Incase you all haven't heard there will be an update to the Office 2007 Beta2 suite, it will be called B2TR == Beta2 Technical Refresh.  You can more information about it here:

• Microsoft Readies New Office 2007 Beta Updates
• Microsoft Readies New Office 2007 Beta Updates (eWeek & Mary Jo Foley)
• Deployed a pilot of WSS V3 or Office SharePoint Server 2007 Beta 2 and plan to upgrade? Pay attention...

It will be a patch install, see here:

For the millions that have installed the beta 2 bits please pay attention.

1. The upgrade path to RTM will be beta 2 --> beta 2 Technical Refresh --> RTM.  I know you have probably heard me say this but I thought I would write it down (...in case I forget).  NOTE: beta 2 installs MUST upgrade to beta 2 TR.  Said another way, there won't be a supportable path directly from beta 2 to RTM.

2. Beta 2 TR will be released as a patch to beta 2.  Therefore, for those 2 or 3 folks that haven't installed beta 2 because you are waiting for beta 2 TR, well guess what, you'll need to install beta 2 anyway and then apply the beta 2 TR patch.

3. Upgrading to RTM will require an uninstall of beta 2 TR, and a registry key modification prior to installing the RTM bits.

From: SharePoint 2007: The Road from Beta 2 to RTM by Steve Caravajal's Ramblings.

I wanted to give you all an update and I also wanted to tell you all that search will be much improved in this next release and of course you can expect that Windows Desktop Search 3.0 Preview will be improve too.  We are even adding a new task pane to help you see the indexing status:

You can get to it from here:

Sorry about the image quality, the bugs of using Windows Live Writer (overall it rocks, just this minor image bug)

This should help with all of those people who were having problems with Windows Desktop Search 3.0 Preview which has gotten much better.

I was just looking at the Office MSDN site and I saw that they have a section up there for the Microsoft Office System Developers Conference 2006, including videos.  I was honoured to speak at this conference and I introduced the OneNote API for the first time.  I just saw that my video was posted online, see here:

Office Developer Center > Microsoft Office System Developers Conference 2006 > Client apps:

CD310—OneNote 2007: Introducing OneNote Programmability and How To Develop Solutions and Extensions

Presenter: Daniel Escapa; 61 minutes (202 MB)
Get an introduction to the new OneNote 2007 API, now offering full data export/import and automation functionality.

Just click on the link and it will download/open the WMV of my presentation.  You can't see me, thankfully, but you can see my slides, the demos and a voiceover explaining it all.  Please excuse me if I sound nervous this was my first presentation and I wasn't sure how I was going to do.  Please check this out, I also heard from some people that they wanted to see demo code, you can see the samples here in the video and I also have the code posted here: OneNote 2007 API Sample Code & Demos from TechEd.  Yes I did just copy a lot of samples from one conference to the next : )

If you just want to learn about the API please go to 11:10 where I end the product demo and go into the API.

I just saw this on Joe Friend's blog:

The Microsoft Word team needs your help!

As many of you know, we have changed the look of the default document in Microsoft Word 2007. Today we are interested in collecting insight and perceptions of the new default fonts in Word.

Please take our survey, it won't take more than 5 minutes to complete. Only those of you who have installed and used Office 2007 Beta 2 need apply.

Click here to participate

This feedback is important and meaningful as we gain insight into the usage of Office 2007. Thanks for your help!

I would encourage all of you who have been beta testing Office 2007 to submit your feedback!

I just got the following question from someone and I thought I would respond with a blog post. Actually I had this _exact_ same question just a few weeks ago; here is the question:

Using OneNote Interop I use GetSpecialLocation with the SpecialLocation.slUnfiledNotesSection parameter and receive what appears to be the full path for the Unfiled Notes section. I then attempt to create a new page using the value I received from GetSpecialLocation. I receive a 0x80042004 which appears to be section does not exist. Yet the .one file is at the location returned by the GetSpecialLocation call.

This is a great question and I would like to explain things:

• The GetSpecialLocation allows you to find the items that are open in OneNote but might not appear in the OneNote hierarchy because these items (Unfiled Notes, backup folder & default notebook location) can all appear outside of your notebooks.
• GetSpecialLocation always returns a path which you cannot use with the other OneNote API calls, since the other calls always use the OneNote GUIDs (unique IDs).

Instead you will want to do the following:

• GetSpecialLocation to get the string
• Call OneNote to open the location and you will then have the ID

The code looks like this:

OneNote.Application onApp = new OneNote.Application();
string unfiledSectionPath;
onApp.GetSpecialLocation(OneNote.SpecialLocation.slUnfiledNotesSection, out unfiledSectionPath);
string unfiledSectionID;
onApp.OpenHierarchy(unfiledSectionPath, null, out unfiledSectionID, OneNote.CreateFileType.cftNone);

Now you have section ID in the variable unfiledSectionID. You can then use that to call CreateNewPage or use it in the XML that you create yourself. If you have questions please post in the comments or contact me.

Last Friday I was thinking about writing a small application that went out and told me how many notebooks, sections and pages that I had open in OneNote. I was thinking about this because I was looking at the new search indexer and seeing how many pages it had indexed from my notebooks. Search has been getting really good in OneNote and I am very excited about the new release which will much improved.

Additionally I have been hearing from more people that they wanted more sample code to see how to program with the OneNote API. Since our app is still in beta I am still seeking feedback on what documentation you want. Please let me know what you are looking for and we can go from there.

Without further ado: OneNoteStats an easy application that tells you how many items open you have in OneNote.

Steps:

1. Create a new console project
2. On the Solution Explorer under References right-click, choose Add and select the Microsoft.Office.Interop.OneNote item
3. Copy and paste the code below
4. Compile and run

Code:

{
class Program
{

static void Main(string[] args)
{

//string to store all of the OneNote hierarchy XML
string onHierarchy;
 
//bind to OneNote via the COM Interop
OneNote.Application onApp = new Microsoft.Office.Interop.OneNote.Application();
 
//get the OneNote hierarchy
//GetHierarchy(start (null for root), scope of what you want, were to put the output
onApp.GetHierarchy(null, Microsoft.Office.Interop.OneNote.HierarchyScope.hsPages, out onHierarchy);
 
//Create an XML Document, load the XML and add the OneNote namespace
XmlDocument xdoc = new XmlDocument();
xdoc.LoadXml(onHierarchy);
string OneNoteNamespace = "http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/onenote/12/2004/onenote";
XmlNamespaceManager nsmgr = new XmlNamespaceManager(xdoc.NameTable);
nsmgr.AddNamespace("one", OneNoteNamespace);
 
//Use the SelectNodes method to pass an XPath query and select the matching nodes.
//One for each top-level item
XmlNodeList notebooks = xdoc.SelectNodes("//one:Notebook", nsmgr);
System.Console.WriteLine("You have " + notebooks.Count + " notebooks");
 
XmlNodeList sections = xdoc.SelectNodes("//one:Section", nsmgr);
System.Console.WriteLine("You have " + sections.Count + " sections");
 
XmlNodeList pages = xdoc.SelectNodes("//one:Page", nsmgr);
System.Console.WriteLine("You have " + pages.Count + " pages");
 

}

}

If you have any questions...this is a really simple application and I hope to have more in the near future to show how you can work with the API.

First of all I would like to say thank you! Many of you are submitting bugs and taking time to let us know what you think about OneNote 2007. Over the past few months as we have shipped Beta1, B1TR and Beta2 we have gotten a great amount of feedback from you all, our wonderful customers. We mainly have these avenues of feedback:

1. OneNote Newsgroup
2. Microsoft Connect – OneNote
3. Office Send a Smile

I wanted to give you all a quick rundown of what happens with the feedback that you all submit.

OneNote Newsgroup

With the newsgroup feedback parts of the team goes through all of the posts and looks for potential problems as well as suggestions and what people are saying. As the general beta-guy/customer feedback PM I have been looking @ most of the posts and I have forwarded them to the people who own those features. If there is a person complaining about ink I will send the newsgroup thread/post over to the people working on ink. When there were problems with note flags not being upgraded I looked into the problem and worked with the team to get a fix in. You get the point, I read your comments and they go directly to the people coding, designing and testing the features, your voice is heard.

Additionally other people on the team look through the newsgroup posts and report back weekly on what has been going on. We try and help whenever we can but we have some great people on the newsgroup (Patrick, Ben & Erik) who reply, we generally see what people are doing with OneNote and what people are confused about.

Microsoft Connect

For those of you who have submitted bugs on the Connect site you are our best helpers. You all have more types of computers and more interesting ways that you are using OneNote and we want to see the issues you all are facing. Each of your bugs are examined and we look to see if they are already fixed or if we can reproduce the problem with the most recent builds.

If there is indeed a problem we track the bug and it goes to a developer who will look @ your comments and make a fix. I know there have been many bugs that have come in and we work on the fix. Your feedback is key for this.

Additionally many of your submit suggestions for OneNote, which is great however there isn't much we can do right now. We are all focused on finishing OneNote 2007 and because of that we aren't get your suggestions in OneNote 2007. However please let us know what you think so that we can get great customer feedback for the next release.

Send a Smile

Finally there are Send a Smile reports, which allows you to send us a screenshot and your comments about what happened and what you didn't (or did like). Sadly most of the reports we get are frowns, which is understandable but I love hearing what people like about OneNote as well. That being said I look through all of your Send a Smile reports and I look for potential problems. Most of them we already know about but there are some great gems in there that I create a bug and start tracking it. Finally I take all of your comments and I send them out to the team and everyone reads them.

For more info about the Send a Smile program please see Jensen Harris' post: Where do the smiles go?

I guess the moral of the story is this: the OneNote team is listening to you. Your feedback goes directly to the people who work on the product and we love your feedback. There have been many fixes we have done based on your feedback. I can't discuss all of them but I will be able to in the near future. I think the OneNote team has a great customer connection and we are looking to maintain this relationship with you all. Again thank you.

What I am currently beta testing:

1. Office 2007
2. Windows Vista
3. Office Communicator 2007
4. Mozilla Firefox / Bon Echo 2.0
5. Windows Internet Explorer 7.0
6. Windows Desktop Search 3.0
7. Exchange 12 (for the backend)
8. My own OneNote PowerToys

I love trying new software, it is great!  If you have other suggestions about what I should try please let me know!

I just read about YES.com which is a great tool to help you find out what you may have heard on the radio this morning.  Just some thoughts on this:

1. I love it!  This reminds me of the Sprint service where you could do this before.  I even remember there was a place where you could hold the phone up to the speaker and it would figure it out.  This is all very cool.
2. I love the UI on the site (see below). It is all very pretty and it just works pretty easily, zip then click on the station.  Then it ends up going to showing you minute by minute what was on the radio.  Plus the UI is just fun, I enjoy being @ this site.
3. I don't like that is only works with iTunes.  It would be cool if there was a musicservice:// and then you could have more than one app use this instead of just iTunes and instead you could shop around.  Heck maybe Zune will be doing cool stuff like this, I don't know but I read Gizmodo waiting to find out!

I really want them to do more mashups and show what is playing across the country and where.  I just wish there was more of this information out there, is this top 40 song more popular in one region compared to another?  How does the music spread?  I am afraid some of this information may not be as interesting any more as the music industry (ClearChannel) has consolidated and they are all together in one company and they broadcast in many markets.  Maybe they could should this 'spread' of music for smaller stations and public radio.  Who knows.

Finally the UI which I love...

See the stations overlaid over the zip-code (98052 for Redmond, WA)...and then here is what it looks like for your radio station:

Just a shot out to my favourite radio station: C89.5 (Seattle's best radio station imho). 

A final note on this post, they are getting their info from: MediaGuide.  I guess they are a provider of this information which is pretty interesting, I think even Windows Media Player uses them, quite interesting.

The other day I was in a conference call and someone asked if you could close OneNote via the API.  In fact you cannot do this via the API but when I was talking to some of the developers for the team they said that you could just send Windows messages to OneNote telling it to close.  Well I thought that sounded like a good idea.  I am no expert on how to program this so I set out this evening to learn how to do this and do it with C# since I think that is what most developers will be using to program with OneNote.

I knew to start off looking for stuff about FindWindow which was in the user32.dll library and I knew about SendMessage as well but I wasn't sure how I was going to get this.  I first landed on this page: Kill any application with system menu using C# - The Code Project - C# Programming.  However this was if you knew the name of your application and the problem is that OneNote might have a few of them open so I had to keep searching.  I then went to MSDN: EnumWindows Function which looked promising since I wanted to use this.  However MSDN didn't have any code samples for this : (

Then I ended up here Enumerating Windows which had some good information but not quite what I was looking for.  Then I found this page:Capturing the Running IE Instances in C#.  This had some great information.

So I ended up with the following code, okay well I just found out that you can't easily post code on a blog...grrr this sucks.  Please get the file here: KillOneNote.

If you have questions please let me know and I hope this works for you!

I wanted to take a minute today and write about a change that will happen with the OneNote 2003 SimpleImporter in OneNote 2007. First of all we will be fully supporting the same API in the next release of OneNote so we will accept the OneNote 2003 XML as well as the OneNote 2007 XML. This also means that existing powertoys will work with OneNote 2007. These are all great things for our customers and if you are seeing any problems with this please let us know ASAP and log a bug on the OneNote Connect site.

So what is the change you ask? As you might have noticed we changed the design of a OneNote page. We no longer have a page header and instead the page title is directly on the page in OneNote. This caused a small problem with the SimpleImporter from OneNote 2003 because by default it thought the best place to start the first outline was at 36, 36. This puts the outline right in the middle of the date & time on the page title in OneNote 2007. Instead we will be modifying the page offset in OneNote 2007 by a little bit (actually 72 now).

This means that whenever you send something to OneNote using the SimpleImporter we will push the content down far enough so that it doesn't collide with the page title that is now on the page. We didn't have a default value but if any of you read Andrew May's blog posts you saw that it said 36, 36 and Donovan's DataImport used that value as well. I know people complained because it was hard to determine what to do correctly (find which version of OneNote was installed and then have two different code paths) and they said that OneNote should handle this correctly. I agreed with this feedback and made the change (with Dev & Test's help!).

There might be some of you developers who are out there and are upset because they wanted exact positioning but you have to realize that you can still do this you just need to detect the right version of OneNote installed and then calculate the right offset that you want. We focused on the base case where most people were inserting content into OneNote and they didn't want it to collide with the title area. This was the most common scenario so we wanted to ensure that our shared customers wouldn't be upset from this.

You won't see this in Beta2 but it will appear in later release of OneNote 2007 and the final version. If you have comments please let me know, but the key take away is that your powertoys for OneNote 2003 will continue to work in OneNote 2007 and you don't need to do anything special (unless you changed the default offset which is pretty uncommon). Thanks!

I love this Firefox extension for OneNote, I use it all of the time and I think it is great.

A few notes:

1. This was very simple to make what the author did was to tell Firefox to copy the selection and then he calls "onenote.exe /paste" which will paste the current clipboard into the current page but he also calls "OneNote.exe /sidenote" which launches a new side note.
2. I love it because right when I am the middle of something I can right-click and chose to send to OneNote and it is right where my mouse cursor is.
3. It saves me time

Why am I writing about this? Well if you use Firefox, like I do, then I would recommend that you check out this tool. On the other hand if you use Internet Explorer I recommend that you use the Send to OneNote from Internet Explorer powertoy or if you are using OneNote 2007 then we will have this right in the box when you install OneNote 2007!

Why am I blogging about this? Well first of all I wanted to show you just how easy it is to create OneNote powertoys. You can easily have your app send information to OneNote. Also if you know the author of this powertoy you might want to recommend that he/she change the max version tag in the install script so that is installs in Firefox >1.5 (currently we are @ 1.5.0.4). I think the Firefox extension folks might want to have a better way of getting this to work, I have even seen the extension which allows you to open all older extensions, just seems like a vicious circle.

The other day I was blogging and I wanted to insert a photo that already was online and I had the URL for it. I was wondering if in Word I could insert a <img> tag so that I could easily link to the photo. Well I found that you can do this in Word 2007 with their blogging feature!

Go to Insert-->Picture and then paste in the URL but before you click Insert click the little drop down on the right-hand side and choose "Link to File" just like this:

Now when you post this you will have a link to the original image! Nice work all!

I *love* keyboard shortcut keys, I use them all of the time I actually come from a UNIX/DOS background and I love the command line. Using the mouse is really only that great for web browsing in my opinion. That being said I just wanted to pass on a keyboard shortcut that I just remembered for Office Communicator 2005: Windows Key-Q (Win-Q).

This will open Office Communicator and take you to the "Find" field so you can type in someone's name or a phone number. I love it because I keep Communicator minimized to the tray all of the time and this just brings it up faster than I could find the button and click it. Try it out!

I just got the following from our test manager Mike who is totally hip to the blogs. I am passing this on because:

• It is great to see that people are saying cool things about our product
• We are listening to your feedback and doing whatever we can to make the product better.  

With that being said here is the feedback:

• Day 8 of Microsoft Office 2007 - just like in Office 2003, OneNote stands out as the most innovative program. 
• OneNote: Product Management Super Tool - it's probably the most useful piece of software I've ever owned 
• While I'm handing out praise, I should say that I find Microsoft OneNote, part of Office 2007 to be a really useful piece of software. 
• OneNote review: "Random thoughts of a young mother" 
• I am pleased to announce the availability of the English Standard Version Bible for OneNote 2007 
• Office 2007 Beta 2 works amazingly well with Vista. This is the bright spot in the experience. OneNote, especially, shines. 
• OneNote Napkin Math - I noticed this little gem over at the IW Center 
• OneNote is great...I'm going to use it all the way through my PhD  
• OneNote 2003 was a great tool...but he needed to use some other tools to publish the entry on his blog. Now, you can do everything in OneNote! Isn't that exciting 
• Top 10 Microsoft Things

 Thank you all and please keep it coming!

One of my favourite mouse features is a thing we have called "riffle" and you would riffle through pages. This is just like you would do with paper you would riffle or quickly flip through the pages in a section (or in the paper metaphor in a notebook).

How do I riffle you might ask? If you are running OneNote 2003 you can do this just by clicking on a page tab and holding down the mouse button and as you move up and down through the page list it will automatically take your through the page listings. If you are using OneNote 2007 you would want to click and hold the ALT key and use the wheel mouse. The reason for the change was because we now have drag and drop so we wanted to enable you to still do this. I personally love holding down alt and using the mouse wheel to quickly go through all of the pages.

That is all I need sometimes, just to see part of my note and then I know what it was I was looking for. It is amazing how a small visual clue could give you that much but just seeing some of the note will clue you in. Actually there was a research done with Microsoft Research that talks about this: Peripheral Display of Digital Handwritten Notes. Done by Gary Hsieh from CMU & Ken Wood & Abigail Sellen from MSR - Cambridge. Pretty interesting read, hopefully they get something working with OneNote instead of just Journal : )

Edited @ 7/19/2006 11:59 AM because of a correction, thanks Alberto!

Awhile ago I blogged about Submitting Watson Crash information and now I wanted to update this for Windows Vista. Here is how a crash goes in Vista and where you can get the Watson Crash information so that we can diagnose your problem and you can submit a bug on OneNote's Connect site.

The crash!

This is what it looks like when you get a crash, to send information to Microsoft please click on "check online for a solution". I think my Vista build thought it was offline even though it was since I was connected via remote desktop!

Then you will see this dialog as Windows prepared the report to send:

Then please click "Send information" to send the report:

Now this information will be sent to Microsoft (and the OneNote team). Eventually you can actually get a solution back from Microsoft telling you how to fix the problem so you don't see it again. Since you are beta testing software there aren't any solutions yet : )

You will need to get the Watson bucket number from Windows. In my earlier post I talked about Event Viewer (eventvwr) and you can still do this in Vista but you will get a UAC prompt and instead you can use this new tool in Vista called Problem Reports and Solutions. To find it just click Start and then type "problem reports":

Note: this is also in the Control Panel

Then on the left you will want to select "View problem history":

You will end up in a window like this:

And you would open the option for any OneNote crashes:

Your bucket number is on the bottom there and this is what you would want to send us to submit a OneNote bug on the OneNote Connect site.

Of course you can still do this with Event Viewer:

Note that they no longer say source = Microsoft Office 12 instead you can find the two crashes right next to each other.

So that is how you can get us Watson info off of Vista machines. Please let me know if you have any questions!

I saw this post Top 10 Ways to Motivate Geeks and I loved it because I think it is very true for all of us. Now as I go down the list:

1. Curious, yup totally, I love to play with things.
2. Yes and no for me.
3. I would have to agree with that, you just need to help spark our imaginations.
4. Totally!
5. Hehe
6. Free stuff where‽ (as I am wearing a free Microsoft t-shirt and I just ate a free lunch that I got)
7. n/a
8. That is true, having your name in source or something is pretty cool (a la what Firefox is doing)
9. Agreed
10. Someone has to pay the bills

In any event I thought this was a good list and also check out the retrospector.com site since it is pretty cool.

I just saw this post: 13 Tips for Improving Camera Phone Photos which has some good tips for taking camera phone shots. Here are the top tips:

• Well lit subjects
• Get Close
• Keep it Still
• Edit images later
• Don't Throw Away 'mistakes'
• Avoid Using the Digital Zoom
• Experiment with White Balance
• Take loads of Shots and Experiment
• Follow Rules of Composition and then Break them
• Keep Your Lens Clean
• Observe Camera Phone Etiquette
• Rename your Images
• User the highest resolution possible on your camera phone

Some of them are pretty self explanatory, but I really liked the "Rules of Composition" interesting stuff that most people need to learn. That is one of my biggest pet peeves when people take photos, they center everyone and that just looks bad, you should try and do what they mentioned like the Rule of Thirds.

Why am I writing about this? Well with OneNote Mobile I believe many more people will be using this to keep track of notes and the like. It reminds me of a photo I took in my office with OneNote Mobile:

I wish there was a way to get a better photo. I know in the future they will have better cameras, and heck you can even get lenses for your camera phones. So if you are out and about with OneNote Mobile remember the 13 Tips for Improving Camera Phone Photos.

I wanted to comment on Omar Shahine's RSS Send to OneNote PowerToy that he released a few weeks ago. I just thought I would spend some time and show some screenshots of this in action. You can download it here. He too was another of the OneNote PowerToy Contest Winner, now that we have blogged about all of the external winners (of those who have written back) I would like to talk about the internal ones like Omar's.

The main screen looks like this:

Then you click on the "Sent to OneNote" button and that will open OneNote and import all of those blog posts. Note that the first time you do this you need to specify to which section you want the posts to go. I would recommend your Side Notes section for OneNote 2003 or the Unfiled Notes for OneNote 2007.

Now you have this in OneNote:

Now because of this you can easily take your RSS feed with you and browse it in OneNote.

Nice work Omar! I also wanted to comment that Omar has been a great help to the OneNote team and we really appreciate all of hard work he has done. Thanks again Omar.