At the beginning of this month news went out that HTC will release a new ROM featuring Windows Mobile 6.1 and improved graphics drivers for TyTN II device (and improvements/solutions for most of the issues). While the former was clear and confirmed by both [MS] and HTC the later was muddy. What improved graphics drivers exactly? Then an article was published in a Dutch online site and translations suggested that HTC had actually bought proper graphics drivers from Qualcomm and it will include them in this same update. Yeah, right.

On Friday, more than two weeks later HTC actually released a new ROM for the TyTN II device (you'll find it at HTC's e-Club web site). It features Windows Mobile 6.1 but, of course - cheap, ignorant and arrogant company as HTC these days is, no proper graphics drivers at all. Yep, the first reports don't indicate any significant performance improvements, the device is still unnecessarily sluggish - even worse, new ROM has apparently brought new problems (at least to some users), among them device freezing while typing on keyboard, Internet connection sharing won't work and Skype won't work either. Furthermore many old issues are still there.

Will I install new ROM? Certainly not at this time.

As SLODUG/SLOWUG members probably already know, the server is experiencing some problems and it is down most of the time. This is old news. The good news are that the problem is being worked on and it should be fixed as soon as possible.

You can download the slides of my Entity Framework presentation from NTKonferenca 2008. I hope you've enjoyed the presentation.

There are various enhancements and even changes in SP1. Perhaps one of the most interesting is the change in security: applications launched from LocalIntranet will get FullTrust by default from now on (read here). I guess this is because a lot of people found annoying that they couldn't launch applications (that required FullTrust) from network shares. This move will certainly ease the internal deployment but at the same time it might cause security problems, too.

Here is the list of .net 3.5 SP1 runtime performance enhancements and another list of improvements. A list of changes in TFS. Brad Abram's list and finally Scott Guthrie's take.

Download the bits from here.

[DevEx], my favorite 3rd party .net component vendor, has just made its first public step into Windows Presentation Foundation world. They released a beta version of their charting product DXCharts for WPF (hey, where are those Xtra, Xpress, Express prefixes - "DX for WPF", shhh, boring ;-)). Anyway, everything is as one would expected in WPF - animations and 3D make it look good. Though it is just a first step and many features (i.e. many chart types), we are used from WinForms world, are missing at this time. But this is normal as they usually concentrate on good foundations at first and only then they add all those additional features.

Here is quick glimpse at the demo that comes with the product:

If you are entitled to [DevEx] beta previews, go check client center for the beta bits.