5 June 2006 in Microsoft | Comments (1)

Unfortunately it looks like one of the features I was really looking forward to in Office 2007 won’t be available in final versions*. I was really pleased when I fired up early betas and found the ability to save to a PDF natively within the office client tools but now Adobe have decided it’s better to annoy consumers for their own benefit than help them.

Read the full story about PDF support being dropped from Office 2007 at BetaNews.

Update: Brian Jones (Office program manager) has Microsoft’s side of the story on his blog here.

- JD

* By default at least, apparently a download will be available to enable the functionality.

1 June 2006 in Microsoft | Comments (2)

We’ve been looking at Office 2007 for a wee while now at Intergen and been finding it quite an impressive step forward. I’m quite excited about the whole suite of tools and will try and make some posts about some of what I’ve been finding. For now I thought I’d just share some blogs and sites I’ve been keeping tabs on to keep informed about Office 2007 developments.

• Graphical Wonder
• Brian Jones: Open XML Formats
• ArtLeo’s WebLog
• Jensen Harris: An Office User Interface Blog
• Ryan’s Look at Outlook Programmability
• Tasks and Time Management in Outlook
• Outlook 12
• search.subscribe.share
• OpenXML Developer
• Kevin Boske – Office Development

Or to add all these blogs to your RSS reader just grab my Office 2007 related OPML file

- JD

12 May 2006 in Microsoft & Windows | Comments (2)

There seems to be some discussion about live.com going on in the .net blogging space in New Zealand at the moment so I thought I’d jot down my own thoughts.

I played with Windows Live months and months back when it first launched. I initially thought “heh, that’s kinda cool – I can move stuff around just like in SharePoint”. Then I closed the browser and didn’t go back.

A few months passed and I saw comments about the new live search and I found myself again playing around with the Windows Live portal again. It was more polished – a lot more gadgets had been added. I played for a while longer but at no point did I have any desire to set it as my homepage.

As many people have said – it’s bulky and slow. When I open my browser I have it set to about:blank because I want it to snappy. I hate having my browser slow. It’s 2006 for crying outloud – browsers have been around for more than a decade, why the heck should I need to wait five seconds for my browser to become useable? I have a 10mbit down internet connection – I’m not going to tolerate it being slow. This is a massive issue that I bitch about from time to time – Why have we had a 100x improvement in computing and network speed but everything seems to be getting slower and slower? Anything more than 1 second between clicking the browser icon and having my browser usable is not acceptable in my eyes.

And that pretty much sums it up – from a functional point of view it’s fine. You can do a lot. But from a usability point of view it’s just not something I enjoy using. It almost feels like a typical Microsoft way of doing things – add tonnes of functionality. They need to mix it with how Apple does things – it might not do *everything* but damn, it’s nice to use!

I realise that so far it seems like I’m ripping Live.com a new one – I’m really not. I know I don’t represent a normal cross section of computer users. I like the idea of a single portal but I think people realised that portals weren’t the best idea in the late 90′s. Just because I can personalise it now doesn’t make me want to use it anymore than I did then. This entry would be exactly the same if you replaced “live.com” with “Google personalised homepage”.

Perhaps I’ll change my mind eventually – perhaps it will become a lot faster. Who knows – all I do know is that I find it far too much of a gimmick at the moment. I do think I’ll use gadgets in Vista – but that’s because they’ll be asyncronous – I can use the computer and have them update in their own time. That makes me happy – and once I have gadgets that I can’t live without I’ll becoming a raving fan.

I look forward to the continuing debate about live.com. I would love for people to point out some positives that I’ve missed. I really love the live.com search, I think it’s fantastic. Tim seems to be tracking this debate if you care to read more peoples views.

- JD

18 April 2006 in Microsoft | Comments (1)

One thing that I’ve recently found useful in Outlook is how you can have it pre-populate your calendar with holidays for your country. I told my flatmate about this and thought I should post the instructions in case anybody else doesn’t know how to do it.

1. Fire up Outlook
2. Click “Tools” then “Options” on the menu
3. Click “Calendar Options”
4. Click “Add Holidays…” (near the middle of the form)
5. Put a tick in “New Zealand” and click “OK”
6. Done

This works in both Office 2003 and Office 2007 (Perhaps earlier ones too but I haven’t tested). Speaking of which I’ll hopefully post a few Office 2007 entries as time goes on

- JD

3 February 2006 in Microsoft | Comments (0)

Recently I’ve been trying to play around with WinFS Beta 1 a smidge. I’m always interested in data storage and organisation of information so it’s very much a hobby thing at the moment.

I’ve been picking up little bits here and there about WinFS and on the off chance anybody else is interested I thought I would put them up here.

WinFS: An intro to the framework classes

WinFS Data Associations: Linking your data together

WinFS: Working with the data store

The official WinFS blog

General WinFS install and how it stores raw data

Some data-unification theory from Microsoft

The WinFS Type system: Demystified

I’ll try and put these into my Del.icio.us bookmarks at some point (I have an account and have one link in there at the moment ). If you know of any other good references (I prefer coding related articles) then leave a comment and I’ll add it to the list.

- JD

1 September 2005 in .Net & Code & Microsoft & Windows | Comments (0)

As promised, a post on my experiences at TechEd 2005.

This was my first time attending TechEd and I was really impressed.

I was stunned at how well Sky City catered for the ~2500 people attending this year. I used to work in catering while at University and was always embarrassed by how amazingly poor the food quality was (I had no control over it so nobody should blame me! I’m a lover of food!). It was great – I don’t think I’ve eaten that well in my entire life.

All the speakers also were really good to listen to.

I really enjoyed the security related talks (I think we can all agree that Steve Riley and Jesper Johansson are kick ass speakers!) – if you ever get a chance to listen to either of these guys talk I would strongly suggest you take it up. I think Nic said it best by saying “basically the presenter I’d want to be”. He was speaking of just Steve, but they’re both awesome.

There were so many topics that I enjoyed – Darryls discussion about the compact framework was great – right at my level. Really did well at inspiring me to have more of a play around with my phone to do some cool things. I’m not sure what yet but that’s half the fun

Other Intergenites did a great job as well – I attended talks by Derek, Andrew Tokely and Jeremy Boyd. All excellent.

I must add that at the start of the week I wished TechEd was a week long. This quickly changed. I don’t think I’ve been so worn out in all my life! Once you include the drinks, the partying etc, it takes it out of you. I don’t know exactly how JB manages it – but he went up their early, then headed over to the Australian TechEd. All up he must be doing 6 or more talks! This excludes mention of the huge amount of work he did before Tech Ed – not just with preparing his topics, but in organising the Hands On Labs which Intergen ran this year. Well worth a mention.

Also a hi to Darryl Burling and Chandima who mentioned that they have read my blog – always good to hear

- JD

1 September 2005 in Microsoft | Comments (0)

While I was away at Tech Ed (I’ll blog on this later) Microsoft released Beta 1 of WinFS.

If you have an MSDN subscription you should be able to login and grab a copy (it’s around 75MB, ignore the documentation download as it’s in the 75MB file as well).

I’ve yet to have a play with it other than to say that it won’t install on Windows 2003 which is my primary desktop environment. You can get around this by downloading the Installer SDK which is part of the Platform SDK. You can skip everything via the custom install except for the Installer SDK.

• Run to the directory C:\Program Files\Microsoft Platform SDK\Bin\Orca.Msi
• Complete the install
• Fire up Orca (on your start menu)
• Open the msi C:\winfsbeta1\winfs.msi (assuming you ran the initial install with default settings)
• Click on “Launch Condition” on the left list
• Right click on the row on the right which mentions that you need Windows XP SP2 and select “Drop Row”
• Click File -> Save.

You should now be able to do an install on a Windows 2003 machine. I installed this onto a VM earlier and it installed without any problems. Managed to reboot – always a bonus If anyone else tries this method then I’d appreciate to hear the outcome of your 2003 install. In fact, I’d like to hear from anyone playing with WinFS!

- JD

29 September 2004 in .Net & General & Microsoft | Comments (0)

Well, I’m thinking it’s time to put together my back room server. I need something to install all the server products that are currently running on my home desktop machine.

It needs to run:

• Windows 2003 Server
• SQL Server 2000
• IIS 6.0
• Microsoft Content Management Server
• Microsoft Sharepoint Portal Server
• MySQL (for legacy development)
• PHP (for legacy development)
• .Net 1.1 + 2.0
• Exchange server (finally, my own mail server

Other than that I also plan to develop some system services that would also run on it:

• Data sync – connects with a share on my work PC and syncs that directory with a directory at home using BITS transfer to ensure a quality, dropable connection
• Exchange rate sync – connects to an xml source and updates the local database with current exchange rates (I’ve written one of these for a client so it will just be a copy of that)
• System backup – something to connect to my desktop once a day and zip up my documents + other important things, copy to server. Also go the other way and store a sql backup on my desktop
• Anything else I think of

So I’ve got to look at some prices tomorrow.

My min spec is:
2Ghz Athlon
512MB Ram
40GB Drive (this will need to be expanded quickly)
1Gbit/s network card/onboard

Hopefully I can get a lot better than that since I don’t need a video card, case etc (my old PC blew up, some parts can be used).

Then hopefully my 3Ghz desktop will feel just that little bit faster without having to run that other stuff in the background!

Can’t wait to comence this project