Robin Paardekam

More discoveries regarding Windows 7

Robin Paardekam — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 08:46:00 GMT

It's months ago since I wrote my last blog post. It was about the things I did like about Windows 7. Now that the RTM is released for Technet and MSDN subscribers, I replaced the RC that I was running with this RTM, UIltimate edition. There are some more interesting changes I found which probably are worth mentioning here. This time however I'd like to point out some rather nasty findings as well. More pictures will be added soon.

Burn ISO files from context menu.
Too bad only "burn" is available, I'd rather see "mount", but this definitely is a step in the right direction.

Simple way of setting up a homegroup.
I currently use two machines which both run Windows 7. I use the same workgroup on both machines, but I believe even with different workgroup names, they both discover each other and will notify you about the possiblities to easily share pictures, music, etc. You can define what to share and with whom very easily, and only if you enter the (automatically generated) right password you will be able to join another's homegroup. An easy and fast way of setting up home networking I must say.

Improved Paint layout and functionality.
Many of you will laugh about this, but I do think Paint has improved (finally). Ofcourse you still can' treally compare it with Adobe Photoshop, Paintshop Pro or Paint .NET, but for small, quick drawings or screendumps, etc. it works very well. The ribbon was added to "unify" the look 'n' feel of it together with other Microsoft applications and well, though it's not the best improvement I have ever seen, it does work rather well like this.

Faster network discovery & more compact Networking Center.
When I opened up the network environment I noticed how fast the network list got populated. It took just a few seconds before the list of hostnames got longer and longer. I am certain this is a performance improvement compared to Vista nd earlier versions. Also the Network and Sharing Center is made a little more compact, showing you (almost) all information you need in one screen. One question still remains: am I the only one who thinks you need too many clicks before you see your IP-Address etc.? I was hoping you could find that information (maybe together with MAC-address) in just one simple click... unfortunately I was wrong.

"Play to" aka DLNA support in MediaPlayer.
When you own DLNA-certified devices you can hook it up with your Windows 7 PC to stream content like music, pictures and video to those devices, for example your TV. From the explorer context menu, as well as the MediaPlayer context menu on your Windows 7 machine you can initiate the stream and push it over to the device of your choice. The device will auto-sense the stream and will start playing it instantly! I don't own DLNA-devices myself but with two Windows 7 PC's you can stream from machine A to machine B as well so I did use it a little bit. I now wish I had a nice DLNA-certified HD TV!

Improved MediaCenter look 'n' feel.
The new MediaCenter application just had a small facelift. It's not a big difference, specially not for those who simply had a look at it in previous versions, but I used it quite often so for me it is an improvement seeing the new Music Library interface and the "Now playing" screen. All Album Art found in your library will be used as tiled wallpaper when playing music. It looks awesome if you ask me. When watching Live or Recorded TV and you navigate back to the main menu, the background shows a slightly faded out view of the footage that keeps playing. Most of the options and configurations seem untouched as far as I've seen.

Dynamic desktop wallpaper feed.
I accidentally came across a blog of someone who liked the new Bing searchengine look 'n' feel so much that he want to have the Bing-backgrounds as desktop wallpaper on his workstation. If you format your RSS-feed in a particular way, it can be used as an image-feed for your desktop. This seems to work in Windows Ultimate only btw.

Linking online ID's to local Windows 7 account.
You can connect your Windows Live ID directly to your Windows 7 profile. This way it's easier and faster to use Windows Live applications like Live Messenger, Writer and Image Gallery and it's mandatory to make your media library available through computers over the internet. Currently there's only one online ID provider available (which obviously is Microsoft Windows Live) but more will follow according to Microsoft. I did not manage to get this working on Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit I must add. On my 32-bit machines it worked fine.

System often freezes for several seconds / minutes.

Still no visualization of defragmentation.
I've used several third-party defragmentation tools in the past, for multiple reasons. What I do like about those other tools is that they all make visible how the defragmentation process is doing. It's visualized with these blocks that get moved around. A perfect representation of the "mental model" I have of defragmenting.

Unreliable MediaCenter performance.
One of the machines (the 64-bit) keeps crashing on MediaCenter. I could use it for about a day, but when I started it up again to make some screendumps it kept crashin hard. When opening the Music Library it simply shows a small error-box that there was an audio error. So when I then try to use the Search-option, it crashes within a second.

Things I like about Windows 7

Robin Paardekam — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 12:08:00 GMT

I am currently using the beta of Windows 7 and I must say I like it a lot. Here's a short list of things I "discovered". I must add that I use it in a VMware environment, I don't like the idea of a beta OS installed as main OS on my workstation.

Progress bars are now visualized within the (minimized) taskbar icons

Screen resolution can be accessed directly from the context menu on your desktop

A Snipping Tool is part of default installation (at least in the Ultimate edition)

New 'Libraries' in Explorer-view allowing you to use 'Favorites' in your folder-structures

Much friendlier BitLocker support (Some UI improvements, including the option to right-click on a drive to enable BitLocker protection, support for automatic creation of the hidden boot partition required for enabling BitLocker on an already-installed system (!!!) and support for encrypting multiple machines with the same key)

Immediate media-discovery within Windows Media Player 12 (WMP12) instead of waiting to be indexed your files get added to WMP right after you add them to your libraries, like My Music, My Videos etc.

Multi-download from Internet Explorer 8 - Wait no longer for your first 2 downloads to complete before you can start the next 2: you can download at least 4 files at the same time, I did not manage to test it's limits yet. I do think it's rather strange by the way that this is possible, because Microsoft's official reaction in the past about the 2-concurrent-downloads-limit was regarding standards that they wanted to be compliant to: RFC 2616, which covers HTTP1.1.

Ofcourse there's much more to mention, but this is what I quickly wanted to add to my blog at this moment. This probably is one of those "ongoing blog posts" where more stuff will get added to along the way.

Update issues on Windows Server 2008

Robin Paardekam — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 21:17:00 GMT

I experienced some problems using Windows Update on my Windows Server 2008 Standard machine. Now this is an old machine... really old I must say and I barely runs with this OS, but at least it works so I'll have to see about upgrading the hardware some day. The problem I had with the Update service in-the-end was not caused by these performance issues... Here's what happened:

When using Windows Update, several updates seemed to be available, both important and optional. When I tried installing these updates, I received error message 8024402C. The eventlog showed me it had something to do with WSUS, and I figured it had to do something with some kind of a SQL Server database as I noticed a database with that same name. After digging into the help files I found that was not the case: it had to do something with connectivity. One of the possible options the Help mentioned was switching my Internet Connection Settings, in particular to turn on the checkbox for automatic detection of the settings. Doing so unfortunately did not solve my problems. When I wanted to search online for more answers, it seemed that I could not view any website at all!

Looking at my network settings it seemed my only DNS server was set to 127.0.0.1 which was not that strange as I have the DNS Service running on that machine. Also, the websites which I host on this server opened up fine from another location, and the network icon showed I was connected to both local and internet so I assumed my internet connection was fine... yes it was indeed... for the outside world it was! I figured I needed to add another DNS server: I chose to add the IP address of my local router, as that does DNS resolving just fine, but I could probably have used my ISP's DNS as well. Doing so solved the issue: my internet connection worked fine from my server again, and the 8024402C message never appeared again!

Hope this helps other people as well who are struggling with this error. I must say I don't know why I had set my DNS-address to localhost only. I am sure to have viewed websites from my server before, so I think there are two options:

I changed the DNS setting myself, but I do not remember doing so.
I installed some fix/update/tool which altered my DNS setting

Whatever caused it, it now is solved! :)

The real story about DNS Security holes, geeks and hackers...

Robin Paardekam — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 14:25:00 GMT

I came across this article on Wired.com which I really could not stop reading once I started... About a geek who saved the internet. ;)

Very sensational and spectacular article (I know, it was already posted months ago on other websites, but for all people who had not yet seen it, here's the link)

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/16-12/ff_kaminsky?currentPage=all

100 SEO Tips

Robin Paardekam — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 08:56:00 GMT

Boris Veldhuijzen-Van Zanten wrote a great blogpost in which he requested his readers to come up with the best SEO-tips. He collected all remarks and created a list with them, which he then converted into a nice WordPress plugin. For all readers who do not use WordPress, I thought it would come in handy to publish the complete list just online. Here it is:

Google Base is a great place to submit all kinds of information that link back to you.
A few quality links can weigh much more than a lot of non related low quality ones.
About the URL's, consider using dashes between the words. not '%20' or '_'
Always set up 301 redirects for renamed or deleted pages.
Always use "alt" and "title" tags for images, flash objects and links.
Avoid people copying your content by checking regularly with Copyscape
Break larger pages into two or more smaller ones.
Browsers allow for bad html code, SE spiders are a different beast.
Build everything you want indexed so that it also works without javascript, flash, java, activex and css.
Build sites to pass an honest-to-goodness human inspection, and not just an algorithmic inspection.
Buy 299 Steps to Website Heaven. An invaluable guide to SEO for the SME
Buying backlinks is always a bad idea.
Check regularly for Dead Links or old links that are redirecting to something else.
Check that what you think you have done = what you have actually done.
Check that your site looks OK in all browsers before taking the time to promote it at browsercam.com
Choose menu labels that are intuitive for visitors and also make keyword sense (without stuffing).
Create a Google Gadget to promote your site.
Create a XML sitemap as well as the usual HTML one
Define a clear and measurable SEO goal.
Despite progress in indexing dynamic sites, static-looking still URLs do better, and are easier to remember.
Do not forget to offer other payment options giving details ( bank account number etc. )
Don't buy links from any company that offers to sell them to you - you'll be banned from Google for sure
Don't have keywords in small font or the same colour as the background of your site - it's classed as spam
Don't link back to "/index.html" but to the / root of your domain.
Don't neglect your sitemaps, don't leave broken links in them.
Don't think that being found for your company name is good - more people DON'T know your name than DO
Don't try and optimise a page for more than a couple of search phrases - it just won't work.
Don't use automated tools to submit to Google - it's against their terms and conditions and could get you banned
Don't use meta redirect, Google dislikes them.
Eliminate or make less prominent all links to fluff pages (like member profiles).
Ensure keywords used in titles and meta descriptions actually appear on the page and in significant numbers.
Ensure that secondary keywords appear towards the top of the page and are consistent with the primary topic.
Ensure what the Search bot sees = what the user sees.
Find out how to make the most of Web 2.0 PR by reading The New Rules of PR
Find out what keywords your target market is searching for at wordtracker.com
Find out where you competitors are advertising - that's where you should be too
Focus each page on one topic and make sure the page title and description tags are consistent.
Forget about 'cloaking' and other Black Hat techniques - you'll be found out eventually and banned!
Formulate a strategic (viral marketing) plan for more relevant inbound links to your website
Generate fresh content as often as possible.
Google and other search engines simply love sites that are regularly updated.
Google has more than 50 datacenters - find out where you are listed in them all
Google searches are NOT case sensitive. All letters, regardless of how you type them, will be understood as lower case.
Have a "verisign" or similar trustworthy certificate.
If you have a blog, start investing some time in community marketing, use blog friends for Facebook, and submit to Twitter.
If you offer more than one service, it may be worth investing in producing a few niche ‘mini sites’ to capitalise on niche and ultra targeted traffic.
Ignore the Meta Keywords tag; it has no value
Is your site "Client" focused or "We We" focused? Find out!
It’s tempting to only choose the phrases with the most searches to optimise for, but the key word is relevancy.....
Learn about 'anchor text' and use it where you can
Learn about Google Search Engine Ranking factors
Link out to quality external sites where appropriate.
Link to your less tasty pages from the site map.
Make sure that each page has a 'call to action' whether it be to sign up, click here or buy
Make sure the search phrases you are optimising for are included in the content of your site
Make sure whatever you're trying to sell/promote/accomplish is user friendly and your call to actions are clear.
Make sure you use accurate titles in pages, and avoid redundant phrases
Make sure you use valid html code.
Make sure you're targeting the correct keyphrases on your front page?
Meta tag that describes the page accurately in more detail, and motivates the searcher to click.
More pages of content mean more potential incoming links for your site = more traffic.
Never, ever, delete a 301 redirect.
No 301 or 302 redirects unless the URL has actually been changed
Participate in busy online communities that will give you valuable links to your website
Plan the site architecture using a rational naming hierarchy so that the folders make sense.
Plan the site so it can easily change when new web technology comes along. Be modular.
Redirect non-www to www or vice versa (domain name canonicalisation).
Register with Google Webmaster Tools to find out what Google really thinks of your site
Remember to delete the obsolete page from the server.
Run Zenu or similar for links out on page internal navigation
Schedule a "Search Engine Position Audit" in your schedule to make your results measurable.
Search Yahoo and Google at the same time and compare results.
Search Engine Genie’s Sandbox Checker will help you to see if you\'re in The Google Sandbox or not
Site optimalisation is more effective than simply a having keyword rich domain
Spiders don't look at a fancy CSS. Build with bot in mind, make sure the content is available and put the important stuff first.
Start a blog, search engines like fresh content. Actually, they LOVE it.
Stop bots from indexing pages which you don\'t want in the index, especially dynamic sections which have no relevance to the SERPs.
STOP optimising for single words and start thinking in terms of key PHRASES not keywords.
Stop using the 'reindex' META tag - no bot actually listens to it, especially not Google
Submit your website to reliable directories, and stay away from blackheads.
Take time out every now and then to review Google's Webmaster Guidelines
Think seriously about your META description tag - it’s what people are going to read in most cases when you show up in a search.
Thinking of blogging for business in order to help your SEO? Great idea - check out http://www.betterbusinessblogging.com/ first though
Title tag that accurately describes the subject of the page, contains the most important keyword (or two, or three if required).
To quote W3C, "Cool URIs don't change."
Treat search engines the same as visitors.
Try and eliminate the phrase "click here" from your site, and use your keyphrases instead
Unless you're a 301 redirect master, don't rename your pages.
Use a plugin like AddThis so users can easily submit your site to other social media.
Use consistent and correct server response codes
Use H1 tag once on the page, H2 for a few of the sub headers, and H3 for less important titles.
Use meta keywords tags, but with a few well-chosen keywords.
Use solid semantic structures. It makes a spider's job a whole lot easier.
Use the META tag content="noarchive" to keep search engines from showing the cached version of your site
Use the w3c validator on ALL of your pages, link to css and javascript docs, not inline.
user-friendly-url's (with dashes between words, not underscores)
When getting others to link to your website make sure they link to a relevant internal page, not just your front page
Write articles - they establish you as an expert and can be placed on sites such as Ezinearticles.com and feelgr8.co.uk
Use a script that will generate meta-tags out of the first 250 characters of the page itself.
Publish a WordPress Plugin to get people to link to your pages.

Installing Office Sharepoint Server 2007 on Windows Server 2008

Robin Paardekam — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 21:11:00 GMT

I tried installing MOSS2007 onto my freshly installed Windows Server 2008 machine but unfortunately I received an incompatibility exception, not allowing me to continue installation. This will probably be fixed soon, maybe with a Sharepoint update of some kind, but for now if you want to perform such an installation you'll have to slipstream the Windows Sharepoint Services Service Pack 3 and Office Sharepoint Server Service Pack 1 into the MOSS2007 setup-folder before starting the actual installation. I never had to perform such a slipstream-operation, but using the following screencast it was done within a few minutes. It's all about unpacking the service packs into the (already existing) updates-folder within the setup-folder of MOSS2007. Doing that will cause the installation to continue where it failed before. Easy as that!

I used the screencast just because it is very easy to follow and it only takes 8 minutes or so, but if you know how to extract an installer into a specific folder then you're actually done already.

Connecting to IIS 7.0 websites from Visual Studio (2005/2008)

Robin Paardekam — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 21:04:00 GMT

Yeterday I installed Windows Server 2008 Standard onto my "web/file/print/email/media server" at home. Installation went super smooth, configuration was quite intuitive. After I installed all components and the basic configurations were done I tried to setup some of my websites. The problems I experienced doing so:

By default, ASP.Net sites can not be visited "Anonymously". You'll have to define users for each .Net enabled website before they are shown to your anonymous visitors. Error pages are improved BTW, looks a lot nicer if you ask me.
Connecting to my sites using Visual Studio Team Suite 2005 from my regular workstation does not work. On Server 2003 I simply enabled Frontpage Server Extensions 2002 (FPSE) for each website, which was enough to connect to it from Visual Studio directly. Now in Server 2008 that's different. I did not do much with IIS 7 in Vista, so I am not used to the new IIS yet. I tried searching for FPSE there but without success. Then I found some answers using Google: FPSE is no longer supported! So how can I then connect to my sites directly from another location using Visual Studio!? There seems to be a strange unsupported fix for it, which I did not yet manage to get working on my server. I did get the Administration pages visible after installation, which state FPSE are indeed extended, but I did not yet manage to connect from Visual Studio. I will try some more later this week and will add any updates on this blog-post

2008/02/16 21:54 - As promised, here is an update regarding connecting to my Windows Server 2008 webserver, running IIS 7.0 and FPSE 2002 (as linked above). I just installed Active Directory Domain Services and DNS Server (because I will also be hosting MS Exchange on that machine), rebooted and voila! Connecting from my workstation (VS 2005) to my websites on Server 2008 magically works again! So either adding DNS or AD fixed my problem!

Converting Visual Studio Unit Tests from VS2005 to VS2008

Robin Paardekam — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 13:19:00 GMT

I am experiencing difficulties with converting one specific test-project from VS2005 to VS2008. I am hoping that one of the Bloggingabout.net bloggers / readers can help me with this.

I try to open an existing solutionfile (target 2.0, currently being used in Visual Studio 2005) in Visual Studio 2008 (Team System Developer Edition) but one of the projects won't load (this is a Visual Studio Test Project). Perhaps someone already experienced something similar? I tried several different solutionfiles, each of them containing one or multiple unit-test-projects and there's just one solution that does not load the test-project properly.

Here are some screenshots and other additional info that perhaps might give more insight in this issue.

The unit-test-framework assembly that's referenced in that project is versioned 8.0.0. I also found a version 9.0.0 but changing the reference does not change a thing regarding the actual conversion. Removing the reference from the project is not helping either.

The above image comes from VS2005 ofcourse, all following images are coming from VS2008. Opening the solution or the separate project in Visual Studio 2008 starts the Visual Studio Conversion Wizard.

When done converting the projects, the following messagebox pops up, indicating something went wrong:

The project in the Solution Explorer is then marked as "Unavailable" and unfortunately reloading the project is not going to change anything about it:

Looking at the UpgradeLog.XML, I noticed that the conversion resulted in ErrorLevel 3. Can anyone tell me what that stands for? Comparing it to other conversions this seems like "just a message, not an error" but maybe I just misinterpreted that ...

So, to cut a long story short: does anyone have a clue on how to get the MsTest-project available in VS2008? Or maybe you have some hints on where to start digging? Thanks in advance.

Some general tips for safe computer use

Robin Paardekam — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 06:41:00 GMT

Everytime I go over to friends or family to fix some kind of "computer problem" that they experience, I start telling the same tips 'n tricks over and over again about how to avoid spyware, how to keep your PC as tidy as possible, how to clean up your internet history, etc. Ofcourse many of them appreciate those tips but as soon as I'm gone, they forgot at least half of it.

This morning I ran into this article on wired.com in which a list of security tips, tricks and apps are mentioned. Let me give a short summary of some nice items in that list here.

Get a Firewall, Learn How to Use It
Install anti-spyware software
Turn on automatic updates in Windows XP
Secure your Wireless AP
Remove as many programs as possible
Tweak your PC's security, then back up the disk image

Just to name a few... I think this list can be very helpful, even for somewhat more experienced PC-users. Click this link to get the full list and read about the underlying thoughts and howto's. I have bookmarked it and will print it out as soon as I have another "PC-fix-appointment"... :)

Vista Sidebar Gadget - Countdown to "2008 Global Launch Wave"

Robin Paardekam — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 06:37:00 GMT

I just came across this nice little gadget that Microsoft offers to be used on your Vista desktop. It counts down the number of days until the "2008 Global Launch Wave" which will start on wednesday February 27th 2008. Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008 will then all be launched. Considering the fact that they came up with this gadget themselves, they must be pretty sure about this date. :)

You can download this gadget here. Note that the actual gadget will indeed refresh the counter, as the image in this blogpost will not.

Viewing Expert-Exchange comments without an account

Robin Paardekam — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 20:37:00 GMT

One of those things that can get really annoying after a few times, is clicking one of the searchresults in your favorite search-engine, which will navigate you to a site that then shows you that you need to signup. It happens to me everytime with Experts-Exhange.com. They manage to get their pages indexed by the Google crawler, so searching for some technical keywords will often result in links to Experts-Exchange. Most of the time I don't even look at the domain that a result comes from, I just look at the title and the compact piece of information in which my keywords were found. When I then happen to click a link of Experts-Exchange.com, I can read the problem-statement without problems, but then after scrolling a bit down to the answers of other forum-members, I see that all of that content has been scrambled to avoid me from reading that without paying a fee for the site... The first time that happened I was just impressed and laughed about it a little bit... but then when I keeps happening over-and-over again it gets quite annoying. Keeping the Dutch spirit alive (ons ben zunig) I refuse to signup for an account.

Click for larger image

When hovering over the individual answers, you get a signup-alert:

Click for larger image

I thought at first that signing up was for free, but clicking the link shows the following prices:

Click for larger image

Well.. it's easy to save money on this... I happened to try what happens when (in Google) I clicked the "In Cache" link and I must say I was kind-of surprised! It took me to the unscrambled version of the page!

Click for larger image

Clicking that showed me exactly the same page as before with 1 difference: it's not scrambled anymore! Here's a screendump of the accepted answer (does not happen to contain the technical solution, but you can see the text is readable... so are all other posts).

Click for larger image

My explanation for this "feature" :-) is that the Experts-Exchange page will not get scrambled when it detects the Googlebot crawler, as they want ALL TEXT to get indexed, so their posts will show up as search-results. That way, Google can easily index all content without any scrambling. When you as a regular visitor will go to that same page, scrambling gets enabled as you have a useragent that sounds like MSIE or Mozilla. This will probably work with many newspaper-sites as well who open up their articles for members only.

Anyway, I know now that whenever I click an Experts-Exchange link from the Google-results, I will go back and use the In Cache option to avoid the malformed contents on the next page. Maybe this happened to you as well, in that case you could take your advantage with this.

UPDATE June 28th 2007 @ 22:26 GMT+1
Sander had a great comment to this post which is worth while mentioning here. You could also add the Experts-exchange domain (with optional subdomain wildcard) to the list of restricted sites (assuming you're using Internet Explorer). This will cause the scramble script to be disabled, showing you all comments without any problems. Thanks Sander for the tip.

UPDATE July 24th 2007 @ 12:26 GMT+1
Unfortunately Sander's tip does not work any more. When you now visit Expert-Exchange, also all words in the comments are mixed up. So even when you look at the unscrambled text, you will still see meaningless words. So, using the Google Cache option now seems like the only way to read the comments successfully.

UPDATE June 3rd 2008 @ 12:37 GMT+1
For several weeks now Expert's Exchange is "publicly" viewable. Indeed when you just scroll down the answers are there, readable just fine. In both MSIE7 and FF. So it seems this post became obsolete.

DevDays 2007 Day 1 - ASP.Net highlights

Robin Paardekam — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 07:28:00 GMT

Day 1 of DevDays 2007 in Amsterdam RAI was a great success if you'd ask me. I have visited DevDays 2004 as well, and I remembered that I then found it very much like a big Microsoft commercial back then. This year however I really enjoyed the sessions by Scott Guthrie and Dino Esposito. I attended a lot of ASP.Net related sessions which really inspired me to add more Silverlight and AJAX components to my site(s). Also some information on when-and-how to apply LINQ was very interesting.

After this day I added some new bookmarks and RSS-feeds which may be worth viewing for you as well. Make sure that if you want to know more about Silverlight to view the posts on Scott Guthrie's blog on "Silverlight Airlines". That demo app. was really mind-blowing if you ask me. Now it's up to myself to create such rich user experiences. Somehow it always looks a lot easier when it's demonstrated... when trying to apply those tricks myself in my own applications, it always seems to be more difficult. :) As soon as some new Silverlight/AJAX page are live I will post it here so can give your honest opinion about it. Make sure to check out the following blogs to stay up-to-date about the most recent technologies:

Scott Guthrie's blog (check out his Silverlight postings)
Dino Esposit's blog (partial rendering using ASP.NET AJAX)

My first Silverlight animation using Expression Blend

Robin Paardekam — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 19:53:00 GMT

A few days ago I downloaded the May-preview of Expression Blend 2. I wanted to have a look at the Silverlight-options it offers. I was surprised to see that this download took not more then 26 Mb. After I installed it I had a first look at the darkgrey, industrial-looking interface. Except for the use of the grey colours it reminded me about Macromedia Flash. I played around a bit with Macromedia Flash several years ago and I guess that for designers who have experience using Flash, Blend will be very easy to use. It's quite intuitive once you get used to the collapsing panels and the lack of rightmouse-context menu's.

After previewing this 30-day trial of Blend 2 I decided to get the full-version of the current Blend version as well to create my first Silverlight application. I should have known that Silverlight is not an available projecttype in "Blend 1", it only offers projecttypes "Standard application (.exe)" and "Control Library". So if you want to create Silverlight animations you should have a look at the trial of Blend 2. I must admit that I did not have any difficulties creating animations using the timeline, but adding interactivity is a hurdle I have to overcome in the next few days. I think it has something to do with limited functionality in the preview: the controls-pane does not show any button-controls, where the "regular" version of Blend has a much more extended assetlibrary (one of those assets is the button control).

Additional information:

http://www.microsoft.com/expression (Expression-Suite website)
http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=6650604 (Webcasts regarding Expression products)

My first creation is attached to this post (it's a WMV-file, wrapped in a ZIP-file and it should show you a web-banner animation). I will probably work on some other Blend-projects in the next weeks so I will post those creations (or links to them) if it all works out well. Any hints on creating Silverlight projects are welcome!

Vista Sidebar - Webcam gadget

Robin Paardekam — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 01:42:00 GMT

Now that I am using Vista for several months, I got used to the sidebar gadgets quite fast. It's nice to have those small applications within reach and visible instantly. I thought it would be nice to play with gadget-development a little bit and found that no real configurable webcam gadgets were available yet so that would be a fun little project to experiment with. I found it is very easy to create these gadgets, as they are just tiny HTML-pages with some Javascript functionality. After developing a first version of my Webcam gadget I uploaded it to the Microsoft Live Gallery and within a week I got an email that it was actually published! It's nice to see that people actually want to view a webcam directly in their Vista sidebar, I know that I'd appreciate the functionality, but I was not sure if other people would like it as well.

If you use Vista and like to view a webcam of your choice in your sidebar, then you could view the Windows Live Gallery (category Miscellaneous) and download my webcam gadget. It is attached to this blog-post as well. In the settings-flyout you can define a live stream that you'd like to view, or an image-feed that gets refreshed at regular intervals. Any comments about the gadget are welcome ofcourse and if you like it, don't forget to rate 5 stars!

More info:	http://gallery.live.com/
	http://www.aeroxp.org/
	http://www.codeproject.com/

Search Engine Ranking Factors

Robin Paardekam — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 23:53:00 GMT

There are a lot of sites describing how you could improve your Google Pagerank. They usually don't add any real new information besides "Make sure you are being linked to", "Use proper META-tags", "Make sure all interesting keywords are used in your TITLE-tags and in the BODY of your documents". But here's a site that finally describes the real keytopics in Search Engine Optimization and how these factors are used to determine your PageRank.

Search Engine Ranking Factors V2

BTW: I personally think Windows Live Search crawls and indexes my sites a lot faster and much more complete then Google does but still I've noticed that Google just is used a lot more often. Let's hope that changes soon. :)