I ran across an article that described a hidden registry option in Windows 7 that prevents some applications from being pinned to the taskbar. The full article is here.

The sum of it though is that the registry entry at:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileAssociation

contains a few keys that affect the ability of an application to be pinned. AddRemoveNames contains a listing of name parts that cannot be pinned:

Documentation;Help;Install;More Info;Readme;Read me;Read First;Setup;Support;What's New;Remove

Just read the following on a blog here and immediately thought this would be a good way to test install software that you might not be all that sure of. Now I just need to find a way to go from vhd back to the physical PC to complete the circle. Windows 7 is supposed to be able to boot from a virtual, so that may be the way to go for the time being.

Windows only: Free Sysinternals application Disk2vhd takes a snapshot of your PC, and turns it into a Microsoft Virtual PC virtual hard drive—while your system is up and running.

Using the software, which requires no installation, is as easy as launching, selecting the drives you would like to create into a virtual disk, giving the file a name, and clicking the Create button. The utility uses the same volume snapshot feature that Windows uses for backup utilities, so it doesn't matter if software is running or not—but you'll have best results if you create the virtual disk on a separate drive.

Once you've created your virtual drive, you can use the free Microsoft Virtual PC to boot the image of your PC, which you can then use for testing, or just as a great way to completely backup your computer. Disk2vhd is a free download for Windows only.

I ran across an article today discussing testing one’s website for cross-browser compatibility. The article mentioned several useful utilities that follow:

• BrowserShots - This site will take screen shots of your website with various operating system and browser installs. You can even provide detail down to screen size, color depth, java script version, java enabled and flash version. Appears to be a pretty good way to shotgun it and get feedback on your websites looks across a variety of scenarios.
• Virtual Machines – Microsoft has made available 5 different virtual machines that can be freely downloaded containing XP/IE6, XP/IE7, XP/IE8, Vista/IE7 and Vista/IE8. This is Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Image Pack.
• Expression Web SuperPreview – This handy tool allows you to compare your website side-by-side in different browsers with in-depth analysis of the elements contained in the site. Another handy feature is that you can overlay to the two sites to check for alignment differences. 

I am came across this on Channel 10 and I am reposting it here so that I can take a look at this software when I have time. Sounds quite interesting.

AutoCollage is a new photo mashup tool from Microsoft Research Cambridge which allows you to automatically create collages from a collection of your photos. The software cuts out interesting parts of the photos in your collection and pieces them together following natural features as boundaries between images. The photos are then blended together using sophisticated computer vision technology as well as other software which does face detection, object recognition, image blending, and other graphic techniques. The end result is a collage created from your very own photos. 

Although the software is doing pretty complex stuff on the back end, the front end is surprisingly easy to use. You just point it to a folder containing your photos and click a button - that's it! AutoCollage will then goes to work. When the collage is complete - a process that only takes a few seconds - your resulting image can be printed, emailed, or set as your desktop wallpaper. 

For great results, it's suggested that you use 7-30 photos for the best performance, but the software defaults to 12. AutoCollage works on both Vista and XP SP2+ and is available as a free download from here.

Ran across this recently and I want to give this a look at some point... I currently deal with a graphical/model based language at work (one of the tools we made to support our product line) and I've been toying with the idea of creating a full-blown DSL behind it for various reasons.

The Optimization Domain Specific Language (ODSL) shipping in the current CTP of F# is built with the new Microsoft Solver Foundation.

Solver Foundation is a framework of solvers and modeling services enabling planning, risk modeling, and scheduling for .NET developers. It is integrated with the full power of the NETfx 3.5+ platform including LINQ for declarative binding to enterprise databases. Solver Foundation is delivered in a single, compact, CLS-compliant library. This managed code library may be used from any modern CLS-compatible language (F#, C#, C++, IronPython, etc.). It aides quantitative analysts, modelers, and programmers in making feasible, near-optimal, and optimal decisions in business critical settings via applications or Office-based solutions. Solver Foundation ships with several production grade solvers and provides easy third party solver integration.

A Solver Foundation program is a declarative model embedded in familiar NETfx design patterns and development environments (Visual Studio 2008). The model is solved by application of numerical and symbolic solvers, meta-heuristics, constraint processing algorithms, and advanced local search techniques. Included in this release are model pre-solve and validity checking. These Solver Foundation services may be leveraged by any of the solvers and provide a rich set of tools to aide to modeling, solving, and post-optimality analysis. Solver Foundation provides these scalable and performance-driven solvers and services while supporting integration with industry standard modeling and serialization formats. This permits users to leverage existing modeling investments directly within Solver Foundation-based solutions.

From Office Excel2007 workbooks to NETfx 3.5+ enabled applications, Solver Foundation provides a new class of services to users developing complex planning, risk, and optimization models.

Found a website that may be helpful: TutsBuzz 

Not sure I will use the programming side much, but the graphics side looks interesting to me. I have yet to dedicate a great deal of time to becoming good at graphics creation/editing, but, in the past, I have found tutorials like this a quick way to get up to speed.

I recently installed Visual Studio Team Foundation Server and I must say this was the worst install experience that I have ever had with a product. Microsoft intertwined this product with so many dependencies and made it so brittle that I am concerned that my move to team for source control was a mistake. However, I am going to give it a shot to see how it works. We are about to make the move at work (full-time job) and figure I should investigate. So far, I am not too impressed with the client. It is missing many key features and/or makes them difficult to accomplish. I'm still at the new stage so we will see how things play out.

 One word of advice for anyone who is installing team server: Read the documentation and carefully follow EVERY step for the installation. Do not deviate, even in the slightest, or you will get burned. It is ridiculous how touchy the install process is. I seriously doubt that I can afford to stay on Team System at home for my source control due to its fragility. Maybe 2008 will be better.

I recently installed Forefront Client Security on my network. I had to roll back WSUS to version 2.0 for the install to go through and then install WSUS 3.0 afterwards. Unfortunately, the Client Update for Microsoft Forefront Client Security would not automatically go down to computers until the actual client was installed manually from the DVD; it said not applicable. Maybe that is the way that it was supposed to work, but my understanding from reading the documents was that it was supposed to be the initial client install. Regardless, my network is fairly small so I just installed the client manually. Everything is up and going now and appears good to go. Hopefully it continues that way.

 I have not had anti-virus or anti-spyware on any of my computers for a very long time. For the longest time I was the only one that did much of anything on my computers and the network was secured so I was not concerned about viruses or malware. However, my wife has begun doing more work (and play) from home and she does not always know what is best when surfing the web and how to avoid being the victim of a scam/phish/virus. So here I go, off with Forefront which is a fairly new Microsoft product. Hopefully it won't make me regret it.