When you start the beta versions of Outlook or OneNote, you get a dialog box that says "Blah blah blah functionality requires Microsoft Desktop Search. Download now?" That seems dangerously close to using the Office monopoly to "tie" Microsoft's offering in personal search. Not only that, you don't even have …

The WMPlayer10SDK does not contain the expected primary interop assembly (PIA) so that Windows Media Player can be programmed from .NET languages such as Visual Basic and C#. The WMP 9 SDK puts a PIA in the /redist directory. However, the WMP10 SDK can be programmed in a managed language …

Oh well. Being able to blog from OneNote is a dream. I had a whole bunch of posts using graphics and ink all set to go.

Well, there goes my bandwidth for the next few hours... Office Beta 2 is available for all comers and Vista Beta 2 is available on MSDN for subscribers.

I get 'em all for free: this is one I pay for out of my own pocket.

I bought a dartboard a month ago to give me something to fidget with while thinking. Rather than struggle with cricket or any "real" dart game, I've been training myself with a game I call "golf." I go around the numbers in the board, and if I hit the target …

Recently, I've seen a huge jump in "Undeliverable mail" messages coming through my mail server. I've double-checked that I'm not relaying and checked a couple return path IPs, so I know that it's just jerks spoofing the "Reply-To" header, but it makes me sick to have my domains in any …

::: {.Section1} [Apparently, the “code navigation bar” in VS2005 is a performance drain. I never rely on it, so I’ll be implementing this change on my own system. Via Steve Pietrek ]{style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:Calibri; color:#1F497D"} :::

In the dot-com days, my work led to three, count 'em, three patent applications. In all cases, I'd signed over the IP rights to the company. Both companies went bankrupt before the patents went through, leaving me to understand that the IP is now the property of creditors, who were …