Living the Microsoft Life: It’s a free life

This series of posts, Living the Microsoft Life, are designed to show off some of the cool stuff from Microsoft that you can use in day-to-day life free, so that you can live a “Microsoft Life”.

As you all know students (or should by now!) can get some of Microsoft’s software for free via Dreamspark, and there is some more available cheaply through the Its Not Cheating/Its Not Piracy program. Is that all Microsoft can give away for free? No!

I’ve compiled a largish list of some of the more useful (in my opinion) free programs and services from Microsoft, however this list still isn’t everything Microsoft gives away for free.

First there are the free programs…

• Windows Live

  It would be impossible to go through this list without possibly the most prominent suite of programs given away by Microsoft.

  The Windows Live Essentials pack is made up of

  • Windows Live Writer (I’m using it right now to write this post!)

    This is without a doubt the best tool for blogging out there. Browser editors aren’t bad these days, but nothing compares to having a rich desktop client to create blog posts in.

   

  • Windows Live Messenger

    Windows Live Messenger is one of the oldest and most used instant messaging network/programs.

    Version "2009" has done a great deal to reduce some of the bloat, while adding a new, cleaner interface, along with a few new features, such as more personalisation of conversation windows, animated avatars (which can react with your "mood" of messages you’re sending), photo sharing, and integration with other Windows Live services, so you can see when your contacts are using Spaces, or Photos.

  • Windows Live Photo Gallery
    
    Windows Live Photo Gallery replaces Windows Photo Gallery (found in Vista).

    With the option to use folder, date, tag or "people" to browse, it’s easy to find the photo you’re after.

    The latest version has facial recognition so you can tag a person in a similar style to Facebook. The great thing is it attempts to recognise all the faces in the photo, so all you have to do is put a name to them, rather than drawing a rectangle over them. Also featured in the later versions is a SDK which lets you develop plugins.

    Windows Live Photo Gallery also features fantastic panoramic photo generation, select the photos in a series, Make > Create Panoramic Photo, and that is it!

  • Windows Live Mail
    
    Windows Live Mail replaces Windows Mail (which replaced Outlook Express), and is a reasonably powerful and quick desktop email client.

    It has built in support for Live Hotmail, Gmail, YahooMail, POP3 and IMAP.

    Personally I find the IMAP performance in Windows Live Mail better than Outlook!

  • Live Movie Maker (Beta)
    
    Free video editor. I wish I could say more about it, but I don’t use this particular application myself. However, last time I looked at Movie Maker, it was a little under featured, but it is in beta and is the most immature application in the package – given time it may be very awesome.

  • Outlook Connector
    
    Not a fan of Live Mail, but still want to be able to access your Live Hotmail in a desktop client? By using Outlook Connector with Outlook, you’re able to get your Live Hotmail emails, contacts and calendar into Outlook.

• Office Accounting Express 2009

   "It can create estimates, invoices, track customer payments, set product and service pricing and can export and import data using Microsoft Excel formats, and can export to e-mails, Microsoft Word documents, or PDF files, and even sell items on eBay."
  
  (from http://tim-stanley.com/post/Office-Accounting-Express-2009.aspx)
  
  

  It’s a bit full-on for personal use (I think), but a free accounting application is a free accounting application.

• Windows Media Encoder 9

  

  For students, you get access to Expression Encoder 2 via Dreamspark which is much easier to use and has some more up to date options. The downside is that Expression Encoder 2 doesn’t support more than two channels (stereo) audio, but Windows Media Encoder 9 does!

  32bit and 64bit versions are available.

  For the developers who like to encode things, WME9 has an API as well, if you want to build a ‘better’ or more specific GUI on-top of it.

…and then there are the free development tools and utilities…

• Deep Zoom Composer

  Don’t know what Deep Zoom in Silverlight is? The Hard Rock Memorabilia is one of the best examples of Deep Zoom. Deep Zoom Composer allows you to add as many images as you like to a composition, and generates all the levels of zoom (and even resulting Silverlight file to show it off) for you.

• Visual Studio Express (C#, VB.NET, Web)

  If you are a student, don’t click here, go to Dreamspark instead and get the full version of Visual Studio 2008!

  If you aren’t a student, the Visual Studio Express versions are cut down (but free) versions of Visual Studio. Works great with XNA too..

• SQL Server Express

  A cut down version of SQL Server, SQL Server Express still remains a powerful SQL database. There are three versions (all free), Express, Express with Tools and Express with Advanced Services, thankfully the SqlExpress team has a great table showing the differences between them.

• SQL Server Compact Edition

  SQL Server Compact Edition (SQLCE) is a free, tiny, redistributable database. If you want your app to use a database, but don’t want the users to need to install and configure SQL Server Express, SQLCE just requires installing.

  Some of the top features are…

  • Free to use and distribute

  • Supports desktops and mobile devices

  • Small footprint for easy deployment

  • Fully embeddable architecture

  • No administration required

  • Single file, code-free database format

  • Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 integration

  • Supports ADO.NET, LINQ to SQL, LINQ to Entities, and the ADO.NET Entity Framework

• XML Notepad 2007

  If Notepad doesn’t cut it for editing your XML files, XML Notepad might be for you. If you wish to navigate via the XML Tree, or see what is causing a parsing error, its definitely for you!

• Terminals

  This is one that I use, so it had to make the list. Terminals is a more powerful version of the Remote Desktop Client, allowing tabbed connections, history, and enhanced protocol support (RDP, VNC, RAS, Telnet for example)

  Technically not from Microsoft, but from a Microsoft MVP and .NET enthusiasts.

• Virtual PC

  Virtual PC lets you create a virtualised computer, so you can run Windows (or Linux) inside Windows!

Next week, part two of this post will be about the free services and learning from Microsoft.