Windows 8 Videos
It looks like the recent rumours were indeed true. The first official previews of Windows 8 are starting to surface from the D9 and Computex conferences. It appears that just like the conferences the focus is all on tablet devices.
Upgrading through every version of windows
This is a great video showing upgrades of all major Windows versions from 1 through to 7. In fact, the whole process starts with the installation of MS-DOS 5.0 before moving onto Windows. Monkey Island and Doom 2 are installed in MS-DOS to test the backwards compatibility of Windows. The level of legacy support that Microsoft has managed to maintain over such a long period of time is certainly impressive. This has definitely got to be a very heavy burden. You can read more about the whole process on the author’s blog.
Getting the Windows Product ID using WMI
I needed to get the Windows Product ID from managed code recently and decided that using WMI would be the most reliable and stable way to get the job done. Do not follow any examples that show you how to get this information from the registry. You simply cannot rely on those registry keys being present in the many different versions of Windows. There is also no guarantee that if they are present, that this will continue to be the case into the future. Using an official and supported API means that maintaining compatibility is Microsoft’s problem and not yours.