.NET From India

Local Cooling

I found a neat utility called LocalCooling, that basically adjusts your power settings to optimize it to help save energy. I have always had a weakness for green technology and this seems to be a easy way to save some energy. I put it on my Laptop and my laptop is now optimized to save around 13 W. Already in a couple of days I have saved 1/2 Gallon of oil..:)

Categorized Search Results in MOSS

As you may have noticed I have been doing a lot of Sharepoint related work recently. Search is one of the main feature of MOSS, that is one of the most important feature considered by a enterprise. If people have to use a document management system, they have to be able to find their documents easily and a good search is very important.

One of the features I wanted to give to my users was the ability to filter based on some peices of Metadata like the document type or maybe categories. This is very similar to the option that most ecommerce sites have where you can drill down into a product category based on some properties of the product you select. But Sharepoint search does not have something like this by default.

I found a component in Codeplex called Faceted Search which adds this feature to MOSS. This is a set of webparts that allows you to do this with ease. You can actually use any coulmn in the document library to on which facets can be created.

Google security bugs

ZDNet has a article on a large number of security vulnerabilities have been discovered in multiple google apps including GMail, Google Appliances, Blogspot, Picassa etc.

Why as I not suprised??

Well, I strongly beleive it is not purely Microsoft's fault that is the reason for Windows being targetted by hackers. It is the number of users out there that really attracts them. So as google gets popular, so does it attract hackers. As more people use google to do financial transactions (or stuff that may help a hacker make money), more attention it will get.

A Strange Excel 2007 Bug

One of my friends pointed out this discussion on a strange Excel 2007 Bug.

Just multiply 850 by 77.1 in Excel. It gives a result of 100000. Calc will give you a result of 65535.

Interesting that someone actually found this..:)

Thanks Ankur for the link!!

Document Link Content Type

I have a need where I have a single document, but it should appear in multiple folders (Wanted something like Vista's Virtual Folders) in SharePoint. One of the new features in MOSS is that of content type and there is a content type called Document Link, that allows you to link to a document in another document library. Todd Klindt has a very detailed post about this.

This works fine, expect for one problem. Sharepoint does not consider the link to be pointing to another Sharepoint document library. So if you click on the link to open the document in MS Office (2003), Office does not recognize it as from MOSS and show you the edit and check in options that it would show if you had directly clicked on that document. The link always opens the document as read only.

Does anyone know how to get around this??

Dotnet From India Search Provider

This site has had integrated Google search for a long time now. Based on yesterday's post, I decided on implementing a custom search provider for my blog.

One of the problems I faced was that the google search link is actually very long and it uses query strings to pass parameters. IE seems to evaluates the search url as html, the & in the url will result in an error. It took me quite some time to figure this out. Once I replaced this with & everything worked fine.

Embed Search Provider Details in your Page

Today when I went to a KB article at the http://support.microsoft.com site using IE7, I noticed the search provider drop down light up orange.

I had never noticed this though I have been using IE7 for a long time now. Clicking on this button usually shows the installed search providers and also other options related to search providers. I know about that feature and have used it.

Since I had not seen this, I just clicked on the dropped down and I could see it had a new option called the Microsoft Support Search Provider, that was added.

Not only was this provider available for use, it was also appearing in the Add Search Providers menu. I tried going to Google to see if IE was able to automatically find a Google Search Provider. It did not get anything new. So I was kind of intrigued by this and decided on searching for information on this feature.

I found an article on this in a blog post at Technobabble.

Take a page from Microsoft Support Page; if you go to that site, you'll notice the arrow next to the search magnifying glass is yellow.  If you click it, you'll notice three things:

• "Microsoft Support Site" is a new entry that you never added
• A little yellow sun next to "Microsoft Support Search"
• An entry that reads "Add Search Providers" with a subentry "Microsoft Support Search"

This is done by a simple line in the header:    
     <link title="Microsoft Support Search" type="application/opensearchdescription+xml" rel="search" href="/common/opensearchdescriptor.aspx?ln=en-us" />

The original post also describes how to set this up for you own site.

This post was written yesterday Sep 21, but due to some problem with my internet connection, actually got posted only on Sep 22nd.

Blackberry Apps using .NET

RIM(the company that is behind BB) recently announced a Visual Studio Plugin to develop applications that can run on BlackBerry. So you can use the same development experience that you are used to in VS and create apps that will run on the BB device.

What else will MS Do??

I have never even heard of it till a fellow MVP pointed it out to me. Microsoft actually has a scientific calculator called Microsoft Math.

Microsoft Math’s full-featured graphing calculator with 3-D technology helps students visualize and graph math and science equations.

Sells for 19.95, so I assume it is a over the shelf retail product and since I have not seen any Ads for it yet, I assume MS sells it mostly via its academic channels. With Laptops being a part of school accessories, just starting in India, this may be a volume business for MS. (Some of the high-end schools in India already have a laptop per student policy, while the majority have a computer Lab. But with the drastic fall in laptop prices over the last year or so, I foresee every student in most private schools having a laptop in around 3-5 years time).