In Windows Vista, you'll be able to register property handlers on your own file types. This is in fact what my PDC Talk was all about. These property handlers are used to expose your file's contents to other parts of the system. They use a standard schema...

Internet Explorer has this feature that lets you add search commands to the address bar. For example, with some registry hacks you can make it so that typing "imdb Lord of the Rings" will do an IMDB search. The registry schema is described in more detail...

I just finished reading Vonnegut's latest book, A Man Without a Country , a collection of short essays by this national treasure. On the back it says, "Thank God, Kurt Vonnegut has broken his promise that he will never write another book." Indeed! It...

I'd like as a baseline to briefly discuss some of the high-level concepts of the shell storage architecture. This topic is discussed in greater detail elsewhere (here too), but I'm going use more modern terminology and paint only a conceptual and perhaps more idealistic picture than actually exists....

I like keyboard shortcuts that put focus in commonly-used edit boxes: Ctrl+E will put focus in the "search" box in Explorer for Windows Vista Beta 1. Alt+D will put focus in the address bar in IE. F11 will put focus in the "find a contact" box in Outlook...

People who know me would probably agree that I am hardly a stooge for marketing. And although I am in general very proud to work for Microsoft, there are definitely things about Microsoft that I’m ashamed of. But one thing that I’ve been especially impressed...

The advent of neutral COM objects introduces the interesting consequence that your thread might have to share an apartment. This means that if you assume all asynchronous calls into your thread are on the same apartment, you probably have a subtle bug...

( Don Box wrote an article in this month's MSDN Magazine called " Scheme Is Love " in which he did a brief whirlwind tour of the Scheme programming language.) Back when gas was only $3 a gallon, if you wanted a programming language with anonymous types...

The API for adding custom schema isn't supported yet on the builds handed out at the PDC. So, how was I able to demonstrate custom schemas in my PRS310 talk? I've had a request to make public how I was able to go about doing this in lieu of the schema...

Flying back to Redmond, I jot down some of the key things I consistently heard from developers, in no particular order: "We want more/better command module extensibility." The term "command module" here refers to that toolbar that goes across...

As a fan of languages like ML, I'm really excited about the new features in C# 3.0 that have been announced in this PDC. But one thing that always concerned me about great swathes of ML code was the readability of that code. If I’m working in a function...

In his PDC keynote demo, Chris Capossela showed off some of Windows Vista's exciting new features for managing the ever-growing sets of data that people will have with PC's moving forward. He showed visualization features like thumbnails, search features...

A couple of weeks ago, a couple of my colleagues and I sat down with Robert Scoble and Catherine Heller to talk about Programming Windows Vista Search and Organize. That interview was posted this morning and you can find it here .

When considering whether to extend the system schema, you should consider whether your extensions are actually necessary given the hundreds of properties that already ship with Windows Vista. You can view the schema as the indexer understands it by...

I once attended a talk given by Paul Allen in which he described how he would routinely visit with Microsoft's most important customers wearing a t-shirt and some shorts. I remember first coming to Microsoft as an intern and standing in line at the cafeteria...

In my PDC 2005 talk, PRS310, I'll be discussing ways developers can expose their data sources to the Windows Vista Explorer so they can participate in the full storage user experience: searching, stacking, property viewing and editing, "live icon" thumbnails...