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.