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: Locate the Windows Live Messenger menu entry in the Start Menu > All Programs. Right click and select ‘Properties’ to open the properties window for Windows Live Messenger application. Switch to the ‘Compatibility’ tab and select ‘Run this program in compatibility mode for:’ check box, in the ‘Compatibility Mode’ section. 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.

Today Google announced and released the Chromium OS - open source project. With a very clear focus on the users who spend most of their time on the WEB, this happens to be an Operating System which, though, would run on your local machine, yet, would operate and store the data on the 'cloud'. Yes there are many pros and cons to discuss but I would prefer to wait and watch instead of putting my time in developing a perspective just out of assumptions. This is an early stage and lots of efforts are being put into making this a reality for the end users. I am waiting.  

Sounds logical that the old browsers were created at a time when the web world was so much different than what it is right now. But how logical is it as a reason for creating a new Browser from scratch so that it could fit the new web of today? Think again, is it really needed? I mean really? I feel at the end of the day this is all about business and 'my' applications ruling the world! And everything else is just to get the dam'n thing in right place. People spending their hundreds of hours together to get the existing browsers like Mozilla FireFox, Safari, IE in the right shape, never thought about writing everything from scratch? Or may be they thought but didn't find it worth, because there is already a platform available which can be reused to build the right thing. May be some people did think about it and so we have the FireFox. (?) But when it came to Google, it had to create "it's own browser", no other way than to start from scratch, so what could be a better reason than to tell the people that it is the need of the hour! If you are mistaking that everything is from scratch, nopes! that's not the case. The Chrome team declares - "We've used components from Apple's WebKit and Mozilla's Firefox, among others - and in that spirit, we are making all of our code open source as well." (reference). Why could not Google contribute to the already existing open source browsers and make them Chrome? Firefox Chrome? Further, Chrome team states "We hope to collaborate with the entire community to help drive the web forward." (reference). I would read this as "We hope to collaborate with the entire community (Orkut, YouTube, Picasa, Other Google Network Sites) to help drive the web forward (to us - Google)." Not that I am Anti-Google or hate Chrome, the product looks promising and too good to hate. But, if I was Google, I would not have used the sugarcoated marketing strategy to lure the world, rather I would have taken courage to declare - I have a better browser for you, please try it once! - simple and straight. What I am not liking is the Googlistic way of positioning the product. (May be that's why I am not Google ;) ) Finally, I am worried about the Web Developers (read programmers and designers who sweat to build web and make it what it is and not just the brand Microsoft / Google / Yahoo) who would again spend hours to ensure everything works on one more browser now. If you are now thinking of writing-code-with-standards-solves-the-issue, please excuse me and ask the real developer how much it works, it still breaks! Stop this war (of Money & Fame?) and get together to create a wonderful web which is what we really need!  

While I have already started liking the Chrome with all that 'soft' look & feel, there is one feature which I think should have been a little different. Am talking about the 'Show Saved Passwords' feature.If you have not noticed yet, it's under the 'Google Chrome Options -> Minor Tweaks'. As you would have guessed by now, even if you have not seen this earlier, this option will show all your saved passwords. Clicking on the 'Show saved passwords' button (refer to above image) brings up a window like this one -   This window displays  all login URLs along with the username and then you can select one from the list and click on the 'show password' button and the password is displayed below the button, immediately. This might not sound so bad until you realize that this can be used by anyone who has access to your computer. You may argue that why would you save passwords if you are using a public / shared computer. Agree! But, there are times when you have saved passwords on your personal computer while you don't mind your family / friends accessing the computer (and may be using those passwords as well) as long as they don't get to know the password itself. So, my two cents on this is - the feature is not so bad, as it helps me in retrieving a password if I have forgotten, but it should have been behind a Login box which is like a master key to retrieve all my other passwords and of course, I would not want to save the master password. ;) 

After successfully upgrading this blog's engine - the BlogEngine.NET from version 1.3 to version 1.4.5, I thought I have enough to help you with the upgrade and hence this post is here. But, as I use XML provider, I won't be able to guide on the MSSQL or any other supported database/provider setup. So, if you also use XML data store, here are the steps in brief to upgrade from BlogEngine.NET 1.3 to BlogEngine.NET 1.4.5 - Backup This is the most important step as only a backup can save you from any unexpected issues in the upgrade process. Though you can live with only App_Data folder, Extensions (if you have custom extensions installed), Themes (if you have customized one) and custom images/pics, yet I would insist you to take a full backup so that you can get back to previous state anytime. Download BlogEngine.NET 1.4.5 Download the build from http://www.codeplex.com/blogengine/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx Prepare the Upgrade Extract the BlogEngine.NET 1.4.5 files to a directory. Copy data and other files from backup to the new build. Copy all Posts, Pages, Blogroll and Categories xml. If you have any other customizations, such as PingServices, copy that as well. Copy Extensions and required files (dlls, images) to appropriate folderso   Copy customized Themes. Don't copy users, roles and settings files; that is for later. Local Setup If you are an advanced user and have some customizations running on BlogEngine.NET, I would highly recommend this step as it would ensure everything is in place before we publish it to the world. Configure the upgrade folder as a virtual directory in local IIS (if you don't understand what this is, please skip this step). Test the blog on local IIS. If everything looks good you are almost ready to go, otherwise tweak your customizations to fit the new build. Configure Users  Don’t copy Users.xml file for the reason that prior to 1.4 version password encryption was not supported. Login to administration using default Admin login. Create a user for yourself. Logout and test the new user login. Remove the default admin login. Now configure Settings Best method is to use the administration screen and re-enter all settings. In case you have forgotten some value, refer to the Settings.xml in your backup. If you want, configure widgets and the look and feel of your blog. No-local setup? If you have skipped 'Local Setup' step, this step is for you. Configure Users Open Users.xml and set the password to blank example - <Password></Password> Now you can use the default password 'admin' to login. Carefully copy settings, one by one, from old Settings.xml to new Settings.xml. Copy only values, if any node is not there in the new file, ignore it and don't copy that node. Publish the upgrade Delete all files and folders from existing blog. Upload the upgrade to your blog   That's it!    

If you are not using Windows Vista or MS Office 2007 on non Vista systems, you may add XPS support by downloading XPS Viewer and Writer from here - http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/xps/viewxps.mspx

Today I posted an article on the VB to C# blog about short circuiting in C# (read here). While previewing the post, I noticed that the pipe symbols are not appearing in the post. At first I thought that blogger should have converted it automatically to its HTML character code, but it didn't and they were just removed from the HTML. A search on Google took me to the complete dictionary of HTML Character Codes. Its really handy and helful for web developers. Its here!