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!!

So have you been using Vista for a while now and are sick of all those security dialog warnings from UAC. Well you can change that and disable warnings on things you know you executed hence reducing the habbit of auto-clicking continue. Mauricio posts on  how to do this. Nice...

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... 

If you are not sure whether or not your pc hardware can utilize the full potential of Vista. The hardware requirements have been specified here. When I first installed Vista a couple of months ago I was missing the AERO graphics as my Video Card did not support WDDM ... but I couldn't resist not having it showing so I went and bought a new graphics card. Hopefully not many people will need to do that!