Search of Forever ZuneThings.co.uk - for those in the UK wanting a Zune + Accessories, etc. Cozi - new way busy families stay organized, manage schedules and coordinate with each other. Browsershots - test your site among a host of browsers and see how it prevails; so how well does my blog do ? Ask the Admin How to hide an airplane factory ? Bill G’s history from MS; and his emails . 😄 Windows 7, not that far off . CooTek - alternative keyboard for Windows Mobile phones. Pandora - free Internet radio but only for the yanks. :sad:👎 Pex (Program Exploration) - a MSR project that from a parameterized unit test automatically produces a traditional unit test suite with high code coverage. Gmap Pedometer - excellent if you are a runner or just want to find out how long your walk is. Thanks to the lovely Meenakshi for this. 😄

I recently got to know that Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw passed away and the ripe age of 94; I am especially sad to hear that - I cannot explain it - might by my army roots. I think fellow Army brats might get it. May he rest in peace! ...

This is not one of the “jokes”, but is one of the “real” ones I got. Maybe about time I got around to installing Firefox 3 then. :)

(c) Science Cartoons

I used to rule the world Seas would rise when I gave the word Now in the morning I sleep alone Sweep the streets I used to own I used to roll the dice Feel the fear in my enemies eyes Listen as the crowd would sing: “Now the old king is dead, long live the king!” One minute I held the key Next the walls were closed on me And I discovered that my castles stand Upon pillars of salt, and pillars of sand ...

As I said in the last post I have been using Live Mesh for a few weeks now. Since then, Microsoft has released an update to Mesh; those of you who are using it and not updated it yet, I would suggest you do. It will restart the Windows shell once the update is finished, but I would recommend to save your work before you start the update and bounce Windows after that (even though it does not require it). ...

You might have heard of the new “Cloud” service from Microsoft called Live Mesh . You can get more details on the team’s blog and a few videos . While I have the Mesh bits installed for a few weeks I only recently started using it and was very handy when I wanted to get to some information on one of the Wiki’s running at home. ...

Pure coincidence that #13 is posted on Friday the 13th! Goosh - the Unofficial google shell (very cool)! Zamzar - free online file conversion. FlashEarth - switch seamlessly between Google maps, Microsoft Virtual Earth, Yahoo!, etc. SiteAdvisor.com - McAfee’s free offering that automatically alerts to Web sites that use or have links to spyware, adware, spam and other nasties. Live SysInternals - all of SysInternals on your figertips. e.g. in a DOS prompt enter: dir \\live.sysinternals.com\tools Windows Search 4.0 - new and improved? Only time will tell. TFS does not have any features for gathering requirements, but if this is something you prefer then check out Caliber RM and TeamSpec . Rosario though might have these out of the box - but only time will tell. BizTalk dev tools - it is almost an year old, but still a very cool list of tools if you are using BizTalk. Xobni (mirror of Inbox in case you did not notice), is Outlook add-on which helps you deal with emails better. Office Search Commands - helps you find commands, options, wizards, and galleries in Office 2007 Word, Excel and PowerPoint; check this out if you are wondering the rational behind it. ...

Over the last few weeks I have heard a lot of people complain about the HTC TyTn (and more so these days with the new iPhone out now). But the phone itself is not bad - but if you are still running Windows Mobile 5 on it then sorry you don’t get the rights to complain - that OS itself has loads of issues. So, if you are like me with a TyTn I would suggest you get on a Windows Mobile 6.1 ROM and get some peace of mind. I am running the ‘Diamond Look-alike" Mobile 6.1 ROM and it is rock solid - I highly recommend it. I have been running it for a few days and am very impressed. ...

I currently have a HTC TyTn and was thinking of getting either the new HTC Diamond or the HTC Diamond Pro and was not sure how they stack up size wise; but that is there sizeasy.com come in the picture and help me see what the three of them look like together . ...

If you got a fingerprint reader on your machine and are running Vista then think twice before installing SP1! About 7-8 months ago I got a new tablet ( Lenovo X61 ) which is a pretty sweet machine with Vista pre-installed and all was well until I installed SP1 and then the thing won’t even boot. I tried to get into safe mode but no luck; I tried repairing - but no luck. I got in the repair console and tried to manually “fix” the MBR, but not luck. 😲 In the end I was screwed - royally - especially as I did not have a backup. I did have my machine being backed up by WHS which is what I was hoping would save me (more on that later). ...

I am thinking of getting the HTC Diamond. If you are interested in its features then check out these guys who have had it and been using it for a week and have been posting a daily video on what works and what does not.

I think Snap Previews were a good idea earlier but now for me it has just started getting irritating and for my blog I have switched it off.

Wow! What a week - so much talk of the next version of Windows code-named “7”. Of course the multi-touch (see video below) is what everyone is talking about. Now, this is cool because it is the evolution of the Surface which is scaled down to a screen. If you have not seen a Surface - it is quite big and works with five infrared cameras which picks up the gestures and then knows what to do with it (more on Surface at another time). ...

Please be advised that there are NEW RULES and regulations implemented to raise the efficiency of the firm. Transportation: It is advised that you come to work driving a car according to your salary. If we see you driving a Honda, we assume you are doing well financially and therefore you do not need a raise. If you drive a 10 year old car or use public transportation, we assume you must have lots of savings therefore you do not need a raise. If you drive a pickup, you are right where you need to be and therefore you do not need a raise. Annual Leave: Each employee will receive 52 annual leave days a year they are called Sunday. ...

Macbook Air vs. Lenovo Ultraportal (via Cuan)

My Book on WCF is now available on Google Books - perfect for those of you who don’t want to buy the book to support a few starving authors 😜.

I have been seeing some unexpected application crashes with Visio 2007 and they usually happen when I close the application. I do have Office 2007 SP1 installed but that does not seem to have fixed any of them. The error seems to relate to one the COM add-ins but disabling that does not seem to resolve the problem. This particular error was a new one for me. After doing a lot of work on a Architecture document - when trying to save the document (for the first time) I see this error - not only is it not very inspiring but also scared the living daylights out of me. ...

.NET v3.5 Product Roadmap Information overload in Outlook? Check out ClearContext and Jello.Dashboard Nokia’s nano-technology based Morph Concept - very interesting on where we might be heading! Oh how I am envious of our future generation. 😄 Although SQL 2008 benchmarks are out and quite impressive; if you want to run the CTP before March, it seems you cannot - lol! What is MS thinking? Duh! C5 - Generic Collection Library Visual Studio themes ; I personally like a few of the dark themes. Migrating to gmail becomes easier from Outlook, PST files, etc. However, if you want to backup your gmail (why you would want to do in the first place is besides me), and want want to use G-Archiver , then do so at your own peril!!! Tools galore - check out Hanselman Ultimate Tools List

This stumped me for a while and I was not sure what I was doing wrong. Apparently it seems if you don’t have the <configSections> element in your app config file as the first thing then you get a weird error saying "Only one <configSections> element allowed ...." (see example below). The description is misleading - you will see this error even though you only have one <configSections> element in your config file. To fix this, move the <configSections> as the first element in your app config file and all will be well. ...

Need I say more ? {via thedogmatix }

This is scary! It seems like your printer is spying on you using tiny tracking dots which are automatically printed whenever you take a print out. Of course these dots are unique and can be tracked to your individual printer and are not visible to the naked eye (otherwise you won’t have noticed them, innit?) The US govt. has convinced most of the printer manufacturers to add this to every page. EFF highlighted the issue first and had issued a press release . Since then they have released a decoding guide that you can use to figure out how to find this. They also released a list of printers which either have or don’t have the dots; and also point the fact that just a “No” does not mean there is no forensic watermarking present, it just means there could be some other kind of marking. Make sure you are consulting this list whenever you next buy your printer. ...

Someone recently asked about how to load test WCF - apart from the usual things like LoadRunner , VSTS Test Load Agent , etc a couple of other interesting options came up. One is WCF Load Test and the other JMeter. WCF Load Test generates a unit test taking in data from a a trace file along with the relevant WCF proxy or interface. ...

My article on P2P programming with WCF and .NET v3.5 was finally published on MSDN . This was written a few months ago and has been going through the internal process at MS to get published- finally it is up there - better late than never I guess. 😄 ...

This is probably old news now, but something which has me concerned as it can cause lots of unseen issues. In .NET 3.5 the default ThreadPool count has been increased ten-fold from 25 to 250 per processor per process! ThreadPools as we know are quite handy - not only do they help when an application comes under load instead of adding more pressure in a stressful situation. They also allow us to readily “reach into” a pool of threads and “pick one” to use - saving the costly overhead of creating and destroying threads (in case you did not know creating and destroying threads is an expensive process). ...