I prefer long running applications to be nicely docked to the system tray (the area where clock appears in Windows), IMs fall in the same category of applications.

Recently, when I installed Windows Live Messenger on my Windows 7 machine, I noticed that it would remain on the Taskbar and would not dock itself on the System Tray. I hated that. After struggling for sometime, I realized it will remain like that on Windows 7. I hated it even more. Some more search and research revealed that there is a workaround, if I could fix the compatibility. I didn’t believe that initially coz I thought that at least Microsoft’s Applications will be fully compatible with Windows 7. But I was wrong. The workaround helped.

To move Windows Live Messenger to System Tray on a Windows 7 machine, do the following:

1. Locate the Windows Live Messenger menu entry in the Start Menu > All Programs.
2. Right click and select ‘Properties’ to open the properties window for Windows Live Messenger application.
3. Switch to the ‘Compatibility’ tab and select ‘Run this program in compatibility mode for:’ check box, in the ‘Compatibility Mode’ section.
4. Select ‘Windows Vista (Service Pack 2)’ from the drop down list, indicating that you want to run Windows Live Messenger in Compatibility Mode for Windows Vista SP2.

Apply the changes and there goes your Windows Live Messenger to the System Tray. :)

Hoping that Microsoft will fix this soon.

This is rather very easy and most of you must be aware of how to deactivate Buzz in Gmail, but I struggled to find the option when I wanted to turn it off for the first time. So for others like me, I’ll mention the steps to hide Google Buzz from your Gmail in this post.

To turn off Google Buzz in your account, you need to login to your Gmail account and scroll down to the bottom of the page and locate the links in the second last line which looks like this -

Yes, there you have the ‘turn off buzz’ link. Click on that and you’ll not see the Buzz menu again in your Gmail until you turn it on.

To activate buzz, your will have to go to the same place as mentioned above and now you will see “turn on buzz”, if you have turned it off earlier, click on that link and the Buzz is all up again.

You want to chat with your Facebook friends without sharing your other IM id, but you don’t like the little clumsy chat box that Facebook provides. No worries, coz there’s a hidden chat interface that enables you to use a full size chat box which fills in your browser window.

Click here to access the Facebook’s full page chat interface

or open this URL in a new tab - http://www.facebook.com/presence/popout.php

[Update] My friend, AJ, reminded me, we could also get it from the Pop Out link in the small chat window. This link is hidden inside the “Options” button (refer to the below image)

That’s it! :)

This error is self explanatory in itself, but I was going nuts as my code behind file was all correct and still the browser was throwing this error back.

I had just migrated my blog and was trying to run it for the first time. This made me believe that some settings at the server side are going wrong. I tried all possible tweaks and wasted good amount of hours over this. Reconfigured everything again, but no luck!

Finally, I decided to remove the file because of which this exception was being thrown. It was an extension, so I removed all of the associated code files from the server and tried it again. And! It worked as if nothing happened ever.

Confused, and unable to understand the cause, I thought of redeploying those file from my previous backup. I did that and nothing broke! I guess there was some problem with the files that I migrated from my old server to new server.

Technically, not sure what it was. If you happen to know the issue / cause / resolution, please leave a comment about it. Thanks.

I’ve just completed a small extension for BlogEngine.NET which adds Facebook Sharing and Twitter – Retweeting options to your blog posts.

Here is a snapshot of how it would look -

Installing this extension is as easy as any other extension in BlogEngine.NET. If this is your first time, here are the steps -

1. Download the zip containing extension file from this page and extract it your local system.
2. Upload ‘TwitBookShare.cs’ file to the ‘App_Code\Extensions\’ directory on your blog installation.
3. Tweak your theme and add following style -

CSS-Code: Stylesheet Code

.fb_share_no_count{display:block!important;visibility:hidden;     }

This style keeps Facebook Share button on the same level as of the Tweet button when a post has not been shared even once.

I could also create this as a user control if someone needs it for embedding into a Theme. I will be adding a few more options to this extension to control the styles. Will update here once its done.

If you happen to use this, please do leave your feedback. :)

Download Extension here - TwitBookShare.zip (1.66 kb)