June 2006 Entries
Having just bought an M4, and subsequently having NOTHING but problems with it since the day I bought it, I managed to get it returned today.
In case you missed it as I did because I was at TechED, the Tecra M7 was introduced. It should start shipping within a week or two. I am getting one of these babies instead of the M4 for obvious reasons.
The M4 seemed nice, but I must have gotten a lemon or something, the HD came in DOA (so I bought a new one instead of waiting for them to replace it...), Then the thing started heating up all the time, even under XP, and the touchpad never worked right but I could almost ignore it until I just saw this thing getting worse by the day.
Hopefully the M7 takes care of the heat problem, but who knows... I do think this may be better for my main machine over the next couple years and should run Vista better than the M4 does. Besides, I REALLY wanted a widescreen tablet.
About a year ago, I very seriously committed to writing a new Blog Engine. Then life hit the fan and I had absolutely 0 time for extracurricular activities. In fact I have been lucky over the last year to find time to breathe, my life completely turned upside down and the dust is still only just starting to settle.
I still want to write the engine, and my main motivation is still to make one that is completely SOA and built on WCF, so I can learn WCF inside and out with a real project. Furthermore I wanted an engine that can be plugged into anything, like DNN, Sharepoint, its own UI, a new one someone else wants to build, or extended in ways you can't achieve with the rigid architecture most so-called engines have.
Meanwhile, I thought about upgrading DotText to Community Server but I really don't want CS for various reasons I don't really want to talk about. It's great software, but it doesn't fit in with the way I want to use a blog engine. I also really like Drupal but that's PHP and also doesn't really fit in with the way I want to use a blog engine.
So until the world stops spinning and I have some time really make my engine, which is just that... an engine, not the whole dang Train! I am going to upgrade to Subtext. Why? Because it is a fork of what I am already using and what I am comfortable with; its open source and it has a nice conversion path from DotText.
I only recently found out about Subtext because Tim Heuer just upgraded to it (for some of the same reasons apparently), thanks for the tip Tim.
I think that before I sit down and do my engine, I will find enough time to write my Publish to Blog addin for OneNote 2007.
This is a GREAT tool for tracking your conversations. I get so frustrated when I can't remember where I left a post asking about something important (or at least something I was curious about) and then have to google around for a while to track it down (if even possible)
With CoComment Enabled Sites, your conversations are all stored in a handy place where you can get at them, read and search them, then look for responses. First Rate, hopefully more people will enable their sites to support this great tool. Speaking of which... my site doesn't support it (yet) because I am still using DotText version 0.95 (yes, I know... how lame... but not for long)
I can't help but wonder if this guy was Beta Testing Vista...
If you haven't heard there are some complaints about how Vista tends to make your laptop get really hot.
Personally, I don't think my machine gets any hotter under Vista than it does under XP, but I tend to stress XP really hard running in Tablet Edition with at least 2 SQL servers and possibly a VPC running all the time. My M4 gets MUCH hotter than my M200 ever did unless I throttle down the processor.
I blame this is a problem on the hardware manufacturers instead of targetting the blame inappropriately at software causing stress. This is rediculous actually, the software should be able to take full advantage of the stuff in your machine without running the risk of causing an international incident on an airplane.
So what will happen when a laptop with bad batteries finally catches fire on a plane? Will they ban laptop as well as lighters? Who knows, but this is getting rediculous, there are enough geniuses out there and enough technology to make a better battery than we have today, so what's holding them up? Can't really blame big oil for this one, or can we?
If you have never been to one of the TechED Jam Session, you are missing one of the most fun aspects of TechED, Geeks of all talent levels get up on stage and perform. It can be surprising just how talented some of these guys are, others you can see why they are buried in a server room all day :-)
Here is a brief video of one of the better Jam Session songs I heard (and recorded) this year. This will give you an idea of what they are like.
Also, if you don't yet know about YouTube, it was mentioned by at least 3 presenters I talked to this year, it's a pretty interesting concept and a decent place to post your public VBlog videos. VideoBlogging is becoming more popular (like podcasts, only with video) when a real Video iPod comes out (speculative image...) I am sure I will be subscribing to alot more of them.
I have been thinking about some ways to combine two new features of SQL 2005 to do some very complex Hierarchies without having to resort to using SQL Explicit and really confusing, verbose scripts. Those two Features are For XML and Recursion.
I attended the two deep dive sessions for each of these today and have a few take-aways that are going to help me to formulate my ideas around this.
First, in the XML Deep Dive, Michael Rys gave a little more detail than he was able to at last year's PDC session that I attended. Here are some features that I am going to definitely be using in my development:
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Type directive - Enables you to return an XMLDocument datatype to ADO instead of raw text strings, the primary advantage here is that you don't need to use a SQL Datareader to concatenate all the XML results any more. Just tack it on like this… "select * from orders for xml auto, type"
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Path Mode - This lets you rename the elements returned easily, path('myelement') returns <myelement> instead of the table name.
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With XmlNamespaces - Allows you to set specific namespaces for the elements
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Wrapper Elements through Column Aliasing and Nested Subqueries to support additional hierarchies
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XslNil to support empty elements
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Root directive to support adding a Root element - i.e. root('MyRoot')
One thing I was disappointed to hear is that "Group By" is still not allowed explicitly you have to hide it some way, like in this previous article I wrote for aggregates.
UPDATE: I was totally wrong about this, I guess I misunderstood, I feel like an idiot now for not just trying it... Group By works fine when structured like this
Itzik Ben-Gan gave a great presentation on doing recursion effectively. I really got a lot out of his advanced techniques for using CTEs (Common Table Expressions).
Consider using CTEs when you need to retrieve self joins that exhibit nested hierarchies in your data such as an OrgChart (so and so reports to so and so…) or Part Kits, Kits are a list of parts that may contain other Kits.
Sometimes people resorted to using cursors or temp tables to achieve these results in the past, now there is a very efficient way to do this type of recursion in SQL Server.
Recursion can be inefficient when it needs to replicate a lot of data to call itself, but the SQL Team decided to internally do all recursion as loops which are much more efficient. There is still a safety net to prevent non-terminating loops (usually due to data errors) which you may turn off programmatically if you are really sure you want to do infinite recursion. The MaxRecursion property is not something you should use to limit data either, you should be doing this with a proper recursion level counter as one of your rows and jump out at whatever threshold you set, also, you should be doing boolean tests to find repeating cycles so that infinite loops are avoided.
There is now a RowNumber() function that is extremely fast and with a little though about recursion can be used for on the fly sorting in hierarchical recordsets. This can really improve your performance over sorting by non-indexed text fields and doing multiple sorts in hierarchies. I'll post more about that in a future article.
Now, putting all of this together, I am sure that I can create very efficient and very fast ways of creating Hierarchies that involve nested joins, recursion, subqueries and aggregates (all at the same time) that where either impossible or at best extremely difficult in the past. When I have some time to organize my thoughts about this when I get back from the conference I will write up an article that talks about it in detail.
Microsoft Officially Announces SQL Server 2005 - Everywhere Edition.
Have you every wanted to just access some LOCAL data on your laptop without having to install SQL Express or some other server system just to store some info? Of course you have, most of us have used things like access .MDB files, XML, or even raw text to do this in the past, now we have the option of storing SQL Server data locally and further have the ability to sync and merge with a server on a remote network for occasionally connected systems.
If you have done any Mobile Development for PDAs or Tablets then you may know there is the option of SQL Mobile… That is essentially what this is (renamed), but it is being greatly enhanced. Some of the internal enhancement I can't talk about yet, but here is what I can:
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Licensing - Free (essentially the same as SQL Express) now available on XP/2003/Vista as well
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Database Size Limit - 4Gb (not set in stone, but most likely)
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Runtime Size - 1.4Mb - running In Process with your App (including Office Apps for VSTO developers)
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This means no server to install, just some DLLs that are independent from anything else and can just be added/removed without harming any other app on your system.
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Single Data File(.sdf) - no transaction log, etc.
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Sync with a backend SQL Server through Merge & Replication - (More than just RDA soon)
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Differencing Tools in the ADO.NET extensions (MergeUpdated(), MergeInserts(), MergeDeletes())
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Complete control over collision handling so you can choose client wins, Server wins or create a custom solution because you have access to both sides of the colliding row.
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Multi-connection support so you can run multiple background processes on the same file.
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Windows can handle the ACL on the file so you can lock the file to a group of domain users, etc.
For just replicating server data locally for partially disconnected access this will really be useful. I look forward to installing and testing the CTP that is now available here.
I think this is my 5th TechED, maybe the 6th… and I have been going to developer events since the 2nd VBITS (i.o.w., a long time)
This year my general feelings about the show at mid-week are:
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The food is good, better than average, no Oranges or Bananas? Where are we Bangor or Boston? Refrigerators instead of everything in Ice is great, no wet hands. There is PLENTY of Ice Cream… but this is Boston, not San Diego, Orlando or Dallas where we really needed it :-)
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WIRELESS FINALLY WORKS! - At the Biggest and Baddest Tech Convention you'd think this would be a no-brainer, but I swear this is the first year I have not been running around looking for a wired connection. Wireless works fast, and it works EVERYWHERE, Thank you, this is beyond acceptible now, it's awesome.
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The Sessions… They are all pretty good as usual, I am learning several things, some notable people and Microsoft mucky-mucks are missing… is this a sign of a changing of the guard, maybe, I really don't know but it surprised me that (not naming names…) wasn't here with WCF almost Live (by live, I mean its actually usable for creating programs now) and Vista being released in the Fall, Winter or is it Spring :-)
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The "Technical Learning Center" is OK, but it's not the Cabanas, there is too much marketing in them now., I don't want a sale pitch on how great WPF is, I want to look at the tools and ask questions from the developers about how to best write code in the new environment that get answered. I'm not really compelled to hang out down there.
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Travel. this is the gripe of the year, the Buses SUCK... I don't care if there is a transport strike or whatever, that has nothing to do with it. My average time from room to seat is OVER 40 minutes, this is one of the closer hotels… I don't know what could be done to improve this, it's Boston's problem, not the Conference organizers. There is no subway that even goes to the convention center… it might as well be out in the middle of the ocean.
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Not enough purchasable Conference shirts… They were gone the first day, glad I got one, but the styles were really plain, not exciting. How about some better conference specific shirts, people buy them up when they are available and look nice, nobody really cares about collecting a TechED Polo or Twill shirt so making them rare is not cool.
Best TechED? No… In fact, I am disappointed, with no PDC this year, Betas Galore and Vista right around the corner this should be an overwhelming TechED, I have found it really light and ho-hum as far as excitement in the air goes. Maybe I am just getting old and all this stuff seems simple now, I really hope that's not the case :-) I really hate to sound bitchy, but I think it could be better. Am I glad I came? Absolutely! Did I get my money's worth? YES! (and no, I didn't get in for free...)
Two Sessions I attended were about WF (Windows Workflow Foundation) I am really starting to get the notion that this is just not ready for primetime yet. Speakers almost always have the disclaimer that there is a some stuff missing that is planned for the next release. Does this mean that you shouldn't plan to use WF now? Not at all, I think the sooner you can start creating design patterns that incorporate the new API the better off you will be in your long term maintenance. What you should be clear about is WHY you want to use an API and how your applications will benefit from it. If there are just a few areas that can benefit greatly from this technology then by all means start using it. If you want easy examples and functionality that will reduce the amount of code you need to support complex tasks, then maybe you should wait.
Having said that… the first session was an overview of what I am going to call "The Triumvirate of SOA". This is the SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) design pattern that Microsoft will be pushing over the next couple years for people to incorporate into their system architectures.
This triumvirate is the combination of:
A brief note about each of these…
WCF is Indigo, it is the foundation of Webservices in Vista, but it is also an API for XP/2003 flavor OSes. Anything you write that is WSE 3.0 compliant will work with WCF. If you need more info, use a search engine :-)
WF, Workflow Foundation (note they dropped the second W) is a new API that sort of extracts the workflow stuff out of Biztalk, though the codebase is completely different and certainly not a replacement for Biztalk if you need that level of interoperability. WF will allow you to (eventually) incorporate complete workflow elements into your applications in a consistent and (hopefully) simple way. What is included in the API is a Designer plug-in for VS2005 that operates on workflows so you can create flows with a GUI and generate code. It looks very similar to the Class Viewer and most of the other designer tools in VSTS. Workflow can be created as State Machines or for Procedural flows.
WCS is the really new guy on the block… This was InfoCard and has been renamed. I think many people are getting the wrong idea about what WCS is. WCS is not a replacement for Passport (Live ID), nor does it replace Windows authentication or any other form of authentication. WCS is an abstraction layer and a portfolio to hold other IDs. These IDs can be just about any type of Security Token, be it X509 Certificates, Username/Password combinations, or a Passport. WCS is a hook into security that when enabled will hopefully allow Grandma to be more comfortable with all these security tokens. What happens is that when you are presented with a request for authentication, WCS wil allow you to choose from the tokens you have told it you have, or the ones it knows about and present you with the opportunity to choose one. So when you choose to use "card A" for Website A it remember and knows that this is the token you use for that and just passes along the token to the site. This works for any application (be it web app or windows app that supports CardSpace.
It is going to take some time for vendors to build this in, but it appears to be in the right direction, Microsoft in not trying to control who the authentication source is (like Passport) but is just a handy place to store all the security tokens to be passed along to the appropriate application at the user's choice.
The ever popular Ted Pattison gave a nice presentation about the new model for Sharepoint Webpart in Sharepoint 2007. Webparts have been redone and now inherit from the ASP.NET 2.0 Base Class rather than the Sharepoint Library… In fact, the new model will extend the ASP model by adding persistence to a virtual filesystem for Sharepoint and a few other methods and properties to allow them to fit in to the Sharepoint system more seamlessly than a raw ASP Object. Fear not though, your old Webparts will run just fine as is with no recompile, they will just have a different parent than a new Webpart.
Additionally he covered how to make "hybrid" webparts where you take all the code in your production Webparts and port them over to the new Object Model; as well as briefly customizing extensible field types.
I will just point to the new features rather than re-describing them here.
We received a copy of SP2007 Beta 2 and I really look forward to installing this when I get home and starting to work with it. Remember folks... This is Version “3” of Sharepoint which means it is when Microsoft finally “gets it right” :-)
Richard Campbell delivered an "as always" great session about SQL Query optimization, this year his special flavor of tools extend to differences in SQL 2005 and where very enlightening.
update: Here's the code.
One thing he covers has always been the fabulous Rozenshtein method of doing Crosstabs (Pivot tables) While this is not really necessary since we have the Case Statement; it is quite useful when you need to create something that will run in virtually any database that supports SQL statements or when you need to create dynamic SQL and for some reason can't use a Stored Procedure.
He noted the still persistent problem of crosstabs in SQL 2005 with the new Pivot Command. While this does help, it still forces you to hard code the column names or build the SQL Dynamically (which will bypass the compiler and optimizer). If you want to know the real reason for this, it's because the low-level plumbing is extremely difficult to achieve in a performant way and will most likely be included in a future release when they can pound the algorithms down to improve performance.
Another noted example is to get rid of cursors by using temp tables (and Table Variables I might add).
Also covered was the new Ranking commands in SQL 2005, and how to simulate them (with small differences) in SQL 2000.
Overall a most enjoyable session, Thanks Richard.
Ray Ozzie makes an introduction by using Microsoft Virtual Earth to show the highlights of his carrer thus far. I found this very interesting as I did not know he worked on Visicalc in addition to Lotus 1-2-3. His leadership projects began with Lotus Symphony followed by Lotus Notes and finally Groove. He demonstrated how Groove works and how it has become the basis for Office Server 2007 since Microsoft acquired Groove.
Coupled with Sharepoint 2007 (more about that later) this looks like a terrific platform for collaboration. I really like all this integration we are finally seeing so that all the tools work together as a whole, this has always been promised and promoted but in practicality rarely succeeds in real integration.
Ray went on to predict that a wave of disruption is coming fueled by the migration to SOA and its widespread adoption by architects of web applications. Though he did not say this, I believe this wave has already crested and is about to come crashing down largely due to the mass move to AJAX (led mostly by Google) as an integral part of web development. The applications we are seeing architected now nearly all focus on integrating AJAX into them. I know all my web development involves AJAX and ATLAS as a foundation.
Ray briefly promoted Exchange Hosted Services which most people are just starting to learn about. He also announced the release of Microsoft Forefront - Microsoft's official name for its client-side anti-virus and anti-spyware system. This will be able to be tightly coupled with policies on a corporate server (through Antigen) and can set a new standard in corporate security.
The Diva of IT, Mary Lynn Rajskub (Chloe of the Series "24") makes several appearances which provided comic relief. There were 4 skits based on the theme of 24 that were pretty lame, but no worse than any former low-budget adaptation made for keynotes...
Bob Muglia presents a series of demos on virtualization. He announces that virtualization will be an included (read free) component of Longhorn Server, along with several "enhancements" to Terminal Services, but will follow the initial release of Longhorn Server by approximately 6 months (probably Service Pack 1 or Release 2) and noted that packages built on Virtual Server 2005 R2 will be forward compatible so we can start building those infrastructures now and know they will be compatible for the future. I really liked the demo of a wizard that takes a physical application, packages it up and moves it to virtualization. As we move to multi-core processors and servers with many of them, this will start to become more important to all businesses.
The Imaging technology in Vista looks fabulous, I gave up on Ghost long ago and have been somewhat happy with Acronis True Image for my imaging. One feature that was cool was the ability to drill down into an image to see and modify how it is put together, even to the granular level of changing the IE Start Page, etc. This image can then be deployed through the new System Image Manager which is part of the new centralized System Center Operations Manager (which combines MOM and SMS with some other tools) All the images demoed where running on Virtual PC 2004, so it looks like the VHD format is forward and backward compatible.
Compute Cluster Server was announced as being RTM. This will bring HPC (High Performance Computing) into the mainstream so we can build servers in a small to medium business that leverages multi-core, multi-processor servers. As the price of these machines plummet over the next few year Clustering as well as Virtualization is going to make a lot of sense for smaller companies, not just enterprise grade systems.
The demo here was to take an Excel spreadsheet that is going to perform a compute intensive task and send that task out to a clustered server for processing. The processing was done in a fraction of the time that it took to perform the same operation on a desktop grade machine. This make real sense for several reasons and by being able to queue up tasks for processing we can task out that big hardware to make the most out of it. Imagine having a commodity priced mainframe in your office, this is now a very real possibility and is Microsoft's answers to Sun's Grid computing.
Back to Sharepoint… As I previously mentioned, Groove has been placed into the Office system and is also integrated into the new Sharepoint Server 2007, with this release we should start to see many more companies installing and getting real benefit from Sharepoint as a centralized repository for Office Documents. With Workflow, Document Libraries and Collaboration tools, this looks to be a great system for even smaller offices to move their documents over to Sharepoint as a Repository.
Expression Design Suite adds some new feature in the May CTP and the demos were somewhat interesting, this is still probably not going to be widely used even though XAML looks terrific, the typical bandwidth will make multi-video and animation not very typical for most web applications. As bandwidth price continue to fall we will start to see this become more prevalent in the next few years, but you can be assured that there are tools ready to accomplish this now in a way that makes sense. Hand coding apps is finally moving to the impossible and apps built with notepad are just not going to be realistic.
Release dates of note:
- Office Enterprise System 2007 - October 2006
- Sharepoint Server 2007 - October 2006
- Exchange Server 2007 - Beta 2 in July
- Live Communication Server v.Next - sometime in 2007
Overall this was a great start to an exciting week for learning the right direction to take for the next year or two in development. I look forward to learning more about the current state of some of these technologies throughout the week.
The API for OneNote 2007 look terrific from the What's New description.
Hopefully I can spend some time with this soon and write a “Publish to Blog” Add-in that I have been putting off forever. If I can just figure out where IOneNoteAddIn is located... its doesn't appear to be in the Microsoft.Office.Interop.OneNote library.
I just read that Robert is leaving Microsoft to go back to Silicon Valley.
http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2006/06/10/correcting-the-record-about-microsoft/
I wish Robert all the best luck in his new move to do more Video Blogging.
If anyone can launch a new community interface and make it mainstream, Robert can. What he did with Channel 9 is nothing short of amazing.
“He put a human face on the company during a time when many in the tech community were still upset with the company” - Tom Foremski
This is somewhat big news... Just as we are getting comfortable with the 2.0 Framework, here comes 3.0
Robert McLaws points out that S. "Soma" Somasegar revealed the news today.
Most of us in the development community knew this was coming, but now it's official.
All the Vista Framework is going to be .Net Framework 3.0: WCF (Indigo), WPF (Avalon) and WCS (InfoCard)
That most likely also means that the delivery date of VS2007 (Orcas) will be synchronous with Vista, or at least right on its heels. They have also previously promised us that these 3 will work on XP/Server 2003 but that still remains to be seen, I'll dig around for official word on this at TechED.
I tried to log into the MSDN Subscriber sites under IE7 on Vista Beta 2 and had a rude surprise. IE7 launched about 20 tabs that all were broken and basically refused to let me log in. It's probably some security setting in IE7 or Vista Beta 2 but it sure doesn't handle this very gracefully.
Here is some tech that looks very promising: http://www.sciencentral.com/articles/view.php3?type=article&article_id=218392803
Could an advance similar to this finally be the thing Robert Heinlein described in his novel Friday?
“Daniel Bridgestone figured out a way of storing power - a kind of an improved battery, but in the sense that a thermonuclear bomb can be described as an improved firecracker.” - Robert A. Heinlein
In the novel, the inventor just churned out so many that he made energy nearly free. He states that there is power everywhere, we just need a better way of storing it. Of course this is an astounding truth; who needs oil when we could effectively charge and store energy in seconds from the sun. The biggest problem with solar power today is the means in which to store it.
I do not speak out of ignorance here, I have a house that has run off solar power for the last 7 years. My biggest beef has always been with the batteries, I have plenty of power, the batteries just take too long to charge.
I look forward to the day technology finally catches up to need and power is ubiquitous; not really even considered as something that drives the economy.
I just found a nice Hook Script that I am now using for editing Log Messages when needed.
http://cs.ferncrk.com/blogs/stuart/archive/2006/03/19/subversion_revision_property_change_script.aspx
I added a small change and wrapped the actual work in a if block that checks for a specific user so that only the specific admin I want making these changes can actually make a change to the Log Messages instead of allowing everyone to do it.
I plan to develop a few more hook scripts for Repositories runing on Windows Server 2003 since there are not many of them to see as examples. One I specifically want is an incremental backup for each commit without resorting to Python, Windows Scripting is fine for this sort of stuff.
First Impressions... Well, ok Second Impression, I used Beta 1 too, but had some wierdnesses that I wanted to wait for Beta 2 before mentioning anything, they are all resolved.
Nice upgrade... Not earth shattering (well, maybe a little) but, extremely useful missing features have been added.
I also don't quite think this is on par with the rest of Office 2007 in terms of major changes, it seems like this was thrown into Office 2007 when it looks more like it fits into Office 2003... Oh well, that's just a visual thing because of the toolbar changing to ribbons in the rest of Office. Another strange visual effect was the change in the default skin and no way to get the old one back... I liked having my Title Block in a separate color, but c'est la vie, not that big of a deal, I'm sure there were complaints about having more space available... Can you say F11? (full page view... nice)
One thing I pleaded for is in here <HURRAY> Drawing Tools </HURRAY>
This means that you can have photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one... inside OneNote (if you don't get that go here...) Additionally you can draw perfect lines, rectangles, diamonds, triangles, parallelograms and cartesian grids with ease. I use this feature constantly.
Secondly, Synchronizing Notebooks between two machines was sort of a hassle, I was doing it with a 1g SD card (and I still do, but it is easier to prevent overwriting beacause OneNote now does a real sync... I tested it with editing the same line in the same Notebook on two offline machines then syncing and it worked perfectly, I did NOT expect that, AWESOME!
I will be installing the Beta for SharePoint 2007 soon so we will see how that integration works. Shared Notebooks were a HUGE missing feature that I wanted way back when... You can store Notebooks in Document Libraries now and they will autosync or allow shared live editing.
While browsing around the new info I stumbled on this:
What is that I see? a WinAmp Icon in a Microsoft Help Document? I pretty much guarantee that will disappear quietly before production... :-) It's on the OneNote Mobile page of “More Cool Features“
OneNote Mobile... I can't try it because I have an Audiovox VX6600, I would love to have this, but it looks like it is rather limted, I will just have to settle for the improved “Copied From Device” function. This works really well for me, except for one thing, ink from the phone mysteriously disappears if you edit a note and undo doesn't bring it back, text is all fine.
ONM doesn't support ink anyway so I don't see how that would help. Who the heck really takes notes on a smartphone... That is why I have a PDA Phone!
Also, I have to rely on TimeStamps to move pictures off the phone into OneNote, there is no way to browse thumbnails, in fact, I have to either do a copy/convert when accessing “Mobile Device“ which is a hassle... OR pull the Storage Card out of my phoine and put it in my laptop which is also... You guessed it, a hassle.
Since I have Activesync running under bluetooth it would be a heck of a lot easier if I could just browse the device and drop a picture into OneNote. Make Text in Image Searchable Rocks! this is really useful, but only if you have a really good image to work with, 640x480 doesn't usually cut it.
Dragging and Dropping pages is greatly improved! Using select page/move page to/another section was always an annoyance.
Calculator - This feature is great, I no longer have to switch over to one of my dedicated Tablet calculators unless I want to handwrite calculations.
Attaching a file in a note is now a bit more intuitive, it was fixed in an earlier service pack, but not as nicely as it works now, with all 3 options (link/copy/embed printout) presented when I drop a file onto the note.
Send To Word is nicer, Save to PDF is AWESOME! (hopefully this isn't removed by litigators), almost no one knows what an XPS even is yet, so I won't go there.
Unfortunately copying Code from VS2005 STILL DOES NOT RETAIN COLOR INFORMATION... major bummer, I still have to copy to Word, then Cut from Word and Paste into OneNote, the problem is bizarre to says the least... if Word can retain that info from the Clipboard, OneNote certainly should be able to as well. I am so used to doing it now its almost intuitive, but it could save me alot of grief for when I do Code Reviews if I could eliminate this step.
Overall, after using the new Beta 2 for a few days my impressions are very positive, sure there are a few more things I would like to have in OneNote, but for what it is and what it does, I feel it is BY FAR the most useful, friendly and snag-free notekeeping program out there.
Vista, Office 2007, Team Foundation Server, WPF, WCF, WWF and other assorted W*Fs, this year is going to rock.
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