager line.

I really believe cell phones will continue to play a much larger role in our daily financial lives, one example I experienced this week was the use of SMS to determine the balance of a prepaid debit card from Alltel. Having used a prepaid debit card in the past it is always a pain to get the latest balance details. You have to either make a call and quote all the numbers or you go online and register at yet another website.

With Alltel you are able to send a text from the your phone and get a balance text back within seconds. I think this is uber cool, I also believe that banks and their associated card vendors should offer something similar. You could potentially use this for credit cards and debit cards. The only real caveat being that you would have to define which cell phone numbers can request balance information. Some of the obvious security concerns could be overcome by establishing a secret PIN that you text, this could be setup during an online banking session.

Silverlight Streaming is a cool service that makes it easier to deploy and test Silverlight applications. Developers have free and convenient access to hosting and streaming and combined with the recently released SDK 2 it becomes trivial to deploy and host applications. Silverlight hosting can be conveniently categorized in terms of hosted video and hosted Silverlight applications.

Video hosting is pretty straightforward, you need to develop a video (WMV format) that can be up to HD quality but a maximum of 10 minutes long. The following video is a quick and dirty photo montage of a trip we made to Portland. I opted to use Windows Movie Maker the video format output was perfect for what I needed.

With the release of Silverlight SDK beta 2 for Visual Studio 2008, the actual output of the Silverlight project is a XAP file. You can upload the XAP file directly to Silverlight servers, this file contains both the metadata and all the associated logic you may have developed. Here is my remedial ample that I actually imported from a previous Kaxaml example.

In order to see the above examples you will need to have Silverlight installed ;) You can get it here.

The way of the beta release developer is beset on all sides with failed installs, orphaned registry entries and lost files. Unfortunately I spent most of my weekend trying to figure out why the Silverlight Tools Beta 2 for Visual Studio was failing during install. The log files pointed to “…failed with 0x80070643…” which is completely meaningless to most mortals including me.

Now the install file referred to as “chainers” are designed for our convenience to help update several components at once, thereby saving us the hassle of finding and installing multiple msi’ for all our applications … well that is theory anyway. The problem with this concept is that any one of the subset of installers can fail for a number of reasons. In order to discover what the Beta 2 update included I ran the following command:

silverlight_chainer.exe /extract

I was then presented with a dialogue box which asked what location to extract the files to. I then followed this uninstall and install pattern:

1. Uninstall Silverlight Tools Beta 1 (if on your machine)
2. Uninstall KB949325 (if on your machine)
3. Uninstall "Microsoft Blend for Silverlight Beta 1" (if on your machine)
4. Uninstall the Silverlight 2 Beta 1 SDK (if on your machine)
5. Install Silverlight.2.0_Developer.exe (Silverlight 2 Beta 2 Developer Runtime)
6. Install either KB950630 or KB950632 depending on version of VS
7. Install silverlight_sdk.msi (Silverlight 2 Beta 2 SDK)
8. Install VS_SilverlightTools_Beta2_Setup.exe

KB950630 is a patch for Visual Studio 2008 RTM
KB950632 is a patch for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Beta

This worked for me I make not guarantees for anyone else ;) … Anyway now I can focus on the code samples that I planned a few weeks back!

If your doing a significant amount of .NET development you have either used Lutz Roeder's Reflector or wished you were using a tool better than ILDASM. As many people have already commented this tool is one that is critical to .NET API investigation.

I was kind of shocked when I went to use Reflector today (after updating) and I saw Red Gate Software literally written all over it. It appears that Red Gate has taken over ownership and development of Reflector. I am not sure that I fully understand this move by Red Gate, given that Reflector is an extremely mature product and the innovation is now being pushed by a stable plugin architecture. I guess as long as it remains free I cannot complain to much.

I have derided the Zune Pass in the past as a DRM trap and simply not the way that I wish to consume music. However, I have been enjoying the recent 2 week free promotion and I must say it really encourages you to discover and download a metric tonne of music for one low price ($14.99). I have probably doubled my music collection in less than a week.

I am not ready to purchase the Zune Pass on a monthly basis but I think everyone who has a Zune should consider getting a pass once a year, sampling all the music you can, and then purchasing the MP3 equivalent at the Zune Market Place, Walmart or my personal favorite Napster.

Ultimately renting music with the Zune Pass is not sustainable but it can provide you with a much needed view into music you have not heard before. As if to remind me of the failings of DRM I received an email for Walmart Music as follows:

...Walmart will be shutting down our digital rights management system that supports protected songs and albums purchased from our site.

If you have purchased protected WMA music files from our site prior to Feb 2008, we strongly recommend that you back up your songs by burning them to a recordable audio CD. By backing up your songs, you will be able to access them from any personal computer...

Beginning October 9, we will no longer be able to assist with digital rights management issues for protected WMA files purchased from Walmart.com. If you do not back up your files before this date, you will no longer be able to transfer your songs to other computers or access your songs after changing or reinstalling your operating system or in the event of a system crash. Your music and video collections will still play on the originally authorized computer.

MSN music was the first major DRM bastion to fall now Walmart. Hopefully we shall see a day when we worry about DRM no more.