I hop on my wife's laptop every opportunity I get, I think the Vista UI is just super slick. I was adjusting the volume and noticed that I could adjust the relative volume of all the open applications that required sound.

This is just a better way to live! I hope Corillian\CheckFree\[Next take over company name here] lets us upgrade soon.

I was debugging some issues at work and we ended up discovering a compatibility issues with some the dll's. These issues were discovered primarily by looking at the Fusion logs. The fuslogvw.exe provides quick and easy access to the logs which in turn describe a variety of issues, however, I have found that binding errors are most common and easily determined.

Fusion logs describe the probing paths used to find compatible dll's and the success or failure of the search.

LOG: Attempting download of new URL file:///C:/Program Files/RssBandit/en-US/BlogExtension.Delicious.resources.DLL.
LOG: Attempting download of new URL file:///C:/Program Files/RssBandit/en-US/BlogExtension.Delicious.resources/BlogExtension.Delicious.resources.DLL.
LOG: Attempting download of new URL file:///C:/Program Files/RssBandit/plugins/en-US/BlogExtension.Delicious.resources.DLL.
LOG: Attempting download of new URL file:///C:/Program Files/RssBandit/plugins/en-US/BlogExtension.Delicious.resources/BlogExtension.Delicious.resources.DLL.
LOG: Attempting download of new URL file:///C:/Program Files/RssBandit/en-US/BlogExtension.Delicious.resources.EXE.
LOG: Attempting download of new URL file:///C:/Program Files/RssBandit/en-US/BlogExtension.Delicious.resources/BlogExtension.Delicious.resources.EXE.
LOG: Attempting download of new URL file:///C:/Program Files/RssBandit/plugins/en-US/BlogExtension.Delicious.resources.EXE.
LOG: Attempting download of new URL file:///C:/Program Files/RssBandit/plugins/en-US/BlogExtension.Delicious.resources/BlogExtension.Delicious.resources.EXE.
LOG: All probing URLs attempted and failed.

The following registry location [HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Fusion\LogPath] will show you where the raw logs are stored. If you use Visual Studio.NET you will notice quite a few of your own applications have orphaned fusion logs as well as whatever .NET applications you use.

If things are going drastically wrong with a complicated multi assembly installation, then take the time to look at the fusion log files.

Validation with regular expressions is becoming integral to even the simplest data entry system. I found myself editing or creating regular expressions on a regular basis now. Don found this great cheat sheet site for regular expressions. This is definitely in my browser favorites.

In a previous post I was wondering why microsoft had opted to use a point system completely independent of the currency that is prevalent in the governing country, which in the US would be the almighty dollar. I found this interesting explanation by Ben Barker as to why this sub currency might be useful

Why Do I Want to Use Points?
... the big deal here is that Points allow what technical types call "micro-transactions."

On the original Xbox Live, transactions had to be around five dollars U.S., the minimum for most credit cards. But with Microsoft Points, the price for most anything—maps, skins, levels, demos, and more—can be much lower than that. That's a big deal. For example, say you want to get one of the new maps for your favorite shooter, but you're not that interested in a few of the others. Lucky for you, Marketplace can offer each map individually for just a few points. Now that's savings.

In the future, you might even be able to redeem your Points for real-world objects, like hardware accessories for your Xbox 360 (note that this is speculative—at first, Marketplace will deal in downloads only).

What About User-to-User Transactions?
Though you won't be able to do it for a while yet, Microsoft eventually wants to enable Xbox Live users to buy and sell user-created content, which could prove to be the heart of the "micro-transaction" system. So, hypothetically speaking, I could create a new skin for Project Gotham Racing® 3 and use that skin when I win a tournament viewed by hundreds of gamers in spectator mode.

Big champion that I am, everyone who sees my skin when I'm racing wants it. I can then (again, hypothetically) post it up for sale in the Marketplace at, say, a dime's worth of points. Other users can get the skin for the price of a piece of candy, and I earn more points in exchange.

In hindsight I may have been prematurely critical of the points concept, I think the promise of user to user transactions is really cool, and I guess micro transactions would not be the cost effective with Visa or Master Card. I just hope this does not become a one way street. Will I be able to gain points and translate them back into real money?

PS the line up of movies and TV shows available from the Live Market Place is getting very impressive, I am hoping that the Zune gets access to this media too!

After my trip to Portland I was sufficiently annoyed by the lack of the video content available through Zune Software that I purposed to find my own videos from around the net. I happened upon this wonderful freeware application called VDownloader. VDownloader allows you to download videos from sites like You Tube, Google Video, and MySpace.

The other application that is necessary to pack the Zune with exciting video is Windows Media Encoder (WME). Whenever I do a search for video or audio conversion WME never seems to appear but this app is free people! Stop spending your hard earned money on converters, Microsoft was kind enough to provide one for us, even though they see fit not talk about it much.

There are couple of steps you need to go through in order to make the video useable to Zune so I will list the steps here.

• VDownloader can search for, Download and convert the the video straight from any site based on a URL. VDownloader converts to several codec formats, however, I ended up converting it DVD (PAL), which is still useless for the Zune but it is a start. What is annoying is that AVI is useable in Windows Media Player but not in the Zune ... why!! There is a registry hack that apparently allows AVI to be available to Zune software but I could not get it to work.

• After you have downloaded the video in the DVD (PAL) format we can start the business of conversion. Start WME and choose 'Convert a file' from the Wizard and click OK. Select the source file that you want to convert and hit next.

• In the Content Distribution page select the Pocket PC option and click next. This will subsequently give us Encoding Options page that will give us the Video options that are compatible with the Zune. Select 'Pocket PC widescreen video (CBR) which will format the video for your Zune.

• Click Finish and you should be good to go! Place the video in a folder that the Zune is monitoring and synchronize.

NOTE: I respect the intellectual property rights of all artists, please do the same. The major sites are very careful about taking down videos that they are not entitled to. However, I am really careful about the videos I download, I do my best to ensure that they are considered public domain.

I just finished updating Windows Desktop Search (WDS) to version 3 (I had version 2.6) and there is a marked difference in performance. I am also really impressed with the UI of the Windows Search Desk bar. I was hoping this would be free a free floating affair in the style of SlickRun and Google Desktop Search ... no dice.

Another marked improvement is the fact that Outlook 2003 is now completely indexed if you do not like Outlook in the search you can always switch that off. In previous versions only the C:\documents and settings folder was indexed and now you can chose the specific folders to index.

The options to specify which file types to index actually uses a GUI now (hooray!), instead of the previous semi colon separated list that you had to manually add to.

I am not sure when this update happened but I am convinced that I have been struggling along with version 2.x needlessly for too long.