... faster and faster than ever.

Here's a small summary of my year 2008:

• Royal TS made some great progress: At the beginning of 2008 Royal TS 1.4.3 (2008-01-10) was the first remote desktop application (besides mstsc.exe, of course) to handle the /consol to /admin switch in XP SP3/Vista SP1 properly.
• Royal TS 1.5 (2008-06-15) was a release with BIG changes: BIGGEST CHANGE: THE BURGER IS GONE! Royal TS should be Royal, so the crown is the new icon for Royal TS.  Another big thing was the introduction of strong encryption with the document protection feature. Besides that, the UI was streamlined and some nice graphics were inserted (designed and composed by a good friend of mine, Armin - thanks again for that)
• The code4ward web page was relaunched using DotNetNuke.
• My internet connection became unstable, so I decided to host my server with my website in a real datacenter with a decent connection.
• One very new experience of 2008 was having no vacation. Yes, that's right, there was no summer vacation as usual.
• Ok, this one is not exactly a vacation but could be interpreted as one: In November I left Europe for the first time and spend 10 days in the U.S. - Seattle. I attended the Microsoft OpsMgr TAP meeting, met a lot of great guys, saw the Pacific, a Rainforest and ate a lot of Burgers - shopping wasn't bad either.
• We had some quiet holidays (which was nice) and I took some days off.
• Lastly a sad story: we had to put one of our cats, Phoebe, to sleep because of a fast growing tumor on her nose. She was only 5 years old. I wasn't really a cat person until I met my wife (and her cats), so I never thought that a creature like this can be so lovable. We all miss you, Phoebe!

What's up for 2009:

After almost 8 years as a freeware, Royal TS grew into a nice and popular product. There's a strong community, a lot of users with great ideas and so much to do. I decided to spend more time on Royal TS. So, from now on, Royal TS will be shareware and I am really excited about this. Your support will help me to improve and extend Royal TS even faster.

But fear not, Royal TS can still be used freely.

First of all, I will keep all previous versions of Royal TS (1.5.1 and earlier) available for free as before. The shareware license applies only to version 1.6.0 (and later).
Secondly, 1.6.0 can also be used for free if you don't need to handle more than 10 connections. So everyone using Royal TS for private use at home, can still use it for free.
Third: the license fee is fair: one license will be EUR 20,00 / USD 25,00 (prices may vary depending of the currency conversion).
Number four: when you buy a license you are entitled to upgrade to any version of Royal TS for a full year.

I'm looking forward to 2009 and hope you stay with Royal TS.

A healthy, successful and happy new year,

Stefan