OK folks, I know it's been a while.  The fact is, I've been worn out, and haven't been able to keep up with anything worth talking about, as evidenced by the big bold (2637) next to my aggregated “Unread” search folder in Outlook.  I have, however, done something sure to be my downfall, and installed Longhorn as the sole OS on my primary box.

No, I'm not completely psychotic... the XP Pro installation I had had been bogged down for a while, and needed to be repaved.  So, I took the opportunity to back my important data up, and totally wiped XP off my box.  Let me tell you, even with only 512MB of RAM and 32MB of VRAM, it runs 1000x better than it did in VPC or VMWare.  Of course, Christmas is coming, so if any of you want to send me a new video card or more RDRAM (don't ask - it makes me sad every day), don't be afraid to ask for a shipping address.  :)

So far, my DVD burning software of choice doesn't want to burn to actual disks (just images), and Microsoft Money 2004 didn't run at all.  Under Longhorn, Money reported that the installation was missing a critical file and prompted me to reinstall.  I did so, same result.  So, I tried compatibility mode... Money started, and promptly crashed.  With my wife (who handles the day-to-day budget) threatening my death if I couldn't get Money running, I pulled a Munich and installed WinXP Pro inside of VMWare.  I back up my Money file to a floppy disk, so I've got a good copy of that just in case everything goes belly-up.

Otherwise, so far so good... Whidbey seems to be behaving itself while I try to start developing Longhorn apps and tiles, and IIS “7” (more like 6.1, at least right now) seems stable, though I am having trouble running the sample ASP.Net apps out-of-the-box... the details escape me right now, more on that later.

If I don't post anything else tonight, happy Thanksgiving to everyone that celebrates, and happy JustAnotherDay to everyone that doesn't!  I'll be flying up to Newark from Raleigh on Thursday morning, wish me luck!

- G

As you can see, I've successfully migrated my old, proprietary, DB-based blog entries into the dasBlog, file-based form.  I have to tell you... if not for VS.Net, I doubt it'd be done today.

I exported from my blog_entries SQL table into XML format with a simple “SELECT ... FOR XML AUTO” statement, with results written to file.  I generated a strongly-typed dataset inside of Visual Studio.Net 2003 based on that XML file, and wrote a quick, maybe 20 line console app to save out to dasBlog format, using its Runtime component.  Uploaded the files via FTP, restarted the app to clear the cache, and here we are.

Yay for rapid development... it's getting to be near impossible to have any amoutn of time to code anymore, with the wife getting more and more needing of attention as the pregnancy goes on... January can't come soon enough.

- G

Well, I noticed from my stats at www.squaretwo.net that a lot of you just weren't switching your RSS feed over as quickly as I'd hoped (granted, it's about as quickly as I expected).  So, I changed my RSS feed at the old site to just redirect to the feed here at the new site.  No fancy XML rewriting or any of that, just a quick Response.Redirect(...) call.  IE pops a security warning, but so far NewsGator and SharpReader don't have a problem with it, and that covers about 90% of my traffic.  So, if you find yourself in the other 10%, please, let me know.

The next step is to import all of my old blog's entries into dasBlog.  Thus far, I've gotten SQL Server to format my entries into XML... now I just need to figure out how to import them without royally screwing up dasBlog.  I don't figure this'll take that long, and I'll probably deal with it tomorrow... I just don't feel like it right now.

- G

P.S. One of my best friends now has a blog... titled “How it should be” (in the blogroll on the right), he says it'll cover coding, money management, and other assorted things.  I can't vouch for how long he'll keep at it, but I think it's worth a read for as long as he does... go subscribe, it's not like one more blog in your aggregator's going to kill you... is it?

I've seen a spike recently in references to both Google's deskbar and the multi-site alternative, Dave's Quick Search Taskbar Toolbar Deskbar.  In case you haven't stumbled across these particular pieces of technology, they both allow you to place a web-search box onto your taskbar as a new toolbar.  It's definitely one of those useful little widgets that you can't live without once you've got it.

However, I'm here to tell you that you probably don't need to download and install anything else to make this happen... probably.  The catch is that you do need to have TweakUI (XP / Win95-2000) installed.  I always install TweakUI as part of my base build, so this wasn't a big deal for me.  You also need to have the “Address“ toolbar enabled.  I've got my taskbar set to double-tall at the bottom, with the Quick-Launch and Address toolbars on top, with my running programs on the bottom.  I like having the Address bar there, since I'm constantly firing up a browser for one thing or another.

Anyway, once you've got TweakUI installed (or already do) and have the Address tollbar enabled, follow these steps:

• Fire up TweakUI, expand the IE branch, and click on “Search“.
• Create a new entry, enter a prefix (for now, let's say Google), and in the URL, subsitute “%s“ for the search terms in a Google URL, i.e. http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=%s
• OK, OK, and you're done.

Now, you just type “google StuffI'mSearchingFor” in the Address toolbar, and up pops Google with your results.  I've got other prefixes set for mskb, Google Groups, and MSDN... I use all of them almost daily.  It'll work for any other search engine of course.  Just run some test search, replace the search terms with “%s”, and off you go.

Enjoy.

- G

[Update: If you're looking to get rid of MyWay or MyWebSearch, click here - I have finally crumbled under the weight of all the search referrals from people trying to get rid of these awful programs.  I hope this helps. - G]

Andy Hopper says, "Use WinFS as an excuse to get rid of filename extensions!"  I say, but what about Windows98?

Andy believes that we should shed the old DOS-like method of using extensions to determine file type, and just tack on a “filetype” metadata field in WinFS.  He goes on to explain that it would still be backward compatible because Longhorn could gracefully recover from the absense of a “filetype” entry and use the extension to determine type.  That's great for legacy applications running on Longhorn, but what about the myriad of files that will be created on Longhorn apps and sent off to people using legacy operating systems?

They'd be left in the cold, really.  Backward compatible is a two-way street, and there really isn't any way to go back.  Remember BillG's keynote?  Visicalc running inside of Longhorn... pretty cool.  If, through some horrible twist of fate you found yourself using Visicalc on Longhorn, God help you if you can't save your spreadsheet and send it to the putz that forced you to use it to begin with.

Andy's on the right track though.  We need to be thinking as far out of the box as we can get to really wrap our heads around what WinFS (and Avalon, and Indigo) can do that hasn't been done before.  I've been focusing my efforts around the collaboration features in the shell, and I keep hitting up against the lack of Aero-based bits; hopefully it won't be too long before more of the underlying Aero (or is it AERO?) functionality makes it into the betas.

- G

P.S. Yes, the blogroll is a mile long... isn't everybody's?