Wow, the news just keeps coming today. I found out about this little tool SonicFileFinder.

SonicFileFinder is a free add-in for Visual Studio 2005 that allows a fast and convenient search for any file within every Project of the loaded Solution by entering the complete filename or just a part of it. The found file(s) can either be edited with a single keystroke or a Windows Explorer / CommandLine prompt can be opened at the file's location.

Grz, Kris.

Grz, Kris.

I like keyboard shortcuts a lot and use them wherever I can, especially while developing with Visual Studio 2005, so here are some handy shortcuts for Windows Vista:

Windows key + spacebar: Will show the Windows Vista Sidebar. I like this feature and the possibility to create your own gadgets as well. There's also some to be found on CodeProject as well.

Windows key + x: This'll launch the Windows Mobility Center. Very handy when you're using a laptop.

Grz, Kris.

Nice movie I just found.

Another great presentation, and I really like the way he gives the presentation, on Identity 2.0 is this one:

Grz, Kris.

No, this isn't some spam about getting your degree from university for $... This blog post is about the MIX university where you can get handson labs about WPF, Virtual Earth, ASP.NET AJAX or Vista Sidebar Gadgets. Check it out: http://www.visitmix.com/university/

Grz, Kris.

For a course I'm going to follow, starting tomorrow, I needed VPC to run on my laptop. Unfortunately my old VPC software didn't run but one can obtain the beta of VPC 2007. Just installing that and trying to add an existing vpc image gave this error:

Pretty nasty. Apparently this comes thanks to the new UAC that ships with Vista. One can set it off, like Gill Cleeren describes in his blog post: Windows Vista tips & tricks #3: Disable UAC (User Access Control). This did the trick but setting UAC off is something that I don't want to do at the moment before I know the consequences.

Another tip I saw gave me what I wanted: Run programs as administrator in Windows Vista. I use Vista Enterprise but am unable to see the extra tab Compatibility under the properties and the Run as administrator's also not available to me. However the other tip, typing in the name "virtual pc" and then pressing the combination ctrl + shift + enter. This causes the program to be ran as an administrator.

Grz, Kris.

I found out about these thanks to Gabriel.

• Visual C# 2005 keyboard shortcut reference poster
• Visual Basic 2005 keyboard shortcut reference poster
• Visual C++ 2005 keyboard shortcut reference poster

Grz, Kris.

I just installed Windows Vista Enterprise edition. The graphics card of my laptop only got a score of 1.9 so I'm not into Aero. My hard drive however, a brand new 100 Gb 7200 rpm, got a score of 5.0. And indeed, installing Vista on it was much faster then I could imagine. I also just installed IIS and now will begin with Visual Studio 2005 Team System For Developers and SQL Server 2005 for developers to get as quickly as possible up to speed again.

Grz, Kris.

Yesterday the EBC badminton club, of which I'm a member and former board member, organised its annual championship. Normally I would rank very low because I, together with my usual partner, are the only recreational players. But yesterday I even got to the cross finals! Some games were real thrillers. The most important things: I had a lot of fun playing, learned some new tricks while playing against people who were by far better than me and I also noticed that I'm getting better at my own game.

Yesterday evening I had the pleasure to attend the presentations by Scott Guthrie. It was very interesting to see what's coming up in the new version of Visual Studio codenamed 'Orcas'. I like the multi-targeting feature, now you can choose which .NET framework you want to target your solution to: 2.0, 3.0 or 3.5. Another nice feature, and something I'm looking forward to is Javascript intellisense. This'll be a great feature once someone starts developing with ASP.NET AJAX.

Afterwards we had the chance to talk to Scott directly and some group pictures were taken by Sven Mus. I hope he posts them quickly so I can also share them.

Grz, Kris.

Yesterday evening I gave a presentation about ASP.NET AJAX. About 30 attendees came to see some small demos about the UpdatePanel, giving precedence to certain async callbacks or cancelling one. Apparently everyone liked the demo material and the response was good.

I also used ZoomIt, a free utility that's really helpfull during presentations, during the session. No more changing font sizes etc. You can download it here.

I'll post the demo + slides after some cleaning up and providing somewhat more detailed information to better understand the demo's without the explanation of the speaker.

This evening I'll also be attending the talk provided by Scott Guthrie so I hope to see some familiar faces there too.

Another interesting thing to note: the source code of ASP.NET AJAX Extensions has been made available. Grab the bits here.

Another thing to note: Apparently there's a small issue with the current release of ASP.NET AJAX but there's a workaround. Take a look at the following article: How to work around the "Access denied" cross-domain frame issue in ASP.NET Ajax 1.0.

Grz, Kris.

Woohoo!!

I just found out that the RTM bits are available for download:

ASP.NET AJAX Extensions
ASP.NET AJAX Futures CTP January
ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit

Update: Scott Guthrie also wrote a, more lengthy, article about it on his blog. Apparently they're also releasing the source code of the Extensions (UpdatePanel, UpdateProgress, ...). Personally I think this is great news and could help in the adoption of this AJAX framework.

Grz, Kris.