Metro Store Apps

Installed a few apps from the metro store..SigFig, Conde Nast, NDTV, Chicago Tribune, News Republic. However, many other apps when clicked on said they were not available any longer!

Installed Visual Studio 11 Beta and Windows 8 Consumer Preview

wanted to see the windows metro store and see what they have there. so installed Widows 8 Consumer edition on a virtual machine in Virtual Box. The hardest part was finding and typing in the license key which is NF32V-Q9P3W-7DR7Y-JGWRW-JFCK8 (kinda hard to find in the microsoft documentation).

The other product I installed was VS2011, which sits nicely alongside VS2010. No time to really play with the new software, so will have to wait until the end of the week. But, i do like the new Visual Studio look.

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.