Put VirtualBox fullscreen on monitor of your choice

I have multiple monitors and when running in fullscreen mode, the virtual display always jumped to a monitor I did not want it to run on. I wanted to pick the monitor, but it was not very intuitive.

Remember you have to be in Fullscreen mode to access this menu item. Basically, in fullscreen mode hit {HostKey + Home} and go to View menu and then Virtual Screen 1. This is Windows version running on Windows 7 x64.

Up & Running Windows 8 on Windows 7 in 20 minutes

With all the interest in the new OS microsoft is working on, I thought I would give it a try. Considering it is still in Dev Preview, I decided to go the VM route instead of a dual boot. I used VirtualBox for the vm. It plays very well with Windows 8.

 

 

You need to tweak a few VirtualBox VM settings:

• In VirtualBox, choose Windows 8 as the type. nice.
• System > Processors enable PAE/NX.
• Display > Video move the video memory to 128MB (the max) and then enable both 3D and 2D acceleration.

Now mount the Windows 8 Developer Preview from ISO. Get the ISO here. There is a separate one with developer tools (VS2011 and Blend 5 and sample Metro Apps) too. Run the VM and follow along with installation instructions. The Win8 installation took around 11 minutes, and no glitches. nice. No touch here, but still nice to see the metro interface.

you will see by default that the VM window does not auto-adjust the resolution to match your desktop resolution. There is an easy way to force the resolution to match your desktop. Take a look at how it is done here. Hostkey+F lets you run full screen. Now things are looking really good.

syncing google calendar with Windows Phone goodness

Google recently added windows phone to their sync. As someone that uses both Google and Microsoft products this is Awesome!

Fixing Aero Peek

Realized a week back that the aero peek functionality on my win7 machine had stopped working. was bothering me why it had stopped working and wanted to fix it.. found the fix here.

sidewiki - will it be popular?

with google toolbar being so popular, i think this sidewiki has promise...

in reference to: Google Sidewiki (view on Google Sidewiki)

Reader for "Silverlight 4 Up And Running"

This is the title of the book set to be published by O'Reilly in Spring 2010. Been selected as a pre-Release "Reader" for the book. Excited about it! Because of the NDA I will not be able to disclose much, but plan to blog what I can..

Silverlight 4 Beta!

It was officially announced at PDC. Tim Heuer has more details. Biggies for me look like printing, Chrome support, right click, mouse wheel, implicit theming, dependency object binding, drop target, keyboard access in full-screen, cross-domain change for trusted apps. Excited about this release. My guess is it will go live before mid-2010. I am loving the quick release cycles with Silverlight.