So I’ve recently decided to register a .au domain name so that I don’t frequently communicate with people here in Australia using my NZ based email address, as a result I’ve also decided to have my blog accessible via both URLs you can now get to my blog by visiting http://www.wissa.net.au or the old URL http://www.dan.net.nz and of course if you already subscribe to my RSS feed via FeedBurner then you don’t need to worry about the URL you use and just subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/dandotnet.

You can also email me on either my NZ email address or my .net.au email address, I’m sure it’s not too hard guess what the new email address might be!

Hopefully this is the beginning of more frequent posts, with Tech.Ed coming up there couldn’t be a better time to get this up an running again. If you’re attending Tech.Ed in Australia next week and would like to meet then drop me an email…

A couple of years back when Windows Vista came out I blogged about the several Windows Vista Shutdown options that were available back then after reading an article on Joel Spolsky’s blog.

It’s really great to see that a suggestion I had back then on a possible solution to this problem has actually been incorporated in Windows 7! I may not have been the only person who though of this but hey I did think about it and now it exists as a feature!

Here’s a snippet from what I wrote back in January 2007

“So Microsoft here is my suggestion, I would like to be able to do something like this, right click the sleep button, click a menu item that says set default action or something like that, and then choose the one that suits me. I think this way the problem that Spolsky mentioned of too many choices would be minimized and I would be able to shutdown my computer by clicking the button...” link to the full post is above.

Now if you are using Windows 7 you can change the default action of the shutdown button – a.ka. the power button to be whatever you want from the possible options by doing the following.

From the start menu right click on the word Shutdown as shown below then select properties

when the properties dialog pops up go to the second tab as shown below

In this example I’ve chosen restart to be my default option. Now after updating if I bring up the start menu again I see Restart as the power button name/action. Cool!

This is one of my best liked features so far in Windows 7 aside from the document grouping by application.

I’ve thought about not posting this a few times but my patience is now fully exhausted thanks to the quality – or lack of it – of service from Telstra here.

Just over 3 weeks ago I shifted to another house that’s about 2 or 3 blocks down from my previous address. Before moving we made arrangements for the Phone number and internet connection (which was ADSL 2+) to be transferred to the new address. Now this is where it all started (and continues to) go wrong.

After moving to the new address and having the phone number connected I had to ring up to notify Telstra that the phone is up and running so that the internet can get activated. THIS took about 12 business days to happen with me having to call Telstra several times during that period to sort things out. Here’s a quick summary of some of the things that caused this to take so long.

- I talk to a customer support person on the first day the phone gets connected and they say that all has been sorted and that I should have internet connectivity within 3 business days.
- 3 days or so later I call again after finding out that there’s no internet connection so I ring again
- I get told by the person I spoke to this time that apparently no order was put through and apparently we only arranged to get the phone number transferred but not the internet!! WTH? and that an order needs to be put through to transfer the internet, and I get put on hold for the customer support person so that they can put an order through. During this time as a result of call waiting on my phone my call with the operator got disconnected.
- After getting disconnected I ring again to ensure that the order went through and all is confirmed ok.
- 2 days later I ring again to follow up on the progress and I get told by the operator that NO ORDER has actually been put through and that I have to wait another 3 business days for the internet to be connected. Apparently when my call got disconnected while I was on hold with an operator they CANCELLED the order!!!!!! and yet after I rang again on the same day the last person I spoke 2 has not mentioned anything about this!

Anyways to cut the story short, after a few more days of calling Telstra and speaking with several different people and getting confusing information …etc …etc I finally had *some* internet access and even though I’m supposed to be on an ADSL 2+ service I was getting about 300Kbps speed but the person I was speaking to at the time (Friday) said that my service is currently running at about 70% but will reach full speed when it’s at 100% which should happen by Monday afternoon.

So ok, I’ll wait to see what happens on Monday.

Stay tuned for part 2. The story gets worse… by a lot. I wonder if anyone at Telstra listens to the supposedly *recorded* customer calls to improve their customer support and service.

Wow. It's been over 6 months since my last blog post! I'm sure this will change in 2009 and here goes the first post this year, and I'm sure many more will come. I received the email below on Tuesday and for some reason it does not surprise me! What's seems a bit strange is that the news did not seem to be picked up by anyone. I havent seen any blog posts on the topic or even articles on Stuff or NZ Herald or anything and I probably wouldn't have known if I hadn't received this email.

I'm in many ways not surprised and I'm sure others probably share my view.

UPDATE: It looks like this has actually been covered in a few articles including the following articles

- Telecom shuts web shopping site on Stuff
- Ferrit to close on Geekzone forums

and a few other posts out there. Thanks for the heads up Mauricio. I missed a lot of news somehow.

Thoughts on my mind as I get ready for upgrading my MCAD .NET to MCPD Web...

Getting certified was something that I got interested in doing not long after finishing my degree at university back in 2005. Given that I was involved with Microsoft stuff and .NET at the time my choice of certification was to be Microsoft Certified and more specifically Certified in .NET so in 2006 I started working towards the Microsoft Certified Application Developer (MCAD) .NET certification and had that completed, this of course was in .NET 1.1.

I personally find a lot of value in getting certified, I think other than the prestige and self satisfaction you get from certification they provide good awareness of products and technologies and with new technologies coming out everyday it becomes very very hard to keep up with them if you don't use them on daily basis as there are probably many areas you never get to use, so the alternative can be working towards a certification. I think for me these are two reasons I like getting certified: personal satisfaction/prestige (whatever you want to call it really) from certification as well as awareness of new technologies, being aware of what is possible can help in decision making when you get to a situation where you need to get something done and are looking for a solution.

Nic (who is an MCP by the way) is one person I know who questions what certifications imply about developers who have them (this is specific to Microsoft Certifications AFAIK) and he may have good reason for that. The reason is, he has come across several MC** developers who happened to be not so great as developers or not as good as non certified developers. He can probably say more on this one...

So this gets me back to the question of this post, should people get certified or not, and what value will it add? I've already given my thought on this one from my perspective so I would personally like to continuously get certified for the reasons I mentioned above.

I don't think that MC** (dev track) certifications should be used as an indicator of whether or not you are a good programmer or developer but as an indicator that you are familiar with what the framework ...etc can do and how to get started on things. Even if you've done all the labs ...etc this doesn't really mean you are a good developer but means you know how the code in a certain area works.

The above issue has been improved slightly in the new generation of MS certifications, with .NET 1.1 pretty much all material was very specific to the framework and surrounding technologies but with the .NET 2.0 a good chunk of the exam covers some generic concepts (within the context of MS technologies and products) such as unit testing ...etc.

Another way to maybe think about this is asking this question: does having a degree with IT/CS majors imply you are a good developer? The answer is probably not still.

Next month I'm going to be re locating to Melbourne and as a result I have handed over the .NET User Group leadership today as announced by Darryl. It has been a great couple of years since taking over the user group from Peter Jones. I really enjoyed running the group during that time and regret to be handing it over but I kind of had to :-)

The new user group leader is Christopher Fairbairn whom you might have seen presenting at the 2008 Summer Road Trip that was held earlier this year. So from now on Chris will be the primary contact for the .NET user group and Bryn will be helping as was the case in the past two years.

I've just introduced a new blog category to my blog topics Business. So in this category you will find some of my personal thoughts on business related things. Despite being at an early stage in my career, the idea of running a business at some point during my career journey is something I'm interested in doing. At this stage I'm not sure when that might happen, but I guess I'll know eventually. Below are some initial thoughts on what I think makes a good business. This category is basically my thoughts regarding things I think I've learnt from observing what some of the great business leaders are doing out there.

To have a good business I think you need to have the following things.

- A good idea
- Money to fund that idea
- A great team of people to build that idea
- A way to get the word out about your idea

- So what defines a good idea? How do you know if your idea is good or whether or not it makes sense and is worth pursuing.

From what I've learnt: A good idea is building a product or a service that fills a need by someone else or helps make what they do more efficient. So in order to have a good idea one would need to recognise gaps in products or services around them. I think if you can be good at identifying gaps then you've got it!

Ok so you think you've identified a gap that you can fill, but need assurance that it makes sense. Here's another thing you can do. LEARN FROM OTHERS. A really easy way to test an idea you have to know whether or not it makes sense is to run it by someone who's been there done that. After all, why make mistakes and learn the hard way when you can get advice from others who've done it before. There are a lot of people out there who can give advice and help one find flaws in their ideas very quickly.

- How do we get money to fund an idea?

Assuming we've gone through step one and now have our idea. The question becomes how do we fund it. Well I guess there only 2 options, either we have enough Capital to fund it ourselves or the need to borrow. In most cases one will need to go with Option 2 and borrow money. This can be done by getting investors on board, borrow money from a bank, floating a company ...etc. I think no matter which option one chooses you need to do one thing convince OTHERS (the investors) that you have a good idea. Note that getting through step one you convinced YOURSELF that your idea is good.

To convince investors that you have a good idea you need to have them take you seriously. I believe this can be done in the following steps.

- Build your brand (portfolio) and your reputation.
- Have a business plan that describes your idea and goals and how you plan to achieve them.
- Approach people who can help while backing yourself with the above and get started from there.

To be continued...

Next week we will be having our next user group session for the year where Peter Jones will be talking on SharePoint for ASP Developers.

Also coming up this month is a session on Embedded Development which will also be the inaugural session for the newly launching Embedded user group.

More details on the embedded user group session soon.

Don't forget, if you've got any questions, suggestions or ideas for the user group and session content feel free to post a comment here or contact me directly.

I was spending some time today trying to figure out how to turn DasBlog categories into technorati friendly links because it seems Technorati doesn't pickup the default dasblog category URLs, I've come across some posts that talk about creating custom macros to display digg it ...etc links at the footer and this I came across this link here that has a list of tons of existing dasBlog Macros.

In the link above I found that there already exists a <%TechnoratiTags%> tag that you can use, this will display your categories at technorati tags instead of the default category links.

I've also noticed that if you use Windows Live Writer, under the insert section on the right you have an option to insert Technorati tags and others...

Nice!

Hey everyone and welcome to 2008, so this is my first post of the year and I've deliberately delayed my first blogging so that I start blogging straight after the 2008RoadTrip here in Christchurch.

As you may know, Darryl, Jeremy and Chris have been doing a tour around the country (the road trip) with Chris and Jeremy presenting on SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 along with a local speaker covering Visual Studio 2008 and Darryl tagging along.

I think Chris and JB have done a fantastic job presenting despite Chris feeling a little unwell. Our very own Christopher Fairbairn also did a great job on his part. For me it was a bit interesting being an MC for an event that big and talking in front of over 150 or so people. It went ok though I think.

So with Christchurch now done Darryl, Chris and Jeremy still have Dunedin and Invercargill to go, you can still register for these here

The draw for the windows home servers will be done by Jeremy on the 5th of March so stay tuned!

Also as I mentioned yesterday our next user group meeting will be on the 27th of February and the topic for that is ASP.NET MVC presented by John-Daniel from Mindscape in Wellington.

Finally, thanks for all of you who made it to the event  despite the bad weather yesterday. And a special thanks to Chris, JB, and Chris F for a fantastic presentation.

For some more pictures and more on yesterday see Darryl's blog here.

A long time ago I wrote this post about Creativity & Innovation in products & service offerings in IT. Without repeating my other post; I mentioned that I find it interesting to see that big players in one area in the IT industry, such as Google in search and Microsoft in Windows & Office products start going away from their core competencies and offer additional products and services and move away from enhancing their core product (or so it seems to me anyway - not in all cases but in some) for instance, can anyone tell me what the latest major improvement / upgrade Google did to it's search engine??

I personally don't know if anything has changed to improve/change the search experience... Are we there yet? Is this really the best Google can do? Is this really the best Microsoft can do? Is this really the best Yahoo can do? Surely not, I'm sure there's a long way to go.

Anyway, to get to the point of this post: yesterday I came across Tafiti a beta service from Microsoft that offers a different way to search the web powered by the new Live Search. Despite the fact that it might need a little bit of getting used to, it's a cool way of searching IMHO, allows you to also bookmark your searches ...etc. Worth trying out I think.

Live Search itself has been upgraded to a new version (will post about this in more detail soon) I particularly like how they improved the advanced search options of Live Search.

So it looks like details are finally emerging on the 2008 Summer Road Trip, don't know what I'm talking about yet? read on...

You may have heard that Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 & Visual Studio 2008 are either already in RTM or will be so in 2008. Therefore you might want to start thinking about tuning in to the latest stuff and this is why the 2008 Summer Road Trip is here.

Darryl , Jeremy and Chris will be visiting the following cities on the specified date to talk to each community in the regions below about those three products.

The details are as follows.

The tour will include the following dates and locations:

• · Auckland – Feb 4
• · Tauranga – Feb 5
• · Hamilton – Feb 7
• · New Plymouth – Feb 8
• · Hawkes Bay – Feb 11
• · Palmerston North – Feb 12
• · Wellington – Feb 13
• · Nelson – Feb 14
• · Christchurch – Feb 15
• · Dunedin – Feb 18
• · Invercargill - Feb 19

I'll update the links to the above locations with more details when all information is updated.

================================

You can register for the event here

================================

So don't wait, get in soon, it's going to be the best road trip ever!

You can read more about the event at the following blogs: Will try to keep the list below updated as much as I can.

- Mauricio's Blog
- Darryl's Blog
- Chris's Blog
- Jeremy's Blog

More details will be coming soon, in the mean time, don't forget to register here

So it's been a week since Christchurch's first ever Code Camp, Boot Camp 2007, came to an end. It was an AWESOME couple of days. We were worried about the weather a day before the event due to forecast but it turned out to be fantastic!

We had a Boot Camp theme for this event as you know and speakers and helpers (the Boot Camp commanders) got to wear army look T-shirts and dog tags which I thought were really cool. The event had a total of 17 sessions spread over 2 streams presented by 13 speakers listed below, I've linked to the ones that I know have blogs so you can visit their blogs for information and resources if you like...

- Darryl Burling 
- John-Daniel Trask
- Pat Martin
- Nathan Mercer
- Andrew Tokely
- Edwin Dando
- Ivan Porto Carrero
- Jeremy Boyd
- Chris Crowe
- Ivan Towlson
- Bryn Lewis
- Adam Cogan
- Evan Williams

I will be posting more details about presentation slides ...etc soon. All attendees should receive an email with links ...etc over the next week. In the mean time, thanks to those of you who attended and those who helped and a BIG thanks to Peter for bringing code camp down to the south island ... It was a great event and we look forward to future ones.

The planning for the the first Code Camp in Christchurch is moving along pretty well but the main thing we need for this event to succeed is YOU, if you have not registered for the event already please do so. Below are updated details on the event.

TO REGISTER GO TO: http://www.codecamp.net.nz

Trimble Navigation, Birmingham Drive, Addington, Christchurch. Map here

Speakers are confirmed and sessions are close to finalised.

Chris Auld (Intergen, MVP)
Jeremy Boyd (Mindscape, MVP)
Darryl Burling (Microsoft)
Chris Crowe (Trimble, MVP)
Edwin Dando (Clarus)
Peter Jones (Intergen, MVP)
Bryn Lewis (Clarus)
Pat Martin (Microsoft)
Nathan Mercer (Microsoft)
Ivan Porto-Carrero (Xero)
Andrew Tokeley (Intergen)
Ivan Towleson (ECN Group)
John-Daniel Trask (Mindscape)
Evan Williams (HP)

View full speaker details here

We have plenty of sessions chock full of critical information.

View full session details here. (More coming soon).

AND ...
Free lunch
Spot Prize
Competitions
Camp Fire Dinner (Saturday night - about $30 each).
Lots more!

TO REGISTER GO TO: http://www.codecamp.net.nz

This is just a quick post to mention that Live Search 2.0 is here. Check it out it's being rolled out world wide but only seemed to arrive to NZ a couple of days ago. See the Live Search blog for more details.

I will be posting my thoughts on it soon.

I've had a play with the idea I suggested in my previous post about this topic and using the Facebook Developer Toolkit it was possible to get a lot of information out of Facebook and display those in a .NET application and you can also get info back in XML format so this should work well with a gadget. So far so good...

BUT the problem with using the toolkit or the Facebook API for that matter is authenticating your Facebook application user so you can get some info. For a web application you have to redirect to the Facebook login page let users login and then capture the authentication token... For having a Windows Live gadget I'm not sure yet how to do an alternative to this, would have been nice if there was an API method that lets you pass in login details for authentication...

Will have to think about a way to work around this so that I can carry on with my gadget development otherwise I'm not entirely sure this idea will work.

I've recently been made aware of a new site www.viawindowslive.com that provides a great place for developers to find resources about the Windows Live family of products. The site is still in the early days but more content is going in all the time, I've even started contributing some stuff myself and will be writing more stuff very soon.

Here's a brief description of the site taken from the about page

"Welcome to the Via Windows Live community space. This space is dedicated to you as a developer to help you build and understand how to utilise Windows Live technologies in your applications.  You'll find different sections on the various Live technologies and APIs that are currently available for software developers."

Information on the people behind Via Windows Live can also be found here

I've recently been wanting a lot to dig deeper into other areas of Windows Live that I don't know much about and get myself to learn more about these. Of course the hard thing in moving forward with that stuff aside from motivation is thinking of an idea of something that can be done.

I think I found an answer to that today! Here's something I'm going to try and see if I can do with or without help and I think it's a cool idea! One that will help me learn more about Windows Live Gadgets and also Facebook!

Here's the plan. I will attempt to get some data from Facebook and show this data on Windows Live and the idea is basically to allow you to see a little bit of your Facebook stuff on your Windows Live homepage.

- A couple of possibilities would be perhaps status updates of friends,notifications, and also showing who's online...

Sounds like an interesting project to work on, will see how it goes!

Some of you may have heard that Christchurch is about to have it's first CodeCamp ever and it's going to be a great event.Peter, Chris & Darryl have already blogged about it and now it's my turn. I was waiting on us confirming the venue and dates and now they have been confirmed, the event details are below.

Myself and Peter will be sending out speaker invitations this weekend so some of you should expect to hear from us soon :-) So whether you want to present a session or just attend one then don't wait! Hurry up and head over to here for registration. We look forward to seeing you there.

I've previously blogged about Windows Live Custom Domains and POP3 support in my last two posts but didn't really talk much about setting it up. Thanks to Darryl's post I don't need to!

You can go read his full post but here's a quick summary of what you need to do.

- Register your own domain name if you don't have one
- Head to domains.live.com and sign in using a Windows Live ID/Passport
- Choose the Setup Windows Live Hotmail for my domain option
- Note the settings given by Windows Live Custom Domains for the MX/TXT records
- Head to your DNS provider and add a MX record and optionally the TXT record as given by Windows Live Custom Domains
- Go back to your Live Domains account and refresh
- Done!

Yep that's all you need to do, if you wish to use Outlook with your Windows Live Custom Domains account you will need the Outlook connector, see my previous post for more information on this.

I had a look around and I think I found the answer to the above question. The answer happens to be there is no support for POP3 with Windows Live Custom Domains at the moment. I found the following piece of information here

"Right now these protocols are not supported for free or paying users.  We are evaluating adding these protocols to the product in the future, but likely as part of the above subscriptions.  We currently do support protocols for rich e-mail clients like Outlook and Outlook Express in the above subscriptions."

So as far as I can tell there is no POP3 support for paying or non paying customers at present. However IMHO using Outlook Connector seems to be good enough. You can also sync your calendar with Outlook by applying the workaround from the link above.

Most of the questions and answers about Windows Live Custom Domains can be found in that link above. 

In my previous post I said I will soon be trying Windows Live Custom Domains and this weekend I managed to have a play with it and I like it! Now I have all my emails for this domain on Windows Live and I can access my email via the Hotmail website, Outlook (will get to that in a minute) and can also have my email showing on my Windows Live home page which was one of my wish list items for Windows Live a while back nice!

I recently read on Lukas's blog the following:

"However their service with POP3 support is not free and a lot more expensive than even the Google premium service."  

I can't find any references to POP3 support whether free or not but you can use Windows Live Custom Domains with the Microsoft Office Outlook Connector which can be downloaded from here and can be used with Outlook 2003 & 2007. I've just tried using the outlook connector and it seems to work well with Outlook. Will update this post if I find any info on POP3 support. 

When I first started blogging about the Windows Live family of products I initially was very general and then I developed an interest in Live Search, now I think I've covered Live Search quite a bit and I feel ready to jump onto the next thing. On my list of things to checkout in the Windows Live family next

- Windows Live Gadgets (It's about time I started playing with these)
- Windows Live Domains

So expect some blog posts about these in the next few weeks :-)

It looks like Microsoft is building another search engine? or perhaps revamping Live Search, not sure. But I guess we'll see.

I do have some thoughts about Live Search though and here they go. I don't think the problem with Live Search is it's algorithm or index or anything like that. I think it's the culture around it!

Those of you who read my blog would know that I've covered Live Search a lot and I like to think that I took a close look at it. IMHO, Live Search isn't lacking in features but it's lacking a lot of support! It doesn't seem to me that Live Search has had good coverage in the blog world by MS bloggers which I find a bit interesting! The other thing works at a disadvantage to Live Search is it's name! I can go and talk to some one and say I 'googled' blah blah, or they can say google this and this, but this wont work with Live Search, I cant go say I Live Searched this thing.. not easy to pronounce, same thing with yahoo, I don't feel it's very easy on the mouth!

Here are some naming suggestions (which are not really that great but I think illustrate my idea)

MS Can buy www.find.com (I mean the domain name and not the actual site) and name it's search Windows Live Find, then when someone is trying to search for something they can go Find it and when they do they can say, I found  it ...etc

My other naming suggestion would be, Windows Live Locate, and using www.locate.com (I mean the domain name and not the actual site) then they can use Locate it ...etc like I say in the find example. This could help MS substitute google as a search term... hence compete with the google culture.

Microsoft, I still love your search engine but you can do better, I hope you are listening!!!!

I've been using Sauce Reader for reading all my feeds till now and I want to move on but can't decide on what to use. What is everyone using out there.

The only 2 annoying things with Sauce Reader were it's a desktop thing so cant read all my feeds from anywhere without my computer, and a few crashes every now and then, other than that, I really liked using it.

I know of several other replacements to Sauce Reader such as FeedDemon that I can try, but I was thinking of an online reader, and so far, I am not impressed with any.

Here are the ones I tried and my thoughts about them.

Live.com : Can import my opml file and read feeds there but there are 3 problems.

1) Only partial content is shown

2) Can't read comments on posts

3) to read more you have to popup a new window 

BlogLines : Better than live .com but I don?t like the fact that

1) I don't like the frame set, the frame divider is far too thick

2) Again can't read comments on posts

NewsGator Online : Only tried the beta AJAX version of it. Better than the above two but

1) Seems a little bit slow

2) Again even though it does seem to have a comments section at the bottom it doesn't seem to grab any feed comments!

Google Reader : Not impressive at all, well not to me anyway, but it seems a lot of people like it out there. Problems:

1) I don't like the UI, colours are just bad, consistent with GMail colours but used the wrong way around I think.

2) Comments, comments, comments, where are they, why are ALL online readers I've tried missing comments.

Are online readers a bad idea? Is there anything better that I haven't tried out?
It looks like I might give up the whole online RSS reader thing and just stick with something like FeedDemon.
If I have to choose from the above I would go for the NewsGator one, but still it feels like the best of the worst to me.

I'm not sure why I haven't done this previously but I'm now registered on Linked In! Will add the link to my blog soon, I'm slowly adding people I know to my list but you could make this easier for me by adding me too :-)

I was going to write about this in the past before all the issues I had with my blog but it looks like it's good I didn't! It just got a loot easier. A couple of months ago I was trying to play with the MSN Search Web service to see if I can add search functionality to my site.

I tried to do so by following this article, and my advice is, don't! Back then I got a bit confused by it and it seemed that some info was missing. Also a lot of the components such as the AntiXSS library were not even included and you had to search for them to get them included.

Now you don't have to do any of this! Thanks to this download. The download includes all the files you need to get the search functionality included in your site.

The only thing you need to do is go and grab a search API ID from here and place that into your source code, you can either do this by adding a key with the obtained value into your Web.Config file or by entering the value in the appropriate place in the SearchProxy.aspx file, and this should be all! Well almost!

The only thing left to do from here is that you specify which site/sites you want the search to operate on this is done by replacing the following code that exists in the Default.html file in the source downloaded from the link mentioned earlier, with the values that you want.

var sc = new searchClient('keyAndCount', 'returnArea', "(site:www.dan.net.nz)");

So in this case I've set that value to search my blog site.

I wish I've seen this stuff a few month ago! Would have made my experimentation a lot easier :-)

If this works then I'm back up and running again! Had a few blog issues since my (now deleted) Live Search Gadgets post, which screwed up my blog template for posting which in turn made Windows Live Writer unhappy. Now I'm upgraded to dasblog 1.9 and it will hopefully be all good!

I look forward to more blogging soon.

I just noticed that Rod has started blogging about Xero.

I cant think of what more to say in this post so go read what Rod has to say about Xero.

I've done a few modifications to the look and feel of my blog - hopefully to the better, and there's still a bit more to come. Blog now has a new background colour and a reorganized and rearranged right side, removed the Google/Amazon ads for now. They were cluttering the area I think, also added a little bio about myself and created a new feedburner feed.

Please do subscribe to the new Feed Url : http://feeds.feedburner.com/DanDotNet

I hope the changes are nice!

I just noticed these two buttons when reading some emails in outlook, they magically appear on screen when you hover over the area where they are at! If you have a conversation with several emails going back an forth, you can go up and down based on the one being read, to see those buttons hover over the right corner side around the separator line between emails. I've only taken a screenshot of one direction, they also show 'previous' ...etc

Interesting idea, but why aren't these always visible?

The first MS NZ event for 'O7 after the launch is coming next month, lots of awesome content and also some nice give aways and all for just $199. Details are here

I even noticed that JD - 2006 Blogger of the year award winner -will be co presenting with JB this year. Nice stuff JD. The next generation of Microsoft tech geeks is emerging. Looks like me & JD are leading the wave but in slightly different ways (Shameless self promotion here :-))

I'm sure JD would agree this is just the beginning!

Just read this post on Scoble's blog and it got me thinking. I don't really care what Microsoft's intentions are to take Google head to head by offering similar services or what but I personally am very happy with the Windows Live family of services and Live Search specifically.

I think the problem is Google is just good enough for the search needs of most people and it also seems to fit very well when speaking about it  - I mean when saying "I googled this and that", it doesn't sound as easy to say I Yahoo'd blah blah or I Live Searched so and so.

Microsoft need to convince people that Windows Live - (and I'm speaking of Live Search specifically in this post) it's become my favourite area - is worth trying. AND IT IS! But on the surface there is no obvious reason that would let people use Live Search instead of Google. All of its good features have not been talked about enough, if ever, and I don't know why. Like Scoble indicates most of the people in Redmond (read MS employees, USE Google) well that's the problem! If people at Microsoft are not convinced their search engine is the best then how is it ever going to take off.

I think all what Live Search needs is for those that tried it to speak about it - what happened to all of those bloggers out there, if a word can spread through blogs online then MS people are the best to do it! How many MS bloggers do you know of?

The different features that Live Search offers need to come to the surface so people can know about them and try them. It's not just another search engine!

Here are a few things of the top of my head that I love about Live Search, go try them!

- Customizable Search algorithm
- Search Macros ( I was first introduced to this concept on Live Search and then Google came up with the very similar Personalized Search)
- Live Image Search (not having to click a NEXT button is just fantastic), the scratchpad is also a VERY interesting idea

So there goes a few. More on this topic in the future...

And what's the deal with the tag game thing, everyone currently says that everyone they know has been tagged 30 times so they aren't tagging anyone! It's interesting I have not been tagged yet, maybe my readers are not that many after all! My blog must be boring!

I read this morning on ScottGu's blog about the new Visual Studio Web designer. It looks promising! I've always found the Visual Studio 2003 annoying especially when switching views... Visual Studio 2005's designer is less annoying but still not perfect. So it's about time we see the Least Annoying - this is going to be my word - expectation - on it till I try it ! :-).

Here's a list of some of the new stuff in the designer taken from Scott's blog.

I look forward to playing with this when the CTP is out.

I thought I was keeping a good eye on what's happening with Live Search but Chris was faster to post about the ability to have Windows Live Search on your mobile. See his post here

I still have a couple more posts I was meant to write up last year and haven't yet, they should be coming soon. Stay tuned for more on Live Search.

I was trying to install VS 2005 SP1 on Windows Server 2003 last night but kept getting an error about an invalid signature (or something like that anyway - can't remember the exact error now)

The cause of the problem as stated on the Microsoft website  is "This problem occurs when the computer has insufficient contiguous memory for Windows Server 2003 or Windows XP to verify that the .msi package or the .msp package is correctly signed."

The solution can be found here.

Here goes my first post in 2007. Happy New Year to you all.

I was recently reading this post on Joel Spolsky's blog about the number of shutdown options available in Windows Vista. Even though they are quite a few and can be narrowed down like he suggests. I think  I have a better idea!

I have been using Vista for almost a year now but for some reason I never thought about this. But for me I tend to shut down my computer most of the time if I'm not using it and to do so I always have to bring up the start menu point the arrow to the shut down option, and now I think this is a bit annoying because I hardly ever use the Sleep button or the Lock button which are available directly on the start menu without having to go the second step.

Now here's my idea. It would be nice to be able to set a default action action on the sleep button that suits everyone's needs and this way you can setup the button to do the action that most fits your needs using one step.

I'm quite sure that most people use one shutdown option regularly and the others less? So doing so would make me use the function I do regularly without having to click the arrow and see all options every time.

So Microsoft here is my suggestion, I would like to be able to do something like this, right click the sleep button, click a menu item that says set default action or something like that, and then choose the one that suits me. I think this way the problem that Spolsky mentioned of too many choices would be minimized and I would be able to shutdown my computer by clicking the button...

Probably those of you who already downloaded and are running Office 2007 RTM know this but anyway.

The Microsoft addon for the save as PDF feature - which was taken out from the beta versions of Office - can be found here

Found this link about Live Search on the Microsoft home page.

Vista has finally arrived!

See here and here

I was playing with the MSN Search web service to try and enable Live Search into websites a couple of days ago and I lost the article reference that I was reading through with the examples.

Today while searching for that article I stumbled across this link. Apparently there are easy ways of integrating Live Search into your websites without having them embedded.

The link above allows you to implement the search in two ways, one by having the search box only and redirecting the results to the Live Search results. The second is by having a floating window that displays the results on top of your web site.

Check it out.

I'm currently also playing with the MSN Search web service (why is it called MSN and not Live when it's for Live Search?)  and will be posting more about this soon.

It's about time I started blogging again, it's been a while. A couple of days ago I realized that Google has made a new offering with it's search services. Google Personalized Search. And almost instantly I was thinking, this looks familiar and you know why. I blogged about something very similar before a while back when I posted about Windows Live Search Macros.

It looks like Google are offering a very similar service to WLSM. I have not tried Google's yet but will be checking it out soon.

I guess Google likes some of Microsoft's ideas! They even have an ugly looking service similar to Windows Live, have you ever seen the link that says personalized page on Google?

This just keeps getting better and better all the time! I've now found yet another reason to use Live Search. The Image Search features are really great. Viewing full size images was a very nice idea but here are some even better ones IMO. The scratch pad and the related people panes, VERY NICE. The scratch pad allows you to drag images to the side of the page and build a collection of images from the search results you get and the Related people pane also shows when you search for a person in images, if you seach for bill gates for example, you see Paul Allen, Warren Buffet ...etc in the related people list.

Here's a screenshot showing the scratch pad.

So Windows Live Search is now Live, and also has new features. I just noticed that there is now an "Only from New Zealand" checkbox that lets you localize the search. It's good this has now been made avaialbe and surely enough I had to try it out.

So I decided to seach for myself and it looks like Windows Live Search knows best!

Searching for "Dan" using WLS with only NZ selected returns my blog as the no1 result (yay!) and if I search for "Daniel" on WLS search I also end up on the first page but I show on 5th. Not bad!

On Google searching for "Dan" finds my blog on the top of page three when NZ is selected.

Will try to play with the algorithm customization thing I blogged about earlier and see what that does to the results (not that I want to!) it's good to be on page one.

The only annoying thing that I see after the release is renaming Windows Live TM Search to Live Search. I think it was better when all Windows Live pages had the Windows word in them rather than some having it and some not.

Just read this on Computer World. I have been wondering about this a few years ago thinking that it would be nice if it does happen.

I guess we will be seeing more softies in Christchurch on regular basis now. Nice... 

As you can probably tell by now, I've been paying a lot of attention to Windows Live generally lately as well as Windows Live Search specifically. This has actually got me thinking about Google again and back again to my Innovation and Creativity post.

As you would have read in that post, I mentioned that I don't like it when companies go out of what they do best to invest in offerings done by other companies and that I think there should always be new ideas ...etc but acknowledged that new entrants help evolve existing products but here's the question. Do they?

Now as you know I've been having a close look at Windows Live Search recently and I like it a lot, it even looks like it might be out of beta soon. The logo doesn't have the word beta any more, there's no news of that anywhere though.

So I went back to take a close look at Google Search, now we all know that this is their big thing, after all they are the best search engine in the world. Well they might be, but is it going to stay so? I wouldn't be so sure about that, and here's why. Unless there's a secret Google search revamp project going somewhere. I thing Google has a problem, they are investing in areas which IMO are out of their main services - email,spreadsheets,IM's ..etc and are forgetting their core service?

I personally am starting to slowly go away from Google. Windows Live Search is great for me and I use a lot of the other Windows Live offerings anyway, so it's easier for me that way. So unless Google are doing something to renew their search engine, they could lose me!

One of the other cool features that Windows Live Search has that I've been playing with lately is search macros, which allow you to create a sub search engine - the best way to explain this in my words - so basically enabling you to have a context or so for a search. Some of the things you can do is specify a list of sites for the search to work on and even use advanced search queries. Once a macro is defined you can then use this macro as the search engine and use that to search for what you want.

I guess the benefit of this is getting more specific results returned to what you are looking for.

One example I've tried is creating a macro to search auction and e-commerce shops sites such as TradeMe,Zillion and Ferrit ..etc

To create a macro, search for anything and then when the search bar appears above the results go here:

and then follow through.

I'm still not happy that the pageless search has been removed but displaying 50 results on the page kind of minimizes the need for me to click a page number anyway, so not so bad.

While looking through the advanced options of Windows Live Search after my previous post I noticed this

Apparently you can customize how the search works, cool idea. Will have a play with this shortly.

Two of the features that made me like Windows Live Search a lot was the ability to navigate results without having to click on a page number to go to a next page and the ability to customise the depth of the results. It looks like these two features are now gone and I dont see why.

Eventhough I can setup Windows Live Search to show upto 50 search results on one page, I still hate that whole pages idea and LOVED the feature in Windows Live Search that overcame that problem.

Those two features were the reason I decided to use Windows Live Search more than I used Google, but now whats the difference between both?

They are both good enough for my search result purposes and I favoured Windows Live Search for the two features that are now gone.

Feedback posted to Live.com. It would be nice if the page can be customized to use either option I think.

I'm finally back up and running again on Vista with only a few more software to install. I've gone through a PC rebuild recently mainly because I needed a new Hard Disk.

It feels good to be back on Vista. I'm on build 5472 which makes me one build behind now. It's hard to catch up with the downloads! and I decided I'll wait for RC1 before my next upgrade.

Here are some of my thoughts.

- Installation time felt a little long still. From start to finish took a little over an hour.
- The non AERO UI in this build is much more appealing than the older greyish one, however, it feels like it doest match well with the black task bar.
- The first time load was quite slow but otherwise it loads at reasonable speed.
- The 'Hour Glass' is gone! Say hello to 'The Ring' (thats what I'll be calling it!)
- Everything seems to be running just fine so far. However, I wasnt happy I had to restart the system after a couple of software installs.

It's good to be back running AERO, after over a month away from VISTA and mainly using Win 2k3, it feels good to see some cool graphics :-)

More thoughts later.

I just noticed that Lukas's blog is back up and running again.  His new blog is on http://blog.svoboda.co.nz and the RSS feed is here 

Welcome back online Lukas.

This is just for my own future reference. As I plan to have a play with writing Live.com gadgets some time soon.

See here for details

Here goes my first post from Windows Live Writer, and first impressions are this thing looks VERY cool. I've recently decided to try out as much as I can of the Windows Live family of services and products so expect to see more posts on Windows Live stuff very soon.

So far I've only blogged about Windows Live.Com, Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Mail, and Windows Live Search, and here goes Windows Live Writer. More stuff soon on the categories I didn't cover closely and ones I havent covered yet :-)

After being very annoyed by the Windows Live problem I reported in my previous post, I decided to go ahead and contact the Windows Live Support. And after exchanging about 6 emails with them my problem is FINALLY solved!

At first they suggested me resetting all my browser settings giving me all details on what to do ...etc and try again. Which I did and didnt fix anything. So I email back saying it didnt work and then they email back suggesting that my account might need resetting which they do, that still didnt work so I email again. They reply saying the have transfered the problem to the product support team and require blah blah of information which I give them and then they reply saying thanks ... and confirm they sent the problem to the product support team and FINALLY I get back an email saying that I should DELETE the 'Add Content' pane from my page and just use the 'Add Stuff' link at the top of the page. So I do this, and it WORKS, FINALLY!

Overall, I'm pleased with their attempts to help but I think it could have been a lot faster. So anyway my page is now rebuilt and Live.com is on my happy side again.

Oh and on a side note: Congrats to JD for winning this years blog of the year competition. Though it seems he can't find any PC's with internet connectivity at TechEd yet, see here for more! He hasn't announced his win on his blog!

I don't know how long this has been the case but it's annoying me alot, I went through a PC rebuild last week and after I was back up and running I logged on to my 'customized' Windows Live page and hmm... It's no longer there. All my custom settings have been lost and it went back to the default look you get when you first set it up. I was very annoyed by this but I thought maybe the settings where stored in cookies or something on my local machine that got deleted from my rebuild. So I go to work the next day and load up my page there again and hmm... I see the old settings but then I think maybe this is a cached page. So I refresh it and :-( I lose everything again. The next thing I think of, it's ok, I can rebuild my settings on live.com but I can't and here's why.

As you can see above, the add content pane never gets populated with the content I can add and remaings "loading" forever. Very annoying...

Right so it seems the hot topic of today is TradeMe's launch of their Job listing service... This actually had me start thinking about the following. What happened to innovation? It seems to me that a lot of companies in NZ and world wide see others doing something and then going, that looks like a cool thing to do we should do that too... and then they do and we end up with multiple offerings of very very similar services, so whats the point there? Maybe there's something I don't get, but unless there is a significant difference I just dont see the point.

Here are some examples in different areas.

Maps: Wises, Zoomin and now Yellow Pages too
Auctions: Trademe,Zillion and 2TradeIt
Jobs: Seek, Job Stuff and now TradeMe

And some global Examples

Google, Windows Live Search
iPod, Zune...etc

I'm not denying that new market entrants can help bring innovations on existing products/services but I really think that companies should invest in new ideas and new offerings rather than go outside what they do best to offer services already offered by others.

But who knows, maybe I got it all wrong!!

Remember to Vote For Me!

I've been playing with the Office 2007 Beta 2 RSS reader for a while now and it hasn't met my expectations :(. It has a long way to go to become a good RSS reader IMHO. Here are some of the things that I dont like.

- I can't see any comments related to a post.
- Can't go to the root node of the folder and click 'Mark All as Read' and have all posts marked as read. Well the option seems to be there but it doesnt seem to work on the root node but it does on each blog I'm subscribed to and this is really annoying (maybe thats actually a bug).
- And hmm... thats all I can think of now.

Currently downloading Vista v 5472 will be posting experiences soon.

It's that time of the year again. The NZ.NET blog competition is back!

Vote For Me

I just noticed that Windows Live Messenger and a few other Windows Live products have now gone out of beta. Google are you listening! One thing that looks interesting among those is Windows Live Domains. It seems that this will make possible one of my early requested features of being able to access other email accounts than Hotmail though windows Live.

Off first glance it looks like the offering is very similar to google's which Rod has been trying out. But with less storage space. Will be interesting to see how these two evolve in the future. The main difference at present is that Google's offering is beta while Windows Live's isn't.

Ok so it's been over two weeks since I've posted saying that I will give Windows Live Search a try. Well here are some of my thoughts. In my previous post I mentioned two of the annoying things I found with Windows Live and posted an update on how to resolve one of them. Well it looks like the second one (the position of the search box on the page+ the tab order) has been solved! I was soo annoyed by this so I even ended up posting feedback comments to Windows Live about it! And guess what (they seemed to listen - yeah right!)

Well, not long after I posted the feedback I noticed that when you are not signed in to Windows Live, the page has been tidied up a bit with the search box in the middle of the page and the tab order selecting the search box by default and all the other non necessary stuff not shown (NICE) this means that I can go and use Windows Live Search just as a search tool without a distraction by all the other stuff just like I would use google. I really like that change.

Search Performance: 

As for the search performance, well it seems to do a very decent job but there are 2 things that annoyed me. Search results for the stuff I looked for in the past two weeks were almost always relevant. I only went to Google once to find something I couldnt find directly by using WLS. However, there was one thing that spoilt my experiment (my Google addition!) on 3 or 4 occassions even when having WLS as my default page. When I am browsing somewhere else and needing to look for something I immediately find myself searching Google! Otherwise I was very please with Windows Live Search. The annoying thing I found was the way WLS displays the results- but there is a way around it. The way WLS displays results without letting you click to go to a next page is a very great idea but was annoying in the following case. If you use the cursor to move the scroll bar and reach the bottom if it, it automatically jumps back to the top of the middle of the page to continue displaying the results. This makes you lose the position of the cursor above the scroll bar which I found a bit annoying. The way around this is to just use the down arrow key on the keyboard (which of course is more efficient anyway)

So overall WLS is looking good. I've played with News,Images and the general search during those two weeks.

This just caught my attention, was looking at my blog this afternoon and I spotted the following:

I couldnt help but clicking the add to see where it will take me. I ended up on MS Germany's Visual Studio / Visual Web developer's page. I wonder why MS Germany are using Adwords!!

I've decided to give Windows Live Search a good try and see if it will make a good subsitute to Google for me. There are already 2 things I dong like about the Windows Live Search interface, but I will give it a fair chance to just test how well it performs in returning useful results for what I'm looking for. The way I'll judge this is by seeing if I can find everything I am looking for without having to go look in google. This is not a formal experiment but just an attempt for me to convince myself whether or Windows Live Search is worthed.

The things I dont like about the interface are the fact that the search box is at the top of the screen. Why do I have to move the mouse all the way to the top of the screen to type a search query (and yes I know you can tab into fields and not have to move the mouse but to get to the search box thats another 4 tab clicks) Again I think the first tab order should be the box. The other thing is the number of search results that show on the page, in google I can see more results on each page and the WLS page displays sub results of listings from the same site (the indented ones) thats a waste of space IMO it would make a lot more sense to me to see top level listings as this will reduce the ammount of scrolling one has to do.

Anyway, I will ignore all those annoyances and see if I can really rely on the results returned by WLS for the next 2 weeks without having to go to Google.

Update: I just noticed that you can control the depth of the search for an entry using this thing: available at the top right corner

the further left you pointed the more results displayed with less descriptive detail. That kindof solves one of the two things I reported not liking.

This is just evil. Thanks Mauricio for the heads up.

Update: Here's  Brian Jones' - MS program manager in office - post about this.

I've previously blogged about having some trouble getting ASP.NET and IIS working on Windows Vista. I dont know if I was doing something wrong when trying to set them up, but I had trouble with Vista Builds 5308 and 5342. On the first I couldnt even get IIS to install and on the second I managed to get IIS setup but had problems with building and running ASP.NET 2 applications.

Well now I've got Windows Vista Beta 2 installed on my machine and I installed VS, WinFX Beta2 ..etc yesterday and it all finally works...

Time for some real playing with development on Vista.

Following on from my previous post about the new changes in Microsoft Office and Windows Vista. The post by Leonie proves my point. When you are soo used to something it is hard to change to something new.

So the question is, will this major change push people away from Windows? While it provided a good incentive for Nic and Leonie to consider a MacBook. I think the answer is still 'No'. For the normal user it is no because again the problem of learning something different. Now for Leonie maybe she already uses Mac so the transition will not be painful. But for others (someone who never or rarely used a mac) I think it will be less effort to learn the new features of Vista than to move away and use a Mac or Linux. Which leaves that user with 2 options (keep what I have now or go ahead and make the effort to upgrade).

As for corporates, I think it's only a matter of time till corporates invest in Vista and here's why : Microsoft's mainstream support is for 5 years, see here and support for Windows XP will end around 2009 see here. So by then Microsoft will not support XP and therefore it might be another reason why all corporates that use Microsoft software would consider the upgrade. So whether the user likes it or not, we have to get used to new ways of doing things, and if we will have to do it anyway then probably better to be ahead and do it now!

The other thing is the opportunities arising for the software sector, go read Rod's post on this.

I dont know if this is just me. But I ran into something yesterday that got me thinkinig. Now the new Windows Vista and Office systems have changed massively since their previous versions and part of that change is for the purpose of improving usability.

Now raises a few questions. I am sure that all of you will agree that the changes in the new versions are significant (I'm only talking about UI  stuff here) such as the introduction of the Office Ribbon and the getting rid of the menus thing.

I think this pauses a major problem for the average user of both systems (Resistance to change). Put it this way, after using the office system for instance for about 10 years or so. Would you be prepared to start to 'learn' a new environment (which will make your life easier - provided you do the effort) I think giving the new system to an office secretary for say will cause some frustration for a while before the person can get around to finding their way. Coz not only did the layout change but some functionality changed place too!

In Office 2003 to enter a header/footer for a document, you go to View-Header and Footer. I went into 2007 beta 2 to try and do this and hmm... couldnt find it, so had to look around and then found that it now residers under the 'Insert' tab. This comes interesting especially when you want to edit the header! You go to the insert tab again to select header and footer and then edit... 

Tim posted about Live.com saying why he 'doesn't' like it here.

Here's my take on the topic.

While Tim sees 'no compelling reason' to use it. I think I've found a few...

I do agree with Sean that it live.com makes a great homepage; while this depends on how you customise it
here is why it works great for me.

Live.com allowed me to group a lot of my online usage in one place; which saves space and memory!

Here's how:

Every morning here are some of the things I tend to do online

- Check my email accounts
- Read blogs
- Read news from several news sites
- Check the weather
- View stock information
- Search for stuff online

Using live.com  I managed to group most of the above in one place.

And here's why.I dont have to open Sauce Reader to read blogs;open news sites in several tabs/browser windows to check latest news for each ..etc
I also dont have to open hotmail...

The advantage in the bit above that you get from live that I can see 'parts' of each section before I decide to read news so that if there's nothing new; then I just wont read...

So overall it does reduce work by having things grouped.

The things I dont like about Live.com
-------------------------------------
- It's slow; on broadband it takes more than a 5 or so seconds to load!
- The above become more of a problem with more usage! The more I like live.com the more I'll add stuff to it the slower it becomes :-(
- I also dont like the current UI - The previous one (where you could customise border colours was much better IMO
- I REALLY would like to be able to access ANY email account I have through live and not just Hotmail.

It's been a while since I last posted but here I am posting again. I've deliberately delayed posting till I get something done (which I still cant do) but now decided to post anyway.

I've been using Windows Vista now since build 5308 was out and as I mentioned in some of my previous posts I am generally very happy with my experiences. Recently I've tried to setup WinFX, VS 2005 ...etc on Vista and here is where I am having some very annoying issues.

I can get WinFX working just fine on Vista but ASP.NET just doesnt like me, on build 5308 I failed several times to get IIS7 installed but after I installed build 5342 this has not been the issue and I ran into another problem. Windows Vista just wouldn't allow me to run aspnet_regiis even if I am logged on as Administrator stating an access denied error - anyone know how to fix this?

Also, trying to build any ASP.NET app in VS on Vista always returns a 'Error loading config file ....'

I was hoping to get all these sorted before I post, but I looks like this wont happen.

Any pointers appreciated.

And on a side note; I've recently started another blog on Geekzone which I aim to keep focused on security related topics so drop by there if you are interested in security stuff...

Following this

Apple have just released a piece of software that allows people to run XP on their intel based machines.

All future versions of the Mac OS will include this software.

More details here

While working in Visual Studio yesterday I accidentally hid the tabs that show the open files, and couldnt figure out how I did that or how to reverse it. With a bit of looking around in the Visual Studio menus (after failing to find an answer in google) it turns out that I changed the environment settings from Tabbed to MDI.

To get this back to what it was the solution is, go to Tools->Options, click on Environment then General and select the tabbed option.

I read in The Press yesterday that ICANN will be meeting in Wellington from 25-31 March and that one of the things that will be in discussion is the registration of the .xxx domain extension. Apparently the Bush Administartion is trying to stop the realization of this domain extension. For the following reason.

"Over 6000 people made their objects by either E-mail or a letter. They are afraid the new .XXX domain extention will legitimize the porno industry."

I'm not sure what legal consequences the realization might cause but IMO having the extension available will really make things better. The porno industry will exist regardless of it being legal or not and content will remain available on the internet. So by having the extension made available, perhaps this could improve things in the following.

- A new law could be created to make it illegal to have adult content in any non .xxx domain
- Given the above occurs, all adult content will have to exist under the above extension
- Given that becomes the case, it will be very easy to block adult websites hence resulting in a safer internet for kids ...etc

Not long ago I installed a copy of the Windows Vista Feb CTP sadly though, my graphics card was not good enough to show the aero graphics, I've been enjoying using Vista a lot lately and just couldnt resist not having the AERO graphics, so I went and got myself a nice new card, and finally, I can now see the AERO UI, very very nice!

You can even choose your favourite color theme, adjust the intensity, enable or disable the transparent glass ...etc

Very cool. Here's a screenshot illustration...

It looks like Chris Auld has started his live blogging from Las Vegas for MIX06. Keep an eye on his blog for live info on whats going on there.

Here's his first post and I'm sure there's more to come..

Ok this was known to be possible, but it wasnt known how. Well now a solution has been posted, you can find it here

Nice! Here's a picture showing XP on Mac

I dont know how long this has been the case, but it looks like Windows Live Mail beta is now available no non US residents. I've signed up for this a while back and received my invite today.

- I can now enjoy a hotmail account with 2Gb space, nice, wont have to worry about downloading my messages every now and then now.
- It integrates very nicely with Windows Live - I really like the grouping of services that Windows Live does. My wish tho is that Windows Live would allow you to plug in other email accounts to it than just hotmail, this will be very handy if it happens I think.

So far I'm very happy with my Vista experience, I've managed to installed WinFX and VS 2005 last night and everything went smoothly with no issues during setup. Will post more as I start playing with WinFX a bit.

One thing I didnt talk about in my previous post of the things I liked, is the way the 'All Programs' menu behaves now. The changes are great. If you recall the old programs menu, you'll remember that you could endup having 3 to 4 panels open and if you slip your hand in the last panel, outch the entire panels would collapse and you have to select the menu,the submenu,thesubmenu of the submenu...etc

The new Tree like expand and collapse behaviour in Vista helps avoid this and it is a really good change I think.

I've also found this great review of the current Vista build and all the previous builds are there too on the site.

There has been a few posts about the new Geekzone blog feature lately.
Want to know what people think.

Mauricio , Tim , Darryl and Nic all posted about this.

I was lucky to get no 9!

Still not convinced you should try it, then here are my comments! :-)

"A security association is reporting what it says is the first virus that can pass from a PC to a mobile device and then erase files."

I guess with viruses targeting new markets in the near future, we might see lots of antivirus software moving there in the future too... I would have never thought I might be running say Norton or McAFee on my Smartphone but who knows; if viruses can go mobile then surely antiviruses will too!

See the article here

With the latest release of the Windows Vista CTP build this week. I was doing some recap with some of the changes made in the history of windows and one of the things that I didnt pay much attention to lately is the Windows 'start' button. Most of you will probably know that the start button was a big talk within HCI for it's inconsistency with user actions - clicking a button called start to shut down - end - a computer ... etc. With a bit of search I found the following link with all the windows buttons from Windows 95 to Vista build 5259 (2 builds back I think) but the button in this build is still the same. So by the looks of it, in the last 3 builds of vista, including the one released this week 5308 the word 'start' is finally no longer going to be present. I think this will make HCI guys happy now :-)

For a recap on the start button in the past 10 years I've included the images I found in the link above.

Windows 95/98/NT 4	Windows 2000/ME
Windows XP Build 2250	Windows XP Build 2257
Windows XP Build 2410	Windows XP Beta 1
Windows XP Beta 2	Windows XP
Windows Server 2003	Windows Media Center 2005
Windows Vista Build 3683	Windows Vista Build 3718
Windows Vista Build 4008	Windows Vista Build 4015
Windows Vista Build 4051	Windows Vista Build 4083 (64-bit)
Windows Vista Beta 1	Windows Vista Build 5219
Windows Vista Build 5259-5308

Watched this on the news today and had to check it out. Telecom are finally upgrading the Broadband plans. Yay! Now it's taken quite a while for this to happen I think but it's finally happening, and I believe there is now room for it to be even better. The even better news - for businesses that is - is that the plans and prices are the same for both!!.

To see the range of the new plans offered by Telecom go here - the plans are effective from April this year.

Ok so on the same day IE 7 beta 2 preview is released a bug is found!! According to PCWorld here. An independent researcher only needed 15 minutes to find to find the first bug in the beta 2 preview.

The interesting thing is that "Ferris's discovery is one of the quickest such bug-findings on record". I personally dont think this is bad news tho. I mean the software is not even a beta yet... and discovering bugs early leads to having a better, less vulnerable final product.

More details on the bug can be found here.

Update: here's a post from the IE blog regarding the issue.

Just read about one of the nice new features available in VS 2005 - Code Snippets! In VS 2005 you can select code from a list of commonly used patterns and  "What makes code snippets really cool is that you can easily create and define your own." as Scott says.

The snippets are not available in C# by default but you can download them from here

See Scott's post for more detail on this here

A couple of days ago I got a Windows Live Messenger invitation and been using it since. Over all it looks good and has some nice new features new user interface ...etc, but here's the one that caught my attention. In Windows Live Messenger you can actually send offline messages to people when they are not online so that they'd receive them on their next login, very cool! This used to be one of my favourite features in ICQ and I'm glad to see it in Windows Live Messenger now. I havent tried MSN Messenger 7.5 but I'm sure that this feature was not available in MSN 7 and earlier.

To send an offline message just right click an offline name or just double click the name...

Update: I also just noticed that you can now also talk to people while you are appearing offline, nice!!! I wished for this feature long time ago to be on MSN...

Here's one of the funniest emails I've received in a while. So thought I'd share :-)

"A man joined a big multi national company as a trainee. On his first day, he dailed the kitchen and shouten into the phone:"Get me a cup of coffee, quickly!" The voice from the oder side responded: "You fool; you've dialed the wrong extension! Do you know who you are talking to?" "No" replied the trainee."It's the managing director of the company, you idiot!"

The trainee shouted back: "And do you know who YOU are talking to, you IDIOT?" "No!" replied the Managing Director angrily.

"Thank God!" replied the trainee and put down the phone.

A new version of the GPL - the first major revision in the last 15 years - is coming soon. A draft was recently released here. According to Computerworld the changes are designed to designed to "address two increasingly important issues in the software industry: software patents and DRM (digital rights management). " Will be interesting to see the outcome of this...

See the full article here

Here's something nice to have a look at as the year 2005 comes to end. I came accross this list of the 50 greatest gadgets in the past 50 years on PCWorld recently.

There should be a lot more gadgets joining this list in the next 50 years I think. It's also interesting that Sony has 7 presences among those 50! Good job Sony!

So you've probably heard of TradeMe and you might have heard of Zillion but have you heard of 2tradeit ? I never have but saw it today on the sponsored links of my blog. Will check it out and post about it again sometime soon.

John Downs  a 4th year Comp Sci and Psychology student in 2006 will be the next Student Ambassador for Auckland University and has recently started blogging. If you follow the NZ.NET student list you may have read his introduction of himself, but if not you can see it here

Please drop by his blog and say hi. I'm sure John will be a great successor for the previous Auckland Student Ambassadors.

Welcome to blog world John, hope to see you blogging more soon.

Was just reading about a new tool released by Microsoft Research; SNARF; this tool integrates with your email client in order to allow you to sort (social sort) your email based on how often you send or receive emails from contacts. Sounds like a nice idea to me, will try it out now.

To get it go here

And for the article on PCWorld about it, see here

Will post my experiences soon...

Ferrit  is now online at last. Initial rumors (at least the ones I heard) were that it will be an alternative to TradeMe. But it doesnt look anything like TradeMe yet. It looks more like a supersized online shop to me - not a bad idea either - perhaps with more products available for sale it could kick off well.

Only think I dont like from my first impressions is that they site display is a bit too busy.

Update: ok, I've just registered an account with Ferrit to check what benefits members get, well the main thing is that you can create a list of items you like and then get redirected to the store whom the product belongs to so that you can buy it. The list is also handy if you want to share it with friends and family (perhaps the reason for this is for people to find Christmas gifts ...etc for others) again not a bad idea.

What I find interesting is that you cannot checkout items into a shopping cart and pay for them and get them shipped to you, so it seems ferrit is more like half an online shop. I expect another benefit of the registration is being spammed  by the retailers participating in Ferrit (hopefully this wont happen!)

Update 2: Just refering to that last paragraph above, Ferrit will be introducing sales and more in later phases of Ferrit. Tim posted about this before here

Microsoft is now developing RSS into making it a two way street. I firstly read about this on Ray Ozzie's (MS CTO) blog here and now just found an article about this on PCWorld.

"Microsoft is extending the popular RSS 2.0 Web syndication format to make it "multidirectional," allowing it to be used for synchronizing information such as contacts and calendar entries across different applications, the company says.

Web sites that support Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds. When content on a site is updated, the RSS feed informs the subscriber, often with a summary of the updated content and a link to it."

See the full article here

Today while I was looking at some books in Whitcoulls, I came accross the following book and surely it got my attention!

I guess it should be an interesting read but I don't think I would buy it, maybe will look for it in the library. Anyone read it? Does it tell much that tech aware people wouldnt know?

More info about it can be found here if you are interested.

I just read that Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's CTO has started blogging. It's nice to see senior people at large corps like MS blogging.

I'm sure his blog will be an interesting read. See it here and here is a little bio of Ray.

I previously blogged about my first impressions on Windows Livehere

Well so far I've been very happy with it - kudos to the Windows Live team. The reason I like it so much is that it puts together several things that I do every day.

But what I would REALLY like to see made available (my Windows Live Christmas wish list) is:

The ability to integrate any email account to the page and not just Hotmail or Windows Live Mail Beta.

I really dont think this is very hard to achieve, and would love to be able to plug-in several email accounts into it.

The next other thing I wish would happen is Image Search, I occasionally find this feature very handy in Google when working on some projects and looking for specific images ..etc

So Sean I know you mentioned that you are trying to convince you're family to have Windows Live as their homepage. Well here's a promise from me, if any of the above features on my wish list become available, I promise to have www.live.com as my homepage :-)

I just added a Google Search Box to my blog, and at first it wasn't working, but thanks to Nic it now is.

The reason the Search Box wasnt working is due to having nested forms as the Search box code is wrapped with form tags.

The solution - in dasblog anyway - add a </form> tag to separate the forms, technically not correct (X)HTML but who cares...!

Thanks Nic for the solutions :-)

This looks really funky!, probably not as good as the ipod family yet, but looks very stylish, should be seeing more of it soon I reckon.

For details about it see the Sony website here

So not only was Nov 7th the launch of VS 05 and SQL 05 but also DotNetNuke 3.2 & 4 !

From the DNN news letter

"Nov 7, 2005 — Perpetual Motion Interactive Systems Inc., a premier Microsoft technology solutions provider, is pleased to announce the immediate availability of two new major release versions of DotNetNuke®, the premier open source Web Application Framework for the Microsoft ASP.NET platform. These releases bridge the compatibility gap between ASP.NET 1.1 and ASP.NET 2.0 and offer a number of powerful new application features."

See the full article here

Time for some more DNN play by me :-)

Just  been playing around with the newly launched Windows Live www.live.com and my first impressions is, very nice! Integrating a search engine along with other things such as email and news feeds is just very very handy to me.

Having RSS feeds and a good search engine integrated in one place, plus a simple, easy to navigate interface is just great.

More thoughts to come soon :-)

Nigel  blogged about the new generation of Microsoft Certifications here. It's interesting that they are becoming more focused on skills ...etc

This presents me with a wee problem though, I am currently studying for MCAD and am not too far from sitting the first exam.

Now the question is, should someone like me go through the entire 03 MCAD certificate or should I do the first exam and then start focusing on the new generation stuff??

I think I will go for both! Is that a good thing to do, what do you guys think?

Nic  blogged about the "How much is your blog worth" tool recently, showing that his blog is worth around 14k, not bad!

Now trying this on my own blog shows that mine is only worth $0 :-(

I guess I should attempt to post more regularly and try and have posts that are of value to my blog readers...

Here's a promise from me to post at least once every week :-) and also post something of value. If you feel that I'm not keeping my promise, please do let me know.

I know this is hard to do, but it's worth the challenge.

To find out how much your blog is worth in money see here

Well quite a few blog writers have been quiet lately including myself - cant find anything to post about at present and seems others have similar problems, most of the blogs I read have been quiet lately....

Hopefully new content will come soon!

As I mentioned earlier here I will continue updating my experiences using GTalk every now and then.

Now yesterday I ran into the most annoying thing in GTalk, this could put me off using GTalk for a loong while!

One of the features I find very handy in MSN Messenger is the option to save conversations. Now unless I am somewhat blind, GTalk doesnt seem to have this option, very very annoying!

I was in a conversation yesterday with someone and after the conversation ended, I wanted to check something from the conversation and bingo, it only keeps a history of the last few lines .... :( :(

Have I missed the option for this feature? Or is it really not there.

Also, Rod this brings me an idea for the next version of AfterMail .

I guess IM's are occassionally used for meetings ... and perhaps the conversations can sometimes contain important info to the people of the meetings,so provided they have an option to store conversations such as MSN ..etc, hmm... the rest you already know :)

So Telecom had their 3G network released for a while now and Vodafone have recently followed with theirs. Now there are a lot of good things that come with the 3G network, not all necessary features but all are cool!

Now like me you may have thought that a Smartphone does everything one might ever dream of doing (at least IMO it does everything I need) so I confidently went to Vodafone and asked someone if Smartphones are 3G enabled and she said no, then I was like I'm sure they are capable of it so will they be in the future and she denied saying that this wont be the case with the current models.

So, conclusion, there are things a smartphone can't do :( :(

Saw this in the DotNetJunkies newsletter today. I haven't played much with O/R Mappers myself but thought it may be of interest to some of you.

James Carpinter , the current Student Ambassador and my successor as a Student Ambassader, has now started blogging. He is currently looking for someone to replace him as a Student Ambassador as he is leaving university this year.

Are you a student at Canterbury who is interested in this then let him know or let Paul Lo the Academic Advisor at Microsoft know.

The program is really great and there is a lot you can get out from it.

Got any questions about the experience? ask me or ask James :-)

Also, I took the Student Ambassador role one step further and was involved this year with the first Student Advisory Boardfor version two (which is now live) of theSpoke. There is a big chance they will be arranging a new board next year, so if you think this will be an interesting challenge, then stay tuned and keep an eye on Mario's Blog

Probably all of you know that stuff already but for those that dont. ASP.NET by default does not treat non MS browsers as uplevel browsers leading to ASP.NET controls being rendered incorrectly. Well the solution for that is to include browser caps in the .config files of the application.

Here is a great article that explains all about this, and here is a browserCap section already written to handle non MS browsers including many of the unfamiliar ones.

Came accross this document today. Provides a detailed history of MS since it started back in the late seventies.

I also found it interesting that MS is only about 1 month away from its 30th anniversary! They'll probably have a big celebration then...

Rod  blogged asking about how startup programs slow down your machine when too many of them are there leading to your machine taking ages to start here.

I found the answer to how to solve this here

Read this on the xtra news today.

"Microsoft moved to build its presence in the booming Internet telephony market on Wednesday, purchasing Teleo Inc, a Californian company that lets users make calls from their computers to regular phones".

In the article it also says "Will Collins, global messenger product manager at Microsoft, said the company hoped to integrate Teleo's offerings into its products by the end of 2005. Microsoft may add "click-to-call" features to Outlook or Internet Explorer, so that users can automatically call a phone number by clicking on it, he said. "

Personally I think they might extend that to MSN Messenger too to compete with products like Skype...

See the full article here

Also, here's the Microsoft Press release for that.

Will be interesting to see what the outcome of that is.

Lukas Svoboda  of Orbiz has been elected president of the NZ .NET user group community. It looks like we will be hearing more of this sometime soon. I only read the news on his blog here . But I guess this will probably come up on the mailing lists soon...

Congrats Lukas.

Nic blogged about google talk here yesterday and on the NZ.NET Mailing lists seemed to be surpised no one responded. Well to make him happy! Here's me posting about it. I just downloaded it now and exploring it at the moment. First impression is, the UI looks too simple, compared to MSN Messenger which some people feel is a bit klunky, I think Google Talk is just wayyy to plain.

More on Google Talk later when I have a deeper play with it.

As you may have previously read here I have completed my degree in Information Systems and Technology just over 6 weeks ago. And hmm... for a graduate like myself the first thing you think about is hmm... a job!

Well, here's the thing, how am I going to get a job if even jobs that state they want graduates, or dont even mention what sort of experienece level they are after, reply saying "you dont have enough commerical experience for the job" or things around that line.

Another problem is the limited number of jobs available in prefered regions of work. Maybe Labour and National should think more about job opportunities for grads in IT (I'm not the only one at home without a job who did IT) I know a few others of which some chose different career paths after finishing their studies, including studying other fields.

Being only 20 years old and having completed my degree already alongside the other good things I've done, I believe I have done well so far. Although I have enough ideas and things I do that occupy my time when I'm at home without a job - that keep my brain fairly active - I want to get out there in industry and prove myself, I believe I can do a lot, only problem is no one seems to believe in me yet!

Things I'm Interested in in terms of what to do for a job.

.NET Development,e-business type stuff, business analysis, programming in general and a lot more.

Do you know anything out there that I may have missed which is suitable, are you interested in knowing more about me, then drop me a line.

I am currently working through learning a bit about DotNetNuke so that I can develop modules ...etc and thought I'd point some useful resources. I have personally found www.dotnetnuke.dk to be a great resource for the initial setups vs the documentation that is actually available with the DotNetNuke package.

I will try to keep this post updated as I continue my journey with DNN, so that it would contain all resources I believe are useful and so on, but here's a start anyway :-)

Update: here's another useful resouce : http://portals.my-asp.net

The NZ .NET Site is having a blog competition!

Just noticed that my 3 of my blog posts have been tackback spammed today. I guess I should consider not displaying trackbacks or referals on my blog, to avoid displaying spam.

I previously blogged about about the First Visual Studio error message I got here. I believe I know why I had this error, but forgot to blog about it a while back. Well, what happened initially was that I installed visual studio and the .NET framework on another partition drive than the root one that has windows on it. It seems that this upset the references to the framework and a few other things, as I not only got the error above, but also, errors saying, cannot load package blah blah blah ...etc.

After I got sick of all that I installed VS 2005 and the framework again on the root drive, and things seemed to be ok since. So either this was the issue or I did one stupid thing in the first installation that I somehow avoided doing the second time!

Darryl blogs about how to change your MSN account and have it updated to reflect your new email address.

See his post here

The next version of Microsoft Windows, which was formerly known as Windows Longhorn will be arriving in the second half on 2006 under the name Windows Vista.

See details here and press pass here

Personally I like the new name more, I am yet to make sense of it though...

Interesting article in Computer World today, see it here

Here's the bit I find most interesting.

"Speaking with his usual gusto to a gathering of Microsoft resellers and solutions provider partners, Ballmer took direct aim at IBM in his morning keynote, identifying Big Blue as Microsoft's Number one competitor and criticising every aspect of IBM's three-pronged strategy to provide hardware, software and services to customers.

"Does IBM have the best hardware most of the time? Ask yourself that question, I say," Ballmer said, eliciting laughter from the audience. "Does IBM have the best software? They don't even have in my personal opinion the second-best software. Do they have the best services? No, they don't have the best services. IBM's product line is the weakest it's ever been. The value [of IBM] is significantly less today than at any time in my 25 years in the business."

I think it's an interesting way of saying Microsoft does better than IBM...

I finally decided to change the Look of the blog a little, this is just an initial start, if you've got any comments on this current change or would like to make some suggestions, drop me a comment or email! :-)

Chris Auld announced today that he is a MSDN Regional Director. Congrats Chris, well deserved.
See his post here. The 'Red Shoe' is getting bigger!

If you're wondering what the story is with the 'Red Shoe' read his blog for info :)

Right, so I've setup myself VS 2005 this week finally, while I haven't dug hard in development yet. Here is my first error message encounter in VS 2005.

Here's how I got it, I click the help menu, then choose Search, and bingo, I get the Index Search window as well as this message. Anyone know why this occurs or how to get rid of it?

Normally people would introduce themselves right when they start blogging in their very first post. I realise I haven't done that, well there is no real reason for not doing so.

So here it is now.

Probably some of you out there know me, but for those who dont.

Here's a bit of info:

I'm currently in my last semester at the University of Canterbury finishing off my B.Com, I am just finishing off my degree points this year as I have already completed my major last year in Information Systems and Technology. Other than that, I have been involved with the .NET community for a little over two years now, thanks to working as a Student Ambassador at the university. This was how I initially got exposed to .NET and I have been developing an increasing interest in the platform since then.

I have not yet had extensive experience in .NET simply because none of the courses we have at the university teach much if any of it. Will hopefully get more experience other than my own study someday. Perhaps through one of Microsoft Certifications.

For more info about me, feel free to contact me ;-)

I've just finished updating my blog to dasblog 1.7

More posts are coming soon :-)