Microsoft Application Architecture Guide, 2nd Edition

The guide helps you to:

• Understand the underlying architecture and design principles and patterns for developing successful solutions on the Microsoft platform and the .NET Framework.
• Identify appropriate strategies and design patterns that will help you design your solution’s layers, components, and services.
• Identify and address the key engineering decision points for your solution.
• Identify and address the key quality attributes and crosscutting concerns for your solution.
• Create a candidate baseline architecture for your solution.
• Choose the right technologies for your solution.
• Identify patterns & practices solution assets and further guidance that will help you to implement your solution

The guide can be downloaded from: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ce40e4e1-9838-4c89-a197-a373b2a60df2&DisplayLang=en

So what is different?

1. Added Functions
a. Dithering function on PDF File and EPUB File
b. FB2Viewer function

2. Improvements

a. Loading Speed improved on PDF File

The firmware can be downloaded from [click on me].   Time to upgrade… fingers crossed it helps…

I have updated the firmware and it seems to basically work, for those that download it, here are the checksums:

Note: if you have downloaded v.1.6.1, the checksum’s should be:

If however your checksum’s are… then you have the earlier v1.6.0 which appears to have been removed from the website, so you need togo back to the website and re-download it.

I have been lucky enough to be reading a couple of books from O’Reilly which deliver their eBooks in multiple formats, as the iRiver supports both ePub and PDF.  I have chosen to install both versions of the same book, so if I experience a issue with one I can flip to the other.

Here is what I have found so far:

• Reading of PDF seems to be the most reliable
• Reading of ePub documents seems to very slow in comparison
• PDF reading can be pain with small text, reflow helps but destroys technical book formats that has embedded code in it
• Battery life is much better

I have had a couple of crashes/hangs of the iRiver but so far it has only been with ePub files.  So guess what… I will be avoiding them like the plague.

Has other people had the similar issues?

As I am both a Mac and Windows user my choices were various from using a pdf printer on Windows to using various .chm readers on the Mac.

I first tried to use a .pdf printer on Windows but this not work due me using a 64bit version of Windows 7 and all the free pdf printers failed to either install or just simply did not work… much to my own frustration, so I turned to the Mac as this has native pdf support but did not have native .chm support! Don’t you just love computers…

On my mac I tried out various, these being:

Again, I was meet with disappointment all of them either failed to display the embedded html in the .chm magazine (complaining about a nbsp entity) or just not displaying anything. So decided to raise a bug against the most the one I thought had the most chance of being fixed, which was the iChm application.

So to my joy and delight the developer fixed it in version 1.4.2 and I was then able to load up the .chm, select Unicode encoding (as without this the pages did not display correctly) and then use the iChm function to export the .chm as a .pdf, copy it to the iriver story and I could then get back to reading all the years issues I had failed to read!

So my tip for converting .chm to .pdf on the Mac is to use iChm as it works and the developer is very responsive to issues raised or was at least was for me!