load of tosh

History of Outlook Web Access

Tosh Meston — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 20:24:00 GMT

My dev lead Jim has a nice history of OWA on the Exchange blog. He talks a bit about the early versions of OWA and describes how XMLHTTP came into being for the Exchange 2000 release and how it came to be installed with IE. Neat little piece of internet history.

http://blogs.technet.com/exchange/archive/2005/06/21/406646.aspx

Opinions on Blogging Two Years Later

Tosh Meston — Sat, 11 Jun 2005 08:21:00 GMT

I noticed today as I was trying to work out why I was unable to log in to my work blog, that this day two years ago was when I made my first blog entry. After one year I made an entry about what I thought of the blogging phenomenon after a year of trying to understand it. I'll give my thoughts after two years now.

I read fewer blogs these days than a year ago, although I am subscribed to many more - 56 at last count. This is still nowhere close to the hundreds that some people read. It's easy to subscribe and never check back, but my agg. keeps pulling them down. That said there are a few consumer blogs and personal blogs that I read regularly and expect to continue to do so. I also write fewer entries than a year ago. Certainly part of this is due to having less free time being a parent now. There are some "blogs" that I just prefer to read in a web browser. I think this was the same a year ago.

I produce atom and rss feeds for various personal web sites - hoops, baby page, and at least one of my family members has subscribed to the baby's feed. I have written code for my sites to consume feeds exposed by other sources. Hurray for RSS and XML.

The term "blogosphere" is very common. CNN has a television show of people reporting what other people write on their blogs. The Daily Show had a bit making fun of CNN's show. My non-technical mom knows what a blog is now. This is probably a result of me, but no doubt she's heard it from other places.

I am convinced that you can make money from blogging. Just look at Calacanis' and Denton's operations. At this point, I think consumer oriented weblogs are a legitimate media form definitely capable of producing ad revenue.

I still use a standalone desktop aggregator, although I have an account with a web based aggregator.

I expect the popularity of blogging and the use of such terms in media to lessen or just fade into the background in the next year or so. People will point to this proving blogging as a fad, but it will not go away. I expect it will be less distinct from regular web based "columns" than it is today. These days you see the blogs of staff writers on many sites, msnbc, news.com, nba.com, etc. The only difference between a blog and a column imo is trendiness.

Outlook Web Access Customization TechNet Articles

Tosh Meston — Wed, 08 Jun 2005 21:14:00 GMT

There are a couple new TechNet articles on customizing Outlook Web Access. These are two months old now, but given that I haven't posted in some four months, I'll consider them "new". In any case, they deal with creating custom UI themes and changing the appearance of the logon page. Sometimes our development team is forwarded screenshots of the OWA UI after it's been changed by customers and many of them are really fantastic looking. If you're interested in giving OWA a look that is customized for your org you should have a look here:

Thanks goes out to Don Mace for his work with these!

DirectSound Metronome

Tosh Meston — Sun, 06 Feb 2005 01:21:00 GMT

My former intern Albert has finished his metronome project that uses DirectSound and talks about some of the issues he hit on his MSN Space -- The Groove Yard.

It Works! Creating streaming, live audio is sorta easy! This opens the doors for all kinds of projects…(audio synth? Audio sampler?).

RE: InvariantCulture and DateTime.ToString()

Tosh Meston — Thu, 06 Jan 2005 09:51:00 GMT

Hey Omar, regarding this entry... Your comments are closed so I thought I'd let the trackback do the talking. I just wanted to say I have been bitten by this kind of thing before as well. This would work too.

get
{
return DateUtc.ToString("yyyy-MM-dd", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture) + ".dayfeedback.xml";
}

Looking for .NET Forum Control

Tosh Meston — Sat, 18 Dec 2004 09:07:00 GMT

I think thinking about incorporating forums into my pickup sports sites - InfiniteHoops.com and InfiniteSoccer.com - and although I am tempted to write my own forum code, the fact is I have so little time and this is something I think there are several implementations in .NET already. Anybody using a .NET forum control or app that they like and would recommend? Let me know. Thanks. - T -

Scrollable Resizable Datagrid

Tosh Meston — Thu, 16 Dec 2004 05:24:00 GMT

The Code Project has a project by Pedro Maia Costa based on an HTC we put out for a Web Team Talking article a couple years ago. NIce job, Pedro. For me one of the great benefits of writing on the web in a developer community like blogs.msdn.com is that you often get good feedback from developers running into the same sorts of problems as you. And many times you'll discover a solution that's pretty elegant. I think the best solution to make column headers fixed on an HTML table in IE is this one by SlingFive. No HTC, no script save a simple CSS expression. Simple, nice.

CSS Quiz

Tosh Meston — Sat, 11 Dec 2004 09:35:00 GMT

Here's a little CSS quiz that I found courtesy of the CSS weblog (yes, there is such a thing). I got a 19 out of 20. Apparently I messed up the index of the left and right padding values. No doubt the result of years and years of writing symmetric web pages -- so that right-to-left languages like Hebrew and Arabic look good in OWA.

Blog Reorg

Tosh Meston — Fri, 10 Dec 2004 08:48:00 GMT

Since the US beta launch of MSN Spaces, I made up my mind to focus more random interests posts to my space and leave this one for posts focusing on Outlook Web Access, .NET or general programming. More eclectic posts like those on best Seattle mochas, robots, hoops and various opinions on industry happenings will be on my space. Feel free to subscribe as that's what this blog thing is all about. I enjoy looking through referrer logs and links left in comments by the people reading my stuff. I don't plan on cross-posting or migrating old content. This change will just be for future posts.

Outlook Web Access Calendar View Query-String Parameters

Tosh Meston — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 08:29:00 GMT

Monday I received an e-mail from James Buchanan asking what is the query-string parameter to bring up a monthly calendar view in Outlook Web Access. Actually, I am starting to get a lot of emails from people asking about this or that, which is great and I am happy to help when I can. I'll do my best to get back to your guys if I can help, but of course, I still have to write new code, which may make it impossible for me to get back to everybody. Funnily enough, I just received another email from the blog as I write this. This time it's just blog spam. Great. Where was I?

Right. James asks it is possible to bring up a calendar folder in the monthly view. The answer is yes. Your URL will look something like:

.../Calendar?cmd=contents&view=monthly

Additionally, you can specify the weekly view like this:

.../Calendar?cmd=contents&view=weekly

The view param is case-sensitive so anything but "monthly" and "weekly" will give you the daily view.

Thanks James.