Before installing SP1 I could right click anywhere in Windows Explorer and select search to do searches in that folder. After SP1 it's gone! Why? Blame "us" (the Europeans or actually EU). They (I say they, because Norway is not part of EU :-) ) found a "new" game to play with MS. It's called Antitrust and it's about Suits meeting up in in European courts to talk about software. Browsers are especially popular, but sometimes they talk about other types of software as well. The looser of the Game (usually MS) have to become agile and change their software so the Europeans can get their price. This time MS didn't want to play, so they just gave the EU the price.

What's the price you might ask? A pluggable search architecture. If you are a provider of a desktop search engine, users can now set your search engine as default search in Windows. So what if I want to have the contextual search like it was? Then you can change a registry key as described here or just use Windows key + F as I do.

Soon Windows Vista SP1 will be available for download. Or actually, it might even decide to automatically update itself, even though you specifically told it not to! However, not all of us want this to happen without our knowledge (or want to wait until some unexpected behaviors has been discovered), so Microsoft has release a service pack blocker. This blocker will also work for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. The blocker only work for a set period of time. Mary Jo Foley has more details in her blog.

You probably know allready, but Visual Studio 2008 is now available on MSDN Subscriptions for download. If you don't have an MSDN Subsription I'm afraid you'll have to wait until February 2008...

The wait is almost over. At TechEd Barcelona Microsoft announced the release date of Visual Studio 2008 and .Net Framework 3.5. Check out the official press release here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/nov07/11-05TechEdDevelopersPR.mspx

Today I got tired of using my mouse when navigating in Google search results, so I started to search for Google keyboard shortcuts. I found some tools that added this to Firefox, but I just couldn't believe there weren’t existing in Google already. And then I found something at Google Experimental Labs. By clicking you convert your Google search to be keyboard sensitive. Nice! Here's how it looks after I've "Joined the experiment":

Here are the available shortcuts:

Key	Action
J	Selects the next result.
K	Selects the previous result.
O	Opens the selected result.
<Enter>	Opens the selected result.
/	Puts the cursor in the search box.
<Esc>	Removes the cursor from the search box.

On Wednesday NNUG Bergen was lucky enough to get Einar Ingebrigtsen to speak for us. He held a great session about XNA and some game dev history. Einar did game development for about 8 years and then jumped to business development. His background was perfect to highlight some of the similarities between the two. Especially interesting was the similarities around layering.

Einar is involved in many things and one of his latest projects is Game Camp. On November 23rd Game Camp will kick off with a great agenda in Oslo. Go here to check out the agenda and registration.

Another thing Einar has been doing lately is creating a 3D engine for Silverlight called Balder. As you may know Silverlight is a subset of WPF and one of the things they removed was the 3D stuff. But that didn’t stop him. Check out his 3D project over at CodePlex. To see the engine in action, check out this demo.

Are you an estimating guru? Have you never missed an estimate in your life? Can you even do estimates for others? Then this is not for you. However, if you don’t recognize yourself in the previous description this still might be something for you.
When I introduced Scrum to my organization, we quickly started to use planning poker. So what’s planning poker? Here’s what planningpoker.com says:

"Individual stories are presented for estimation. After a period of discussion, each participant chooses from his own deck the numbered card that represents his estimate of how much work is involved in the story under discussion. All estimates are kept private until each participant has chosen a card. At that time, all estimates are revealed and discussion can begin again."

How we use planning poker in Contiki

At Contiki we use planning poker to estimate all our user stories, or features if you want. When the backlog starts filling up with un-estimated backlog items, we gather the team for a round of poker. We also have a team in Ukraine, so using planningpoker.com works great for us. Here’s what we do step by step:

1. The product owner reads the user story and adds any additional information he think is necessary. No comments or input is allowed from the others at this time (our experience is that starting the table discussion before the first estimate takes a lot longer and will not make the estimate any better).
2. Everyone vote for an estimate.
3. When all estimates are in, all estimates are revealed. When we see that the estimates vary (which usually is the case), we ask the person with the lowest and the person with the highest estimate to discuss why they differ. This usually results in highlighting the different perceptions of the user story and helps clarify other aspect previously unknown to the story. The person with the lowest estimate might know something that will make implementation easier or the person with the highest estimate might know some other implications that the other person didn't.
   
4. At this time other people might jump in to add extra knowledge to the story if they think this will help.
5. After a short discussion a new voting is started, if not the estimates are very close to each other that is.
6. If the estimates are still not the same, pick an average.
7. In rare cases we allow a third vote if the team agrees.
   

Using a team to do the estimates has several advantages:

• If one person is doing the estimate, it’s not definite that he’s the person to implementing the functionality, making his estimate less valid. I’ve never understood people doing estimate for others.
  
• If only one person does the estimate, he estimate is based on his background and his knowledge.
• Having several people with different experience, knowledge and perception to agree on an estimate, usually results in a better result. It will usually help people visualize aspects of a functionality that was previously unknown the one person.
• It’s more fun!
  

Later I'm thinking of talking about:

• The anchoring effect
• Story points vs. days
• Why does planning poker work?
  

I've been waiting a long time for this. I remember this was one of the things with Google Reader I found annoying. A Google product accessing a lot of data and no search support? Anyway, now it's here, and it works as expected :) First thing I noticed was a search that found 500 items, only showed the first 60. Hmmmm..., that was no fun. No paging or anything. But then I noticed it automatically loaded new items when I scrolled to the bottom. Nice!

Another not so new feature is the increased unread counter. Previously, if you had more than 100 unread items it displayed 100+, now it's increased to 1000 and if exceeded will show 1000+.

I've been using both Install Shield and Wise (Wise Installation Studio) for some time now and have mixed experience with both, but one thing puzzles me about Wise; there's no support for Application Pools! The IIS dialog in Wise only has support for IIS 5 features. I just can't fathom how they can keep releasing new versions of Wise without supporting IIS 6/7. Are no one using Wise for deploying web apps, web services etc? Are Install Shield the only choice for (advanced) plain Msi's?

Back in December 2006 I requested this feature from Wise on their forum and I got this answer:

“I've run it past the product manager, and there is no specific timescale for adding application pool support. I know it's come up once or twice before, but I think the overall demand is not significant enough to priorities this feature ahead of others.”

On their website they list key features and one of them is:

“Supports the latest technologies, including virtual applications and Microsoft Windows Vista.”

Fantastic! But no app pools! Later someone else requested this feature on my thread and Wise finally added a link where you can subscribe to this feature request. The more subscribers, the more attention it gets. Want to help me Wise out? Visit: https://kb.altiris.com/display/1n/articleDirect/index.asp?aid=3066&r=0.7956964 and click subscribe/unsubscribe on the right side, and hopefully this feature request will get Altiris Symantec's attention.

Update: At TechEd Barcelona Microsoft announced today (2007-11-05) that Visual Studio 2008 and .Net Framework 3.5 will release in late November. See the official press release here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/nov07/11-05TechEdDevelopersPR.mspx

I’m at the Microsoft Partner Conference in Devner where Microsoft just announced the release date for Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008. Look forward to February 27!

Did you know about this? Have you heard about it before? I didn’t have a clue before I saw Roy Osherove blog post. It turns out that this was the perfect solution for me and my family. I have now integrated my domain (torresdal.net) with Google email and other nice features of Google Apps. Before I always redirected my domain email to my work email. Now I can manage my private emails in a separate location, which is what I really want.

In addition to email there were a couple of other features I found interesting. My fiancée and I found the Google Calendar really useful. Finally we had a common calendar which was easy to use and easily accessible. In addition to those I’ve already mentioned a Start Page, Chat, Web Pages and Docs and Spreadsheets was also included in the service.

So if you have your own custom domain and want to use Gmail/Chat with yourname@yourdomain.com, Google App’s should be a nice solution. Not that I’ve tried or looked for anything else, I just tried this service and found it very useful.

If you’ve installed Office 2007 yet, you’re probably aware of the new preview feature in Outlook. By default all Office attachments can be previewed inside Outlook. Thanks to Ryan Gregg you can now preview PDF documents as well. Go check it out!