Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
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I recently discovered a problem with Windows Mobile 5 and the Pocket MSN Messenger that comes with it. If your device is a Pocket PC Formfactor (not Smartphone) and you sign into MSN Messenger, every time a contact signs into the service your device will do the following:
If you have over 200 contacts in your buddy list, chances are some one is signing into the network at least once a minute during peak hours. You can imagine the shock I had when I discovered there was no UI to turn this off. I recall from Windows Mobile 2003 that you could go into Sounds & Notifications and select the “contact online” action and disable alerts and sound. However, this does not exists on my device.
I fired off a mail to some friendly folks in the Pocket MSN team. After a few exchanges they let me know that I could manually add the registry keys for the events and that this might resolve the issue (and that this was unsupported etc etc). So I fired up PHM Regedit (freeware) and added the keys. Lo and behold, I could now mess with the notification options in Sounds and Notifications.
Here are the registry keys you’ll need to add to your device:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ControlPanel\Notifications\{A877D65E-239C-47a7-9304-0D347F580408}]"Options"=dword:00000008@="Messenger: Contact Online""Wave"="notify""Duration"=dword:00000000
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ControlPanel\Notifications\{A877D65F-239C-47a7-9304-0D347F580408}]"Options"=dword:00000008@="Messenger: New Message""Wave"="notify""Duration"=dword:00000000
After adding these you can go to the Sound and Notifications control panel and customize the notification behavior.