After OS, the next most popular (or required) software is Office Suite.

So, after the Tips & Tricks for the new Windows Operating System, its now the turn of the all new Microsoft Office Tips & Tricks.

 

Follow this link for the official Tips & Tricks link from Microsoft.

 

So, you wanted to know some cool tips and tricks on Windows Vista...

 

Microsoft launched a new website solely for this purpose. Most of the content in this site targets the non-technical users, but couple of them certainly catch the eyes of geeks out there...

 

This is the website launched by Microsoft recently on Windows Vista Tips & Tricks...

 

One more reason to get lost in the wonderful world of Windows Vista.

Ok, so you want to select the keys which will select (complete) the currently highlighted item in the intellisense list???

 

for eg., I type obj and press a dot, I'll be listed with all the members of that type. I select a type and proceed with programming. Mostly, people press "Enter" or "Space", but you can confiure other characters for that.

 

You've to go to the registry and add this particular key and value. (The key should be of string type)

 

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\CSharp\Options\CompletionLists\CompletionCommitCharacters --> {}[]().,:;+-*/%&|^!~=<>?@#'"\`

 

Most of the items in the list are already available (or default) in Visual studio. But, I wanted all the special characters on the keyboard for this purpose...

 

Now programming something like

 

if (obj.IsThisProperty && obj.IsThatProperty) is even faster to type.

 

Any takers for this???

Guys!!!

 

I found an interesting bug in orkut today.

Being in beta gives it an advantage, but man... it is in beta for more than an year.

 

Are there any plans to get it LIVE yet?????

 

Anyway, coming to the topic... here goes the snap of it

 

Sorry for the bad picture quality. This is max Windows Live (TM) Spaces support.

Somebody wrote in his blog comparing .Net and Java and one point is the number of languages. I dont have that link with me now, but the excerpt from that blog is "Number of languages that target .Net platform (CLR) has been constant for long time. The last time when somebody wrote a new language is the first year of its release. Whereas in Java, the list is ever growing".

 

Well dude... if at all, you read this... just look at this link. This shows the most updated list of the languages that target the .Net platform.

Windows Vista - My XPerience (An Exhaustive review of the new Windows Operating System) - Part 1

Windows Vista is the new desktop operating system from Microsoft. This blog is an unofficial review of this operating system.

Before starting the review, I’ll specify my machine configuration. I’ve tested this product on Pentium 4 2.8 GHz processor, 1GB SD RAM, 16 MB Video RAM, 60GB HDD and 15’ Monitor. I’m using Microsoft PS2 Keyboard and Microsoft Infrared PS2 Mouse.

The ratings here are given purely based on my personal choice. No influences whatsoever. I’m using a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being Excellent and 1 being Worst. I’ve decided the ratings based on the ease of installation, ease of use and usefulness of the feature. As an ardent admirer of Microsoft and its products, you can certainly get a feeling that I'm biased towards the review, but believe me.. use it for few days and you'll agree with atleast 90% of what I say here.

User interface

Windows Aero

Aero is the new GUI used in Windows Vista. Aero includes transparent windows, fancy window animations. These are called the glass effects.

My experience: On my first attempt, I could not get aero installed. But, I was using Windows Vista Beta 2 Build 5360. Now in RC1, Aero is installed without any pain

Windows Vista RC1 uses Windows Aero graphical user interface.

My Rating: 8/10

Windows Shell

The new Windows Explorer is a breather. I like the left hand treeview of folders and the list of drives. The fact that the treeview contents always align to the center of the screen is just a pleasure working with it. But I could not figure out how to get back to my previous windows look and feel.

The icons can now be as small as in the details view or as large as a half of the screen. I don’t know if anybody will be using such a big icon ever. But. One more interesting thing to notice here is that the icon size can be increased incrementally and not necessarily to choose from medium, large, extra large…

My Rating: 9/10

Desktop Search

Windows Vista contains an inbuilt desktop search. There is even an incremental search box in the start menu. The desktop search searches the mails in the outlook and one need not keep outlook for this to work. I like this feature. This reduces (if not completely removes) the chances of having any third party desktop search tools, which you never know only searches are do any spying for its creator.

One more point to feel happy about is that the desktop search now remembers your previous searches and opening a certain folder will perform the search and fills the results as a normal folder. These are called virtual folders, and they can even be distributed via RSS. Wonder, if anybody apart from developers would ever need this?

My Rating: 7.5/10

Windows Sidebar

Windows Gadgets

Sidebar, is certainly not a completely new feature. We have google deskbar, yahoo konfabulator and other tools that have done this in the past. There are not many gadgets available yet. The only useful gadget I found so far is the post-it. But, it will not be very far when we have gadgets flooding for this. But as of now, this just occupies some part of my screen.

My Rating: 6/10

New and upgraded applications

A screenshot of Windows Calendar.

Windows Mail is a breather for those who hate Outlook Express. I never liked the Outlook Express, though its rich variant, MS Outlook is my favorite email program. Windows Mail is built on the lines of Windows Live mail and the UI look and feel is excellent. There is a long way to go for others to pick up with this comfort. Overall, for those who don’t want to go with MS Office, Windows Mail is an excellent alternative.

My Rating: 10/10

The Windows calendar is here and the reason is a no-brainer. It now can sync with a network share and that is something which is good.

My Rating 8/10

Windows Meeting Space is the replacement of Netmeeting. Some cool UI changes and some additional features like Locate People near me.

My Rating 7/10

Screenshot of the Snipping Tool

Snipping tool is here for no reason. There are so many tools doing this in the past and this will just be integrated in Windows so users need not go and download stuff. But the fact that images can be directly saved as an HTML page or can be emailed is something useful. Again, I don’t see much of the use except for the developer community.

My Rating 6/10

Games… well… I like the games on Windows Vista, though the number of games that ship with Vista is less, the quality is pretty good. The efforts to attract kids with games like PurblePlace is really good.

My Rating: 8/10

Windows Internet Explorer 7

Screenshot of Internet Explorer 7's feed reader

Internet Explorer 7, a thumbs-up from me to this wonderful browser. It includes tabbed browsing, searchbox, phishing filter, RSS support, Quick tabs, Page zoom, group tabs and what not.

The fact that IE7 always run in a low-privilege level makes it more secure

My Rating 9/10

Windows Media Player 11

Screenshot of Windows Media Player 11

I was already using Windows Media Player on Windows XP box, so was not very excited about this feature, but the look and feel Aero gives to this tool makes it a visual pleasure. The play/pause button invites users to click it. But, Windows Media Player 11, does not seem to remember my previous play list if not closed properly. They need to give this tool more memory power.

My Rating: 7.5/10

Internet Information Services 7

Screenshot of IIS 7's redesigned management console

IIS 7.0 is fast. All the configurations info is stored in config files instead of including in the assemblies. This makes configuring IIS very easy. The admin interface is a revamp to the previous versions. It took some time for me to look at the places where I used to do things previously. They could have done a litter better with this, especially after consistently maintaining the look and feel for couple of previous versions. But, the fact that the current version fully utilizes the taskpanes and async operations provided by the MMC does not make it a pain.

My Rating: 7.5/10

NOTE: Feature list is from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Please let me know if I’ve to content used, and I’ll drop them immediately or provide appropriate links. I'm not using any content from that website, just used the feature list as a reference to do my review.

The original features list can be found at here

Now its all official.

 

David was kind enough to resend the mail that will be sent to the winners... Thanks David!

 

I can now claim (officially) that I'm one of the winners for the month of August 2006. Check this link, and select August 2006.

I'll be receiving a Tx Led clock

 

Very much excited to blog this!!!

 

I've installed .Net 3.0 beta on my laptop and wrote my first program (I know its in C# 2.0).

But the feeling is really good. I'm sure I'll work on this someday in the future, so wanted to take the first step ahead.

 

Did not do much investigations on it yet, but sure will develop something really silly and be proud of it over the weekend.

 

Until then...

 

Cheers!!!

Not very long time ago... i was using Firefox for its tabbed browsing experience.

Though IE6 has several toolbars (live toolbar, yahoo toolbar) providing the tabbed browsing features, I somehowdin't liked those as they used to slow down my broswer.

 

IE7 has an inherent tabbed browsing capabilities and it is super cool.

 

The point I want to make here is not the tabbed browsing, but the security implementation in IE7.

 

By default, IE7 runs under low security zone. I've added *.microsoft.com in the trusted sites list and elevated the permissions to high for this.

 

Now, I start a browser and open any microsoft site, it automatically launches a new instance of IE with elevated permissions and runs the site in that window...this is fine... now what I did is tried to open another site in this instance of browser and IE automatically opens this in the older instance (which still runs under low permissions) or opens a new instance with low permissions. This is super cool...

 

IE (7) rocks!!!

I received a mail from the webmaster at dotnetspider mentioning me elected as the monthly winner at dotnetspider website.

This now gives me more energy and more responsibility in community work.

 

Thanks Dotnetspider, for recognising my efforts :-)

It is with great pleasure that I blog here today.

I've just checked the community credit website and saw my name is the winners list.

 

Though this not yet official. I did not hear from anybody at community-credit yet. So this just my assumption. Will keep this blog updated as things reveal.