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Windows Live FolderShare used to be the most important tool in my arsenal. That changed when Live Mesh was in beta. As soon as I was added to the pre-beta program, FolderShare has been but a mere memory. That decision may have been a questionable one, however. There has been talk about FolderShare being rebranded as Live Sync in the past and the FolderShare team just confirmed it. The bigger picture, however, is that what we now see as "Live Mesh" is only a sample application on top of the Windows Azure platform. The key here is "sample application." I always knew the sync and remote desktop capabilities within Mesh were intended to be a proof of what's possible, but it was never posed as an app that would eventually be dropped. Granted, I'm an early-adopter and am used to a few cuts and bruises, but it would have been nice to see where this was going. Maybe that doesn't matter, tho, because I don't think I'd change anything. Live Mesh is significantly better than FolderShare and I imagine Live Sync won't be much better in its initial incarnation. Soon, however, we'll start seeing Live Sync take over more and more of what Live Mesh has to offer. How long will it take? Only time will tell. I'd like to say 6 months, but the FolderShare team is notoriously slow. The only thing we really have to cling to is that the FolderShare... err, Sync team should be able to take a lot of what Mesh has today. The impression I got was that this was an evolutionary improvement, tho. We'll see what happens next month. Either way, be ready to switch from Mesh to Sync. I'm hoping the team manages to automate that upgrade/migration so it will be relatively transparent. The only problem I see today is the format FolderShare uses during the sync process; however, it sounds like Sync will change all that. Like I said, tho, we'll see...
Yesterday, the IE team posted a comment about what's next for IE8. I didn't get much out of this except for the fact that the next set of bits will be available in early 2009 and will include all the major enhancements, which includes feature adds and performance tweaks -- and let's hope they're significant because IE8b2 is slower than IE7 for me. It sounds like this next release will be a release candidate (RC), but that statement was very non-commital, so it may end up being beta 3. Either way, it sounds like this next one will be the last pre-release before the final version. There's still no word on when that will be, but with speculation that Windows 7 will be out in late 2009, it would make a lot of sense to see it just a little earlier than that release, so it's bundled with the new OS.
I won't confirm or deny anything about what I've heard about the Windows 7 release, but IE8 has most definitely slipped past internal deadlines. I know the team has thought about IE9, but as we drive past one milestone after another for IE8, there's no telling when that'll happen -- not that I don't have a guess  I can't say I'm surprised, tho. The timelines I saw for IE8 and 9 were very ambitious; especially, when you consider how long it took IE7 to come to market. Of course, that comes more from neglect than anything. I should say that those timelines were very rough and only touched on some high level things to look forward to. What's surprised me with IE8 so far is that it's missing one of the things I could swear I heard about over a year ago. Maybe it was pushed back -- although, I didn't see it in the IE9 slide deck -- or maybe I'm just crazy. Either way, I hope it sees the light of day, because it sounded extremely exciting from a productivity standpoint.
If you're doing any web or WPF/Silverlight work, you're probably used to dealing with the RGB (red-green-blue) hex color format. I can't tell you how many times over the years I've opened the calculator to convert to/from hex values to either get a specific value or find out what percentage is being used. I'm sure graphic artists deal with this a lot, because I know I find it relatively annoying when I've used apps in the past that only accepted 3 decimal numbers instead of the RGB hex format. That's changed over the years, however. I will say that this is perhaps worsened by WPF and Silverlight, which have incorporated opacity using the RGBA (red-green-blue-alpha) spec, which is arguably a misnomer, since the alpha channel (aka opacity or transparency) is specified first. All that aside, I found myself wanting to find out what a certain opacity was when working on a WPF app, so instead of opening the calculator, I referred to my handy-dandy PowerShell, which is always open on my desktop.
Being a .NET developer, I knew the Convert class has the ability to convert to/from hex, so I started out with this simple one-liner to convert a hex number to its decimal equivalent.
[Convert]::ToInt32("a6", 16)
To go the other way, you simply switch out the method name and first parameter you pass in.
[Convert]::ToString(166, 16)
The first parameter is the value to convert and the second value is the base (i.e. 2 for binary, 8 for octal, 10 for decimal, and 16 for hexadecimal).From a PowerShell perspective, there are a two more things to note here, since we're accessing a static method. First, you have to surround the class name with brackets ([]); and, second, you have to separate the class and method names with two semicolons (::). Also note that, for some classes, you may need to use the fully-qualified class name, which includes the namespace.
After doing this, I remembered the numeric format shortcuts available in C#. For hexadecimal numbers, you can reference a value without treating it as a string by prefixing it with 0x. So, to convert my hex number to decimal, I was able to drastically shorten the code (can you even call this "code?").
0xa6
To go the other way, we'll tap into standard string formatting logic. Knowing .NET, our first guess might be to just convert it to PowerShell, like we did before.
[String]::Format("{0:x}", 166)
Here, we're specifying a string format that renders the first parameter as hex as well as the number we're converting. This isn't saving us anything, tho. Luckily, we have a bit of PowerShell magic to shorten this for us.
"{0:x}" -f 166
I thought this was confusing the first time I saw it, but comparing it to the String.Format() method brings it home for me. Hopefully, for you, too.
I'm now converting the hex number, but that isn't telling me what the opacity is. This probably isn't even worth mentioning, because I know you're smart enough to figure this out for yourself, but we simply need to use a bit of division to get that percentage.
0xa6 / 0xff
I now know that A6 is 65%.
If you find yourself using the calculator every so often while working on something, consider keeping PowerShell in the background and just bringing it up instead. It's a great way to get used to the tool and even boost your productivity, as you get used to things you can do faster in PowerShell than via the mouse.
Do you have an MSDN subscription and want to know what was updated? Are you supposed to receive DVDs, but think you are missing a few? Unfortunately, I find myself answering "yes" to both of these questions. I was ready to complain about it, but then someone pointed me to the MSDN Subscription Index. Using this site, you can search for products, view shipment contents, or just see what's new or removed in a shipment. The site has a fairly crappy experience, but at least it gives you the information. I'm also somewhat annoyed that there isn't an RSS feed. Since I find myself so curious, I'm going to try to keep up with what gets released and share it in my blog feed -- if you're only interested in these updates, there's also a feed just for the MSDN subscription updates  . I may be late with the updates because it's a manual process, but I'll also pursue having the MSDN team produce their own feed. I should mention that there is a feed for the latest downloads . I'm going to focus strictly on the DVDs that are released. If I have time, I'll go back a few months and create separate posts for each of the releases. Hopefully, that will make the feed fairly sensible. Having one big catch-up post seems a bit much. These posts will be back-dated, so if you see this post after others, that's why.
Ya know, I'd be remissed if I didn't say I'm partially expecting someone to email me or comment with a link to an existing RSS feed. There is an MSDN Subscriptions blog , but that doesn't seem to tell me what I want to know. If someone knows of a good source, I'd love to hear it.
In the past, many have talked about the desktop vs. cloud wars -- is it really a "war?" -- by comparing productivity suites like Microsoft Office and Google Apps. People have had a lot of speculation about what web apps are capable of and what is truly needed when it comes to admittedly bloated apps, like Microsoft Word; but this is the first time I think we've seen two "friendly" competitors go head-to-head: Google Apps and OpenOffice. I say, "friendly," but use that term relatively loosly. Google is very open source friendly and some may say they operate in the spirit of open source, but there's a big difference between free and "open source." Either way, the results aren't too surprising: Google Apps gets spanked. While nobody has ever said Google Apps was better than Microsoft Office, it's a pretty well known fact that Microsoft Office beats out OpenOffice. Based on the transitive property of inequality, that pretty much says Microsoft Office kicks the livin' hell out of Google Apps. And, with Office Web Access just around the corner, that's pretty much game, set, match on Google Apps. I think Paul Thorrott said it best when he talked about the "small" web-based rich text editor in Office Live and how it was better than what Google Apps had to offer.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against web-based apps. I actually think we're a long way away from hitting the roof of what the web has to offer... and that's just the current incarnation. The platform itself needs another rev or two, tho. In the meantime, I'm excited to see what Google will come back with. We haven't seen Google react to competition much, other than speeding past very little, very sparse competition at 100 miles an hour. Google has vision, but Microsoft is one fierce competitor. The sleeping giant doesn't sleep for long.
Apparently, Sun has switched from bundling the Google Toolbar with their releases to bundling the MSN Toolbar. I'm kind of surprised they aren't using the Windows Live Toolbar, but at the same time, the MSN Toolbar has a much better experience. Whether this was sparked by Google dropping StarOffice like a bad habit or not, it's a win for Microsoft. The toolbar comes with Windows Live Search integration (duh) and, even better, uses Silverlight. There must have been some pretty high-level talks to get this approved because Silverlight is a competitor to the yet-to-be-released JavaFX, so I can't see this going thru just because Google pissed someone off. I have a feeling Sun was just trying to whore themselves out as much as possible. The MSN Toolbar deal only applies to Java downloaded by IE on Windows. Everyone else will keep the Google Toolbar based installer. I know Sun is hurting, so this probably just gives them a chance to pad their slowly declining product line.
Aside from all this, I have to say I hate these things. I wish there weren't deals like this. If you do feel the need to whore yourself out, make it disabled by default. I get aggravated when I see these things as opt-out inclusions. I don't want your crappy toolbar, I don't want an icon on my desktop, I don't want to change my homepage. Get off my freakin' back!!! Bad installer, bad!!!
I've been looking for a screenshot of the on-screen keyboard that comes on the Touch HD for the past few days and have been remarkably unsuccessful. Even the HTC customer support brushed me off. Wow. Luckily, I stumbled on a video that shows how to use an external keyboard. I don't care about the external keyboard, but it does start off by showing the on-screen keyboard. Unfortunately, the keyboard doesn't seem wildly fantastic, but at least it's not as bad as the keyboard on the Blackberry Storm.
If you're not familiar with the Live Search homepage at www.live.com, you should really check it out. It took a long time, but the Windows Live team finally got something out that really looks better than what you'll find on other services. I've always been a fan of the holiday themes Google and Yahoo use, but with the images on Live's homepage, I have to say there's a much better, much more interesting experience. The image changes daily and it comes with 4 or 5 regions of the image that provide some searches related to the image... usually. Sometimes they're a bit off, but other times, they're absolutely great. My favorite was the one from election day. There was a very cute section that said, "U can haz kittenz instead of politishens." Hillarious.
I try to check out the new image every day because they're very nice. I just wish I could save some as my desktop. I also wish they'd archive and make them searchable. I did talk to someone on the team, however, and it sounds like they're looking into both of these options. The issue is the licensing agreement for use of the images. Hopefully, we'll see an update to this soon. Until then, keep a look out for the latest image of the day!
When I first heard that the next version of Windows was going to be Windows "7" -- back when that was just a codename -- I thought, "What? Wait... no!" I don't have a holistic problem with the number. My problem is more with what "Windows 7" was really supposed to be based on early talks. The chatter led me to believe it was going to be a pretty drastic change from where we are today, in the Windows world. I envisioned some drastic changes from the ground up. Then, after a few months, there was talk about the next version of Windows being codenamed Windows "7." Don't get me wrong, I'm as excited about the OS as the next guy, but it just doesn't feel like a major release. The name and version number seem to be more about correcting people's invalid perceptions about the state of Windows than actually being a major version jump. Heck, Microsoft has even waffled on whether this is a major vs. minor release. That still seems more about PR, tho.
If that wasn't enough, there's one thing that really seems to be the final "nail" in the coffin to me: Windows Server 2008 R2 will coincide with Windows 7. An "R2" release, is essentially a major service pack with a couple features thrown in. At least that's my opinion. That's been turned on it's head with the .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 SP1 of late, but historically, that's how it's worked. Above all, an "R2" release is not a major release. Of course, this isn't the first time Microsoft has fallen into the version number debacle.
Hopefully, nobody else has run into this, but I've hit a bug in PowerPoint that keeps displaying a dialog with the following error message:
The printer "Microsoft XPS Document Writer" cannot be found.
I'm on Vista 64 w/ SP1, but I don't think that has anything to do with it. While there aren't many, I did notice that others have also hit this. The problem is, nobody seems to have found a fix. After talking with people close to the dev team, it sounds like this is a postponed bug. I don't know what they meant by "postponed," other than, "it's not fixed." The work-around is to reinstall the print driver. This surprises me, but there's not much to do about it, I guess. I wouldn't even know where to begin to reinstall the XPS print driver. Whatever. Part of me thinks it has something to do with a malformed PPTX file, but I haven't been able to validate that.
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