shahine.com/omar/

Scott Hanselman and Clemens ran into a nasty dasBlog 1.6 bug. Basically it was possible for your entry cache to get corrupted (not your entries). Thanks to Erv Walter for quickly investigating and fixing the problem.

I have uploaded a hotfix for folks that are running 1.6. It's a single DLL that you drop into your /bin folder. I have also upgraded all the MSI installers and .zip downloads on the workspace. You can download all the releases here.

Today I got a letter from AT&T Wireless telling me how cool GSM America is (some new short lived effort on their part to stop hemorrhaging customers, till the Cingular deal is final). Here are the benefits:

• Double the coverage
• Improved signal strength, even in buildings, for enhanced call quality
• No roaming charges from coast to coast
• No domestic long distance charges

“One of the way we've improved our service is by making special arrangements with other carriers. So although you might see the name of another carrier on your phone's screen, you will not pay roaming charges.”

Translation:

Cingular just purchased us. If you live under a rock and don't know this, then check out our clever marketing in this message. You have nothing new. We aren't telling you who this special arrangement is with because we want to keep our name and launch a new service with Sprint using CDMA. At that point we're sure to have confused the hell out of you.

Lets look at the bullet points.

Double the coverage - not really, since there is 80% overlap in their existing coverage.

Improved signal strength, even in buildings, for enhanced call quality - um, not for me. I don't have an 850 MHZ phone, so net change is zero unless I get a new phone.

The last two I already have... it's called a nation plan.

I have released my Media Center Front Display Panel SDK. You can find API documentation here.

This is an SDK that I created to give you a managed API and State Aggregator to get notified of state from the Media Center State Aggregator Service. If you have a Windows Media Center 2004 machine you can implement IFrontPanelDisplay and do what you want with the information. In other words, if you want to write some code that gets notified of things like current tv show, elapsed time, volume level and so on then this is for you.

For example, Ian Kennedy (a fellow MSFT employee) wrote a C# implementation for the Hitachi HD44780 Parallel Port Vacuum Fluorescent Display that comes with our D.VINE Media Center cases. I wrote an implementation for my machine using his code and voilà. If you happen to have a Media Center box with such a VFD you can feel free to download it.

I've been soo busy this week that I haven't even had the time to enjoy some of the wonderful things the press are saying about Office 2004. I worked on Entourage 2004 for about 16 months before moving on to Virtual PC. I just saw this review in PC Magazine and it had this wonderful paragraph

Entourage's main competition comes from Apple's own Mail, Address Book, and iCal apps, which are preloaded on every new Mac. While the price is right, Entourage's various utilities are so thorough and well integrated that it puts Apple's efforts a distant second in quality.

I couldn't be happier about that. I am really proud of this release, and of the people that made it all happen. One of the things I spent about 6 months working on is the S/MIME v3 support that we added to Entourage. This was a huge undertaking for us and I had an amazing developer and tester working on it with me. Getting my head wrapped around PKI, X.509 and S/MIME took a very long time, and trying to design a simple solution to meet the needs of our users took even longer. I'm happy that our users can now send secure encrypted/signed e-mail.

Another feature I worked on was the DAV Mail replication that we added to replace our IMAP Mail solution for Exchange. Entourage 2004 has a local sync model just like cached exchange in Outlook 2003.

But my favorite feature of Entourage 2004 is the three column view that Dennis designed (based on Outlook 2003's implementation).

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).