Wictor Wilen

Outlook 2007 Business Cards

Microsoft Outlook 2007 introduces a new view for the contacts called Business Cards. It’s a view, much like the old Adress Cards view, but the business cards view lets you customize how the different contacts look - just like a business card. You can customize the business cards and give each one a unique look. This can make finding contacts easier, if the business cards resembles the real ones.

Microsoft Office

Ed Bott: What do you think of Office 2007.

Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report blogs about What do you think of Office 2007 so far? I’ve been using it, mostly OneNote, Outlook and Word, since the release of the latest beta, and I like the most of it. The Ribbon bar and the User InterfaceThe most significant change is the user interface and I like what I see. I took a while for me to be aquainted with the new shortcuts and the Ribbon bar, I am a keyboard user. But I think it’s working fine. I only wish OneNote 2007 had the Ribbon bar, as I wrote before. Outlook does not have it either, but Jensen Harris explains why.Previewing works really fine and is great.

Visual Studio

Visual Studio 2005 SDK June 2006 CTP now available

Yippie, finally a new CTP of the Visual Studio 2005 SDK is available. I’m really looking forward to the upgraded DSL Tools. New features of the DSL Tools include: new file format (.dsl), instead of the old .dsldd and .dsldmd. Now things should be easier to get a grip of and there are more designer support new DSL Designer and more…

Personal

I wish I had OneNote 2007 when I was a student!

As Microsoft OneNote 2007 will be a part of the Office Home and Student 2007 suite OneNote will and can be used by students. And it’s a great tool for that! I remember when I studied for my M.Sc. and all the notebooks and pens I used, making notes was very important for me and helped me remember things better. And it still is, I have used OneNote for a few years and been satisified with that, but the new OneNote is so great.

Windows XP

Outlook 2007 Instant Search and Windows Desktop Search cont.

Just a follow up to my last post on Outlook 2007 Instant Search and Windows Desktop Search problems: My scenario in the post does not always happen and it may work for you. The System Restore I did was not that complicated since I did not install anything while I had the troubles, and I have not had any problems after it either, so don’t worry about it.

Windows XP

Outlook 2007 Instant Search and Windows Desktop Search

I have installed the Office 2007 beta, including Outlook 2007, and I wanted to enable the Instant Search functionality and followed the instructions in the dialog that popped up in Outlook. It said that I had to go and download the Windows Desktop Search Beta 3.0 Engine Preview, read about it in Microsoft Help and Support. I did, but I had a previous version of Windows Desktop Search installed. There was no warning and when I tried to search in Outlook I recieved a message saying that Outlook cannot perform your search. And when I tried to use the Windows Desktop user interface that was still there (the 3.0 beta has no UI yet) the explorer.exe crashed.

.NET

Anatomy of a blog: What is a ping and how does it work?

During the creation of this site I wanted to know more about how the blog world works behind the scenes. I will make a few articles about my findings in this matter and what I have done to create this blog. The first article will describe on how you inform other sources and parties that your blog is updated. This is done through a Ping. You should ping whenever you have created or updated a post on your feed. Pinging is either done automatically or manually. Manual pinging is done by finding a site with a Ping interface, like http://www.bloglines.com/ping, and then enter the Url to your feed. You can find some more on the Blog Ping List at AYWE

Microsoft Office

About the non existing Save button in OneNote

The IQBlog has a post, Microsoft OneNote: Great program, interesting design flaw, in which they disucuss the lack of the Save button. Chris Pratley, Group Manager of the OneNote team, responds to the post in a comment - it’s worth reading. And as a side note, the posting page is reported by Internet Explorer 7 as a potential phising page.

SharePoint

Public release of Windows Live Gadgets SDK

Microsoft has release the first public release of the Windows Live Gadgets SDK, you can find it MicrosoftGadgets.com. You can also find the Gadgets Development Overview for Microsoft Sidebar for Windows Vista Beta 2 on the site. Developing Gadgets for both live.com and Microsoft Sidebar will be really easy and fun. But I see a problem with only having live.com as the only web-based Gadget host (host meaning where the Gadget can execute). I would like to see an implementation in either Microsoft SharePoint Services or as a standalone product, so you can host Gadgets in an Intranet scenario. There are some examples on how to host your own Gadgets; for example Donovan West has an example using an iframe solution. The problem is still that the Gadgets are hosted externally which is not that great if you think about security issues.

Business

Internet Explorer Anti-Phising feature

I have been using Microsof Internet Explorer 7 beta for a while and I have noticed that some sites are reported as suspicious phising websites. The address bar turns yellow and a big popup informs you about it. A few days ago the popup appeard on one of my blog entries. The popup includes a link to a site in which you may inform Microsoft that you are the owner of the site and the site is not a phising site. I gave it a try and reported the site not to be phising site and that I am the owner. Within 24 ours I recieved a response from Microsoft that they had reviewd my request and a few ours later the warning was gone. Phew! I think it all worked very smoothly and I think it is a great feature of IE7. If you would like more information on the IE anti-phising filter, read about it here.