Wictor Wilen

Finally the Windows Vista Ultimate Extras team released the remaining 19 language packs for Windows Vista Ultimate. The language packs allows Vista Ultimate users to easily switch between different languages in the Vista user interface. The language packs are maybe not the most exciting feature for Windows Vista and I believe that this should not just be an exclusive add-on for high-end users (the ones who buy the, as of today, very expensive Ultimate version) of Vista. This feature should be a part of all Vista editions, maybe with an additional minor charge for each language pack.

I’m currently in progress of making the third version of msfeedicon, a free plugin to the Windows RSS platform and Internet Explorer 7 feeds. The new version, 3.0, will include an updated interface as well as some requested features and some major changes that msfeedicon users have asked/begged me about. This is how the notification window currently looks like. I will need a few, 3 or 4 to start with, beta testers to make sure that I have a good release once it’s final, please contact me if you are interested and explain why you should be one of the beta testers. All beta testers will of course get credit in the application!

Yesterday I wrote about Internet Explorer 7 starting to behave like mad when reading feeds with the built-in Feeds functionality. This morning when reading my feeds I specifically studied the usage of GDI Objects in the Task Manager, and these are my findings: GDI Objects Action 1.656 After started IE7 and watched first feed 6.037 After reading about 20 different feeds, in the same IE7 tab 811 Browsed to a non-feed site in the same tab

Internet Explorer 7 has great RSS reader features based on the Windows RSS Platform but I have seen it degrade over the last few months as my number of subscribed feeds and new posts has increased. Every morning when I get to the office I have a few hundred of unread items to go through, see sample statistics from msfeedicon to the right. I have a pretty modern Dell XPS m1210 machine with 2 GB of memory and as I start reading these feeds Windows starts to trash and finally totally goes nuts. Just watch the images below, which I will guide you through.

Today Microsoft announced that it will be extending Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 with new enterprise social computing capabilities, by adding features from the partners NewsGator (Press release) and Atlassian. SharePoint Connector for Confluence This connector will integrate the Atlassian product called Confluence which is an enterprise wiki that makes it easy for your team to collaborate and share knowledge. The connector is allowing you to create more advanced wikis and blogs than the standard features of SharePoint or you can include SharePoint lists into Confluence, it even allows you to search both SharePoint content and documents as well as the Confluence content in one location.

The Microsoft SharePoint blog has a new post called “Known issue: Office 2007 on Windows Vista prompts for user credentials when opening documents in a SharePoint 2007 site”. The article is a result of many reported support cases on this issue and contains a few possible (I repeat possible) workarounds. We have had this problem ourselves and on several customers. In some cases these workarounds really work, but most of the times not. And the problem is not only with SharePoint 2007, we also see it for SharePoint 2003 installations so I think it’s more related to Vista, and its new security features, than SharePoint (the problem does not appear on Windows XP with IE7).

Certificate problems with Windows Mobile and Active Sync seems to be a pretty common cause of not being able to synchronize you mobile phone with Microsoft Exchange, but despite the number of web pages and posts found around the net there are no simple solutions or shortcuts. I previously had some problems installing my certificate on to my Windows Mobile 5 phone, but now it’s upgraded to Windows Mobile 6, which has support for handling certificates. Today I had to update the certificate on our Exchange server since it was not valid anymore and after that my WM6 phone stopped syncing and giving me this error: The security certificate on the server has expired. Check that the date and time on your device are correct and the error code 0x80072f05. The Microsoft KB article 927465 did not help but led me to look for a utility called SslChainSaver which I found on the Windows Mobile Team Blog. The SslChainSaver utility traces all certificates to your server and saves them as files on your machine. It also produces an XML file which you can turn into a CAB file (instructions here) to install them on your Windows Mobile phone.

A few links on XML Paper Specification that I stumbled upon the last few days. View XPS documents using Acrobat 8 The XPS Review Blog has an article that Acrobat 8 (8.1 to be precise) can be used to open XPS documents. I have not tried it, since I don’t own Acrobat 8, but it sounds great. Note: it’s not supported in Acrobat Reader 8.1. A new set of XPS tools from SANAtech SANAtech is has released a set of tools for XPS.

The news that Microsoft will be releasing the .NET 3.5 framework libraries source code for everyone. The code is under the Microsoft Reference License (MS-RL) which means that the code is available for you to use as a reference or for debugging, not to modify or extend (if you simplify it…a lot), i.e. it’s not open source. What’s in it for us? Scott Guthrie has all the goodies in his post, where he explains how this release of source code integrates into Visual Studio 2008, and how you can debug into (for example) the ASP.NET framework. Whenever you decide to step in to a .NET Core library or ASP.NET method Visual Studio will download the appropriate source code and allow you to dig in to it deeper.