For reasons still unclear to me, Windows Explorer became painfully slow on my Windows Vista beta (build 5219). Expanding directories in the Folder Tree would work as normal, but simply showing the contents of a folder would easily take half a minute or more. I've seen other reports of this on the internet but without any solution.

So I was doing all my regular work in the command line (which is quite horrible if you're used to the whole drag & drop thingy) until I found out that simply checking the the "Use Windows classic folders" setting (Tools menu, Folder Options) resolved my issue:

The "Show preview and filters" option sure looks a lot better, but I'll pass if it takes more than 2 seconds to render, thankyouverymuch... But I'm sure this will get resolved in future builds of the OS. In the meantime, I've got my Windows Explorer back at full speed!

Hans Verbeeck, overall technical content owner of TechEd Europe 2005, has started planning what's on the agenda for this year.

TechEd focuses on hot (nearly) available technologies so with the conference taking place in the beginning of July, that's going to be

• Beta 2 of the .NET Framework 2.0 and Visual Studio .NET 2005 for developers,
• Beta 3 of SQL Server 2005 for DBA's (I didn't even know there was going to be a third beta, I thought they were actually pretty close to shipping already),
• SOA, software factories, domain specific languages for architects and
• "Special tracks" (hmm that's pretty vague ;-) ) for IT Pro's.

Not on the shortlist:

• Indigo and Avalon, although there's a bundled CTP of both coming up in March (but it doesn't fit the "relevant within 6 months" criterium),
• Windows Longhorn (if anybody still knows what's up with that anyway since it ran out of pillars to be based upon, but that's probably just my confusion, right?)

Cool stuff, so if you dig this kind of content (along with labs, ask-the-experts, panels, Amsterdam's finest herbs, and - let's not forget - wicked parties) don't forget to add 4-8 July to your agenda!

Yes! It seems there'll be a PDC again in 2005 (via Scoble)! The new PDC05 site is already up although there's not a lot of content yet (meaning there's no content yet, apart from the date (and the fact that it's announced of course (which is most important))). In fact the news is so hot they didn't even have the time to update the PDC03 logo yet ;-)

Oh, I so wanna go again, last year's PDC was a blast... I'm already marking that week as busy in my agenda, wink wink :-)

Since Whidbey/VS2005 should be old news by then, I'm assuming this one will be all about Indigo and Avalon, and of course Longhorn (or what's left of it anyway), and they'll probably have some yet unrevealed tricks up their sleave as well. Bring it on!

I've seen on Tom Mertens' blog that Robert McLaws is asking to support the number 2 feature suggestion for Visual Studio 2005: an updated icon set that ships with it. I heartily agree. What's more: I'll top the suggestion and expand it a little.

We don't need just an updated icon set to ship with Visual Studio. If Windows Forms 2.0 is the final stage in Windows Forms development and Microsoft wants people to ship products with a compelling "User Experience" on the road to Longhorn, then they better start providing the community with the proper tools to do so. Icons are in important part of the user experience (platform-wide consistency is an important design principle), so the most important step here is indeed to make the common user interface elements obiquitously available.

In my mind, that's not just shipping the icon files with the development environment. It's also publishing those icons on a searchable resource-like website where you can just download the icon you need without having to search the entire web and skim out the ridiculously outdated or overly charging icon-library websites. Microsoft must already have some central library of these icons to be shared by the product teams so why not share it with the world?

The next step is to go all .NET'y and package a large number of common icons in strongly signed .NET resource assemblies (dll's). These could be distributed with the runtime and placed in the Global Assembly Cache (GAC) so they're readily available to all your .NET programs. That gives you the advantage of being able to update all your icons to the latest (fanciest) version with just a configuration change and it follows the same idea as reusable dll's in the first place: why embed all those common elements in each and every program when you can share one version between multiple programs?

Anyway, an update to the icon set would be a requirement in my mind. The rest would be a nice-to-have. But I really don't want to start searching the web for a decent looking Save button ever again.

I've been trying to get the WinHEC build of Longhorn installed but to no avail... Did anyone get it up and running on a Dell Latitude D600?

I run the setup (from within Windows XP) to install it onto a freshly formatted partition, and I get up to the part where it's supposed to start copying files onto the partition. At least I suspect so, because I get "An error occurred while copying files".

Now I've read in the readme (I actually read those on anything other than RTM builds nowadays) that the hard disk driver must be supported - "or else"... (Or else what? I don't know. It probably throws funky "cannot copy" errors in your face, right?) Luckily, you can insert a floppy disk containing drivers at some time during the setup process if your hard disk is not supported.

Well, 'luckily' is a bit of an overstatement. A floppy disk? Let me sketch that into its right context here: I'm installing Windows Longhorn, a true 21st-century OS with vector graphics, a filesystem backed by a relational database, an extensible item store, a polyglot communication stack, all programmable with the obiquitous .NET runtime, and (how conveniently) a brandnew driver model - and it's asking me for a stone age floppy disk? Even if I had a floppy drive for my laptop (which I don't), I certainly wouldn't have any driver disks to feed it with. It's kind of like "here's that ftp server with the zipped 19GB pr0n collection you asked for, but it only has a 56K modem and there's 178 users before you".

Anyway. It's alpha. Years from shipping. A lot can change. (Read: change this!)

So with that option out of the way, I tried installing it onto a new VirtualPC. Unfortunately, you can't mount a directory (the one containing the setup files) as a CD in VirtualPC. So I made an ISO out of the lot and mounted that, but I can't get VirtualPC to boot it (how do you make a bootable cd?)... It would be nice if VirtualPC could map the virtual drive onto the local filesystem (kind of like the nifty Shared Folders, but then backwards) so I could try installing it straight onto that, but there's no way of accessing the virtual drive straight from the host system as far as I know.

Alas, so far nothing worked. No Longhorn for me. If anybody has any ideas, be sure to let me know!

Writing data access code will probably remain useful for quite some time, especially since ObjectSpaces is being rolled into Longhorn's WinFS data store. I sure do understand why, but I'm still a little sad to see it go (although it's not really gone of course).

Anyway, here's a quick dump of some things I picked up from a recent MSDN TV episode on ADO.NET 2.0. Especially cool is the "provider-agnostic data access code" so you're never coding against an actual provider (SQL Server, Oracle, ODBC, plain text, whatever, ...) but use the generic versions through a factory...

// Get the configured providers if you want to see them all.
DataTable providers = DbProviderFactories.GetFactoryClasses();
// The "InvariantName" column contains the invariant name to be passed to GetFactory.

// Use a specific provider.
DbProviderFactory factory = DbProviderFactories.GetFactory( invariantName );
using( DbConnection c = factory.CreateConnection() )
{
    // Use generic methods to create commands and other ADO.NET goodies.
    c.ConnectionString ="...";
    DbCommand cmd = c.CreateCommand();
    cmd.CommandText ="...";

    // Something else that's new: load a DataTABLE directly in stead of a DataSET.
    DbDataReader r = cmd.ExecuteReader();
    DataTable table =new DataTable();
    table.Load( r );
}

// And for perfomance, in stead of updating each row separately to the DB,
// batch them all at once to lower the number of connections to the DB.
// This will call sp_executesql(""); with a sql string that contains the batched statements.
DataAdapter da; // Initialize this...
da.UpdateBatchSize = 100;

I just made the most obvious observation: ASP.NET 2.0 and XAML are mother and daughter. And their hereditary determined angle-bracket beauty will only be increasing by the laws of natural selection.

Although that shouldn't come as a surprise at all since it's often been said that "XAML is to WinForms what ASP.NET was to the web". I just hadn't had the physical real-world click just until now. (Of course it's already been shown extensively that XAML isn't really tied to WinForms at all, but it's probably still the most useful scenario for it.)

So what triggered the click? I just noticed that some ASP.NET controls provide a kind of nested properties like <SomeControl Property-NestedProperty="[value]" />, e.g. <GridView HeaderStyle-Font-Bold="True" />. That's just like the nested properties syntax in XAML (only here they're using a dash in stead of a dot). I don't think the syntax here is as universally supported (I've only seen it with a number of properties, mostly to do with styles) but it's conceptually the same.

Another thing that struck me is the template mechanism; it's been there since the beginning really, but in fact it's just a way to attach template objects to controls (like grids) without using code. In other words: declarative object coupling.

So to realize their 70% code reduction claims they're providing declarative nested attributes and object coupling - exactly what XAML is so damn good at… I should've seen this long ago, I'm so slow...

Of course, there's no blah without quuz, so it seems they'll be doing all it takes in Longhorn to get that too.

Ok so I have a little question for Chris: Why the hell would you need quuz to do some blah? Seriously, I've been quuzing for a few months now and it didn't get me anywhere near blah or even close to foo. I'm so confused... Maybe my latest shmaz is barred :-(

With WinFS coming up, this one should be a breeze on the upcoming Windows platform (which will go unnamed for a change to further lessen that diabolic (but oh so just) hype): I would like to see FTP grow up (*). And by growing up I mean become more than a protocol to shake hands and throw bits at each other until you run out of ammo. I want to see it become (at least) transactional and secure.

"Transactional" because if you're using it to transfer a whole website (still one of the most widely used reasons to use FTP in the first place - apart from that "legal" form of "datasharing" any ignorant judge would call "piracy" of course), you want either the whole thing to succeed or fail. You don't want half of your site reflecting the fact that your company just went bankrupt while the other half is still pretending to be alive and kicking while throwing fast-climbing sales graphs in your face to prove that point. You also don't want to see any changes to your site halfway through the transmission, instead you want the whole batch to be committed in the end - when everything arrived safely and correctly. ACID baby, yeah.

"Secure" because right now, I just don't trust plain FTP. I don't use it at work to change my site for example. There are all kinds of initiatives to make FTP secure (like run it over SSL or in an SSH session) but I want this to be the default. Security is not an add-on anymore, it's not optional, it should just "be there", implicitly.

Of course this reaches beyond Windows into all platforms, but I'm just focusing on Windows now because, well, that's my personal bias. (I'd be interested in knowing how hard it would be to build this in penguin-land though.) The Windows built-in ftp.exe command is a great and simple tool I use regularly and it just seems so incredibly easy in WinFS to make it even better. With WinFS becoming a file system backed by a relational engine, it's intrinsic that you can use transactions. So at the start of your FTP command, you just call WinFS.BeginTransaction (so to speak) and do a WinFS.Commit() in the end. And with Indigo and its secure messaging features, why not use 'services' as a higher-level layer upon merely sending bits across the wire? Overhead? Sure! But I'd like to see you perform security, routing, and even transactions on the wire-level yourself without using Indigo. Don't want to? Keep it simple and unsafe? Good luck coming up with more fast-climbing sales graphs...

(*) Actually, I would like to see the whole web grow up. Starting with the slashdot community ;-) No really, the current state of the web is like a badly designed medieval castle you just keep throwing bricks at to keep it from falling down. Browsers can't keep up with modern-day webapplication requirements like obvious state- and usermanagement (cookies and ASP.NET viewstate being obviously working but ugly hacks), emails still disappear from my inbox all too regularly or never get there at all, RSS still having no other central distribution mechanism than being pull in stead of push, TCP being a hard protocol because it tries to be reliable over an intrinsically unreliable IP-connection, ... So I'm not waiting for IPV6 really, I'd bet my money on TheWeb 2.0. (Yes, I am aware that this last remark isn't remotely realistic thank you very much. But it would be nice to have a band of modern-day architects design a whole new future-proof web though. If only for the kick of it.)

Take it from me: Lotus Notes is a product that deserves a quick and silent death. I'm currently on a project with a large company, the first I've been where they're using Lotus all over the place. And we hates it, don't we? Yes we do... Let me elaborate for a second or 2(000)...

<rant>

You launch the program. You get a password box. Fair enough, Outlook users are spoiled because it uses your Windows account to log on. But the fact you have to log in every time eliminates the possibility for me to launch it only when there's new mail (there's a separate little tray app that can check your email) because it slows down the process of quickly checking your email too much. Ok so the program is always running, and always taking space up my taskbar. I'd minimize it to the tray (sorry, notification area) using PowerMenu, but then the icon gets turned into this default windows app icon (same happens to Opera by the way, so I can't see the difference).

But anyway, once you're actually logged in, you want to go off and send an email of course. Just to make sure this thing really works. So you're sweeping the screen for a "New Email" button but you must have missed it. Sweep again. Then you start thinking, it's not gonna be that "New Memo" button is it? Click it. Now that looks remarkably like composing a new email. Come on, "New Memo"? I'm not creating a memo, I'm not gonna print it out and put it on the freakin' fridge. What's wrong with "New Email"? Except when they actually do use the word (consistency is not their middle name) they still call it "eMail" (note the casing) - as if it's still an enhancement to regular mail. It's an actual word these days guys, please.

Now let's talk GUI conventions for a second. You know, that's the user interface stuff that everybody does more or less in the same manner so we get a consistent (whoops I said the c-word again) look and feel across the entire platform. But I've been told that IBM made up its own set of GUI conventions over the years and clings on to them like hungry mice to a hairy piece of cheese. Just a few examples:

• Notes behaves sort of like a tabbed MDI environment: you can have multiple "windows" open but they're on separate tabs. You can click a tab header to switch to another window, and you can close it by clicking the 'X'. Great, except that the 'X' is on every tab header itself, in stead of one 'X' on the right of the tab header so you can just keep clicking to close multiple windows.
• Getting help when you hover over something is really nice, and that's what status bars are used for normally. But in Notes, they conveniently use the title bar of the window. Well, 'use' it is an overstatement: they just paint a grey box over it and put the text in there.
• If you look at the Inbox, you see a list of emails - sorry, memo's. Selecting multiple emails at a time is possible, but not with ctrl (single select) and shift (multiselect) like you're used to: shift is single select, ctrl does nothing. Dragging in the list to select a bunch of mails also doesn't work.
• The calendar is buggy when you're scrolling with the wheelmouse: in stead of moving to another month (or something else that makes sense), it just moves the calendar up and down. And fails to redraw correctly.
• The menus are totally screwed, I'll just walk you through an example for the hell of it. Say you want to create a new folder in your inbox, you right click the inbox folder and expect a context menu, right? Wrong! That would be too easy, in stead you have to go to the "Create" menu and choose "Folder", and then the place where you want to create it in. To delete a folder, it gets even more complicated. Select the folder, go to "Actions", choose "Folder Options", and then "Delete Folder". Note that it's a related task but it winds up in a totally different place. What does that "context" in "context menu" stand for again? Another example: if you'd ever want to mark an item as unread, again don't go looking for a context menu (well there is one but it would make too much sense to put the command in there of course). You have to go to the "Edit" menu, select "Unread Marks" and then "Mark Selected Unread". Rock on.

You want some more? As long as I'm ranting...

Well it's just not an intuitive program to work with. For example, there's a Trash and an Autotrash button. What's up with that? I don't even want to know the difference, I just want to get some item out of my sight and have it be done with. For all I care autotrash seems to work in my inbox, and trash works in my outbox. Whatever.

Moving items is possible (whew) but sent items cannot be moved, only copied. Ok so you copy and trash the original, right? Works great until you find that the copies are also deleted - that is sooo not funny. Same goes for calendar entries, meeting requests should get out of my sight when the meeting is scheduled but they sit quietly in my inbox. Until I delete them - but wait! That removes the calendar entry! The joy of missing a meeting... And alarm options, really, what's up with that? By default, a calendar entry doesn't have an alarm set to remind you of it. In stead, you have to open the calendar entry, edit document, click Alarm Options, enable alarm, close dialog box, save document. Holy crap how productive!

Replying is funny though, really. You don't actually reply; I mean, you could but you'll soon find out that's not what you want to do. The Reply button is still there for when you want to save a few bytes for your 14k modem actually (what, some people have broadband these days...?) because it omits the original message altogether. So you press "Reply With History" (ah so now we're getting lessons in history?). Great - except if you want to reply to everybody. Then you have to press an additional Reply To All button in the new window. What is this, are Lotus programmers paid by user mouseclick or something?

Finally, to make sure nobody goes off using a competitive product, they've made very sure that you can't export anything out of the program in any useful way. Well there is some kind of crappy text format, but don't even think about importing that into another program. So there's no separate email files (.eml), no Outlook personal folders (.pst), no nothing. Except if you buy expensive third-party tools of course. (They rub each others backs just to make sure their little eco-system holds together I guess.)

Oh, and 16-color icons really, really give an enormous performance boost on my system. Thanks for not overloading me with all this shmancy-fancy 32-bit color GPU-eating overkill.

We wants Outlook back, Outlook, my precious!

</rant>

Aaaaah that felt good. (Bear in mind that I've been using Outlook for years so you might say I'm slightly biased towards the Microsoft way of using a computer and an email client in particular - but in the end, aren't most of us? Really?)

Update: I really wonder what they're going to do when Avalon comes along. With all this rich functionality and user experience goodness that gets unleashed - will they make the switch? Or will they stay behind and (random prediction) lose their market share to remain only in the companies where NT4 is still running by the time Longhorn ships? I really wonder...