Microsoft created a website called Office2010themovie.com based on Blockbuster Movie designs.

They mentioned that the Technical Preview will be available to general public until July 2010. However, the Office 2010 Technical Preview applications will start automatically shutting down after 2 hours of use starting from March 2010.

Though the official version of Technical Preview is not expected until July 2009, Torrent sites has already released the version and is quite popular because of the increasing number of downloads.

The major change in the new Office 2010 is that it is available in both 32 bit and 64 bit flavors (something that should’ve happened long before). The next major thing I noticed is that the design has gone under a major rework based on Office 2007 theme. They also introduced new themes for Office Suites (however, only default theme is available in Technical Preview). The screen shots so far leaked are amazing and I tried the 64 bit version of Office 2010 in my Vista PC and was awesome by its beauty. Major rework has gone on many applications in terms of functionality. The ribbon from Office 2007 is now available in all the applications (Office 2007 does not show ribbon in some applications like Outlook to make them feel compatible with Office 2003). Instead of the round button that showed Start Menu in Office 2007, it is now a rectangle button which shows a different screen for all menu operations and allows you to go back to work area. All office suites are following their official color schemes throughout the Menus. The performance is slow but acceptable due to its beauty. Unusual introduction is Minimize, Close and Cancel links in Splash screens.

1. Microsoft Visual Studio – SharpDevelop, MonoDevelop
2. Web Development IDEs – Eclipse, Aptana
3. Microsoft .NET Framework – Mono
4. Microsoft SQL Server – MySQL, PostgreSQL, FireBird
5. Microsoft Project – OpenProj, Open Workbench
6. Microsoft Visio – Dia, StarUML
7. Microsoft Publisher – Scribus
8. Microsoft Office – OpenOffice
9. Microsoft Office Outlook/Outlook Express – Evolution / Mozilla Thunderbird
10. Microsoft Exchange Server – Zimbra, OpenXchange
11. Microsoft SharePoint – Alfresco, Deki Wiki, DotNetNuke, PHPNuke
12. Mercury LoadRunner – OpenSTA
13. Adobe Flash – OpenLaszlo
14. Adobe Acrobat – PDFCreator
15. Adobe Photoshop – Paint.NET, CinePaint, GIMP, GIMPShop
16. Adobe Illustrator – Inkspace
17. Adobe Premier/After Effects – Avidemux / Jahshaka
18. BusinessObjects Crystal Reports – JasperReports, DataVision, OpenRPT
19. Microsoft Dynamics – SugarCRM
20. Microsoft Money / Quicken – GNUCash, Grisbi
21. MindManager – FreeMind
22. WinZip – 7zip
23. Beyond Compare (File/Directory) Comparison – WinMerge
24. CodeSmith (Easy Code Generator) – MyGeneration
25. Icon Editor – IcoFX
26. FTP Client – FileZilla

There are much more than this list is available. But this is a start to remove on famous proprietary software from your arsenal.

Now, you can shed all your worries of that and embrace the open source community for making a powerful Open Source IDE named SharpDevelop. It was so powerful that you can seriously consider it for a complete drop-in replacement of Microsoft Visual Studio. It supports almost all of the Visual Studio features and much more. It supports Subversion for Version Control. In my opinion Subversion is far great an Version Control system than VSS. Here is the screen shot of how it looks:

First of all, Google Reader, didn’t accepted my OPML file which I exported from RSS Bandit. So, I tried manually adding some of the RSS feeds and had a go. It’s really awesome.

Google seems to be making very good use of AJAX. Which really made their Web Based reader a pleasant experience.

I strongly recommend those of you guys who think a Web Reader is not good to see Google Reader.