shahine.com/omar/

Found a solution for my annoying toolbar changing behavior between IE and Explorer.

Go to:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Toolbar\ShellBrowser

and Set the Permissions for your account to Deny. Haha, take that Windows. Try and change things now.

THIS IS DRIVING ME NUTS!!!

Every few hours of using my computer, my Explorer Shell inherits the layout of my IE toolbars. This is NOT WHAT I WANT. I manually move them back the way they are supposed to be, then lock toolbars and then all of a sudden the Explorer Shell Toolbar layout is back to being the same as IE.

Does anyone have a fix for this? RegKey? Does Windows XP hate me?

note to self. Start saving.

Well, today was my last day in the Macintosh Business Unit. I've worked here ever since I joined over 5 years ago. I feel privileged to have worked with some of the folks who are still here or moved on before me. I had a truly amazing time working on OE, Entourage, IE, MSN, and Virtual PC. It's funny to think back of the days when I first joined. My first visit to Redmond, my first Release To Web, working on a top secret project (Entourage), and most recently learning an entirely new product. I'll always look back on these last 5 years as some of the best times in my life, and I'll very much miss the people.

The good news is that I'm not going far. Monday morning I'll be working one building over on the Hotmail Frontdoor team. I'll be a Lead Program Manager on the Frontdoor infrastructure. My team is responsible for things like DAV, Passport, POP, SMTP and various other Frontdoor protocols as well as a number of other things (many of which I don't know anything about). I'm happy that I'll be doing mail stuff again, but working on a service rather than a fat client. Plus I'll be working with Reeves Little again (Reeves used to be the Test Lead on OE, now a PM in Hotmail).

I decided to pursue this position for a number of reasons, and much of it has to do with where I want my career to go in my next 5 years at MS. I also find that I want new and different challenges. I've been working on Mac related software for a long time and am looking forward to something that's on a totally different scale . Hotmail is something that I feel is a great match because of my backround in mail stuff and my interest in the stuff they are doing. I think the free mail space is getting even more competitive, and I love competition!

So, my office is all packed up (it all fix in 8 boxes!). Not that much stuff. I'm off to my 10 year high school reunion this weekend, and come Monday I'll be sitting in my new office.

Ok, recently I posted an article titled: Programming for Outlook using managed code is hard. This article summarized and documented some of the pain that I experienced in writing my Outlook2OneNote Add-in.

All this time I was aware that there was another route I could take, one that Dan Crevier did a great job explaining in a recent post. Originally I didn't want to go the Shim route because:

1. It was unfamiliar territory.
2. I don't know C++ and was afraid I'd encounter a problem I could not solve.
3. I had philosophical problems going this route.

Luckily Dan helped me with #1 and #2, and well, I got over #3. I mentioned that I had been working with some MS folks that are domain experts in this area and they have always suggested that the Shim route was best. Rather than go with their expert advice I went and suggested that people do something that was explicitly unsupported (targeting the Office XP Interop Assemblies rather than the 2003 Primary Interop Assemblies).

Now, for one thing it's not good for me to be offering you unsupported solutions if there are better solutions out there. Secondly, there are some benefits to the Shim route that you won't get otherwise. With a Shim you get your own AppDomain and if you Authenticode Sign the Shim, and Strong Name sign the managed add-in you will not get the Outlook Security prompt when accessing e-mail fields like body. The net result is that you will be in a situation that you have more control over, offers a better user experience, and protects your add-in.

The only downside to this is that you still have to rely on the user successfully installing or having access to the Office 2003 PIAs. It's unfortunate that there is no redistributable version of the 2003 PIAs, but the good news is that for the majority of users, they should be automatically installed when your add-in first loads.

So starting with Outlook2OneNote working against the XP Interop Assemblies here is what I did to get the Shim working.

1. Read the step by step overview.
2. Read Dan's post.
3. Download the Shim bits in step 1.
4. Follow all the steps in the article from step 1.
5. Strong Name sign your add-in.
6. Add the Shim project to your Solution.
7. Build
8. Test to make sure that your add-in loads
9. Authenticode Sign the Shim

You no longer need to keep building the Shim as you have a signed DLL that has the public key of your managed add-in to load in outlook. You just need to ensure that you register the assembly if you are debugging and make sure it's located in the same directory as the managed dll (/bin/Debug).

Now you also need to make changes to the Setup project.

1. Remove all the current project output
2. Add the Authenticode signed unmanaged shim as an assembly and mark it for vsdraCOM and then add the assembly from your managed shim (from bin/Release).

I would like to thank Misha Shneerson, Siew-Moi Khor, Art Leonard and Andrew Cherry for helping me do this the “right way” and helping me debug some of the problems.

Jonathan Hardwick has an excellent post on Offline Files support in Windows XP.

I posted some of my annoyances on his post, but today I found something that makes offline files so much more tolerable. My main complaints with Offline files are:

1. It seems to sync at the wrong time. Every time my WiFi goes up and down for example. So I turn off the sync on logon feature.
2. While you are syncing you have no access to those files. So if you use IDLE sync then you can occasionally get hosed.
3. Files never seem to be synced when I want them to.
4. The UI is sucky. It really is... but it does work most of the time.

Don't get me wrong. I rely on this functionality to keep my data available on all my PCees. Today I found a great way to do a sync.

Enable the folder you want to sync and logoff. Now when you want to sync you just go to Start->Run and then mobsync /logoff. This will do a full sync and then put you in online mode.

C|Net is reporting that we are exiting the broadband hardware space. That sucks big time. I still have nightmares of all the linksys firmware upgrades and wacky hardware versioning schemes they have (trying to buy the lastest piece of hardware at Fry's is a challenge). Downloading firmware for my wireless/wired router used to be an almost weekly occurrence. Going back to older versions was just as common (cause the router would crash, become unresponsive etc). I'm hoping since Cisco purchased them things are better in that respect.

I swapped all my broadband gear to Microsoft because of UPnP support, quality web based UI and the fact that I knew the quality would exceed that of the competition. Back in the day, you could only have a single PPTP connection and the only products which could handle more than one connection at a time were the Microsoft software based NAT/Routers. I knew that our hardware would work really well with our technology and sure enough it worked.

I guess the only Microsoft hardware to last the test of time is the keyboard and mouse. Some other nifty hardware products were the Digital Speakers (these rocked), the telephone (heh) and the remote control (what a clunker)!

Thunderbird 0.6 is out. The best news is that they added support for IMAP IDLE. Sweet. I mentioned it on my blog a few months ago and the bug was voted high enough to get fixed. Thunderbird is my favorite mail client for non exchange mail as well as my favorite usenet reader.

They also added a real windows installer this time.

I only wish it had the three-column view like Outlook 2003. That view just rocks my world.

note: when I say “three-column view” I also expect the two line message list summary that outlook gives. Doing three panes is easy, doing the multi-line message list is the hard part .

Evan DiBiase chronicles his travles back to Windows from a Mac (via Dan Crevier).

My co-worker Mike Fullerton rants about his Mac. I actually found Mike's post pretty humerous.

Since I built my first do-it-yourself computer almost 2 years ago I was super interested in making sure that when the computer went to sleep (standby) it was silent. After all, what is the point of putting something into standby if the fans and HD were running?

Well, if you build your own PC, there are a number of factors that will determine if this is at all a possibility. First let’s start with a discussion of the different states your PC can be in.

S0 - Working State

In this state, your PC is awake and working

S1- CPU Stopped

In this state, your PC is technically in standby and this is the default standby state if S3 is not supported. Power consumption is Five Watts to Thirty Watts of Power.

S3 - Suspend to RAM (context saved to RAM)

In this state, your PC in standby and all fans, hard drivers and other devices are powered down into a sleep state. Power consumption is less than Five Watts.

S4 - Suspend to Disk(Context saved to HDD)

Otherwise known as Hibernate, your PC has saved the contents of RAM to the hard disk and is pretty much tuned off. Power consumption is less than Five Watts. This isn’t very useful for desktop PCees and is mostly used in Laptops where battery drainage is far better than if you are in S3.

Now, as I mentioned there are some requirements before you can use S3.

1. Motherboard must support S3
2. S3 support must be enabled in the BIOS (many motherboards do not do this and default to S1)
3. OS must support S3 (Windows XP does)
4. To wake your PC from S3 your USB peripherals (like keyboard and mouse) must be enabled to arm your PC to wake.
   1. From the device manager, you must select they keyboard, go to properties and select Allow this device to bring this computer out of standby. On a Windows Media Center you’ll want to do this for the Remote Control device.
5. The following reg key must be installed.

Step number 5 is the most critical step of all. Not surprisingly, a post that I wrote back in April of 2002 is the most frequently visited page on my web site. I get hundreds of hits a month to this page from people doing google searches on dumppo.exe and other related standby issues. My guess is that they are all having the same problem I had and would like to use S3 on their PCs. Sadly, the advice I offer on that post isn’t going to work because of the mysterious step 5 and the required regkey.

Here is a cool Outlook tip when using you M200 in tablet mode.

By default the button above the joystick is configured to type the escape key. If you go to the Tablet and Pen Settings Control Panel, you can change this to type delete. This basically allows you to rapidly read and delete items in Outlook w/o using the pen. Instead you use the joystick to move around outlook, and then the button above it to delete mail.

I scan and delete a lot of mail in Outlook and find doing it in Tablet mode very comfortable. I did this for about 2 hours on a recent flight. It was really a nice setup since I was on an American Airlines flight with Less Room Throughout Coach (don't ask, it was a ghetto 757).

Here is how you can get AUX in on your Audi. Read this post. Then go to autotoys and purchase an adapter for your specific car. Don't forget the tools to remove the radio. Don't cheap out, you need this!

It took me about 20 minutes and now I can throw away the cassette adapter. I can line in directly into my factory radio by pressing the CD button a second time (by default the car can have a second 6 disc changer, this basically fools the car into thinking it's connected to an Audi Factory CD changer). Instead it's connected to my iPod.

Congrats to Dennis on making AA Platinum. I've been an AA member since January 1998. That following year I made Platinum and have been so ever since (Gold is 25,000 flying miles a year, Plat is 50,000 and exec plat is 100,000). Being a member of a program like this makes traveling a whole different experience. For me it's almost a necessity since I am 6'3” and don't fit in most airline seats. I fly AA because they have More Room Throughout Coach (MRTC), and because I am plat I can book exit row seats when purchasing my ticket (which is a big perk). Of course other perks are:

• I have about a 70% upgrade success rate on flights. Flying biz/first class for the price of coach is priceless.
• I can pre-board meaning I can hog all that overhead bin space (just kidding, I travel light).
• I can call a special number for help with things w/o any hold time.
• I get double miles. In 5 years I have accumulated 800,000 miles. 200,000 more miles and I will be a lifetime Gold AA member (this rocks, but knowing my luck they will cancel this sort of secret when I reach 1 million in about 2 years).
• I can check-in at the First Class line at the airport (never do this any more cause of electronic checkin, but it's nice on International Flights).
• The seat next to me gets blocked on non-full flights
• I can upgrade my spouse with me.
• I get to use the special no faster than the regular security line. This is only a perk at SEA where the TSA are slow as ...

Each year I managed to just make the 50,000 mile cut-off for Plat. I don't think I will make it as now that my wife lives with me (we did the long distance thing for 4 years while she was in med school) I don't go back east enough. However, my credit card spending has compensated for any loss of miles .

The only downside to AA is that they are now flying this piece of junk 757's on transcon flights to/from JFK/SFO and BOS/SFO. That royally sucks since they have crap seats and cabins, and have Less Room Throughout Coach (they removed the extra legroom on these planes to cram more people on board like the sardines that we are).

A while ago I blogged about a new feature of dasBlog: the ability to highlight .NET code. Thanks to Scott Hanselman who let me know that I forgot to add the necessary xml file for the code highlighter to the 1.6 release :-(. As such I've uploaded it to the workspace. I'd rather not rev each and every download up there so this won't be rolled into a release till the next rev or hotfix if there is one.

Steps to install:

1. Download .zip file and expand
2. Copy CodeHighlightDefinitions.xml to the ftb folder in your dasBlog root.

The version in 1.6 is actually based on the AylarSolutions.Highlight v2.0 by Thomas Johansen. Thomas even has a cool demo of how you can integrate his work into Free Text Box. However, for dasBlog I chose a different route. You click a button and get a pop-up window where you paste in your code, parse to see the result, and then insert the raw html into the blog post.

Scott Watermasysk is taking a different approach in .Text. 

I'm typing this in the Westin Grand hotel in Washington, DC. I'm just a few short blocks from where I went to college. I arrived this afternoon, which I thought might not happen since I had a 30 min layover in DFW. I knew it was bad news when they made a last call announcement and I had 40 or so gates to traverse.

Once I got here I hopped on the Metro from National to Foggy-Bottom. It's amazing that the METRO and BART are almost identical. I walked down M street and all the way up to my alma matter. So many good memories. It's so fun to see your school through different eyes. DC is such an interesting place. The energy is very different from San Francisco (and the valley) for sure. I could definitely see myself living here at some point. Georgetown is so full of college students. It's so interesting how they are basically all still doing the same thing you would do on a nice warm sunny afternoon... and on a Thursday night. Hanging around, getting ready for a big night out on the town. Of course at Georgetown, big nights were Wed, Thu, Friday and Saturday... but not for me. I spent that time in the freaking science library trying to become a doctor. Glad that didn't work out .

Back at the hotel I was actually horrified that they charge $16 for 24 hours of Internet access. Thanks to the miracle of the open and unsecured WiFi network I've managed to get my fix for free.

Well, tomorrow should be fun. I'm doing some press interviews then up to New York City to hang with my family.