Longhorn People & Groups : Longhorn

Contact Addresses

darkcanuck — Mon, 27 Oct 2003 22:00:00 GMT

Unfortunately the WinFS Contact schema for addresses is pretty ugly in the PDC build. We're working to fix it, but for now you're going to have to live with some pain.

Person.PersonalAddresses is just there to trick you. The shell UI isn't actually hooked up to it. We used to use it and store the information in a PostalAddress, but then someone invented Locations and we thought it would be cool to use them instead (I blame Walter). Sadly, we couldn't convert all the code right away so we had to leave the PersonalAddresses collection in place. I think everything is converted by now, but we didn't take it out for the PDC just so we could confuse everyone. Sometimes we suck...

So, you should use Contact.Locations instead. If you look at the schema you'll see that Contact.Locations is a collection of WinFS.Links. That means this isn't as easy to use as the Person.PersonalAddresses collection. You' ll have to do a FindOne for the target of each link and build your own collection. This will become much nicer and cleaner with the next batch of WinFS changes, but for now the code below may help.

using WinFS = System.Storage;
internal static ArrayList GetAddresses(WinFS.Contact.Person p)
{
    ArrayList coll = new ArrayList();

    foreach (WinFS.Link linkLoc in p.Locations)
    {
        string strFilter = "ItemIDKey=" + WinFS.Util.ByteArrayToHexString(
                                                linkLoc.TargetKey);
        WinFS.Core.LocationElement loc = WinFS.Core.LocationElement.FindOne(
                                                p.ItemContext, strFilter);
        if (loc != null && loc is WinFS.Location.Address)
        {
            coll.Add(loc);
        }
    }
    return coll;
}

All I can say is sorry...

Removed Entry

darkcanuck — Fri, 24 Oct 2003 07:32:00 GMT

Jon and I had a couple of entries about workarounds for some PDC problems. Apparently we got in trouble for posting them before Monday. Stay tuned, they'll be back when they're actually useful.

We'll try to keep you updated with information about Windows "Longhorn" People & Groups. We'd also love to hear your feedback when you get a chance to see it next week. Jon will probably have more in-depth technical information and bug workarounds because his team worked on the People & Group controls. But, I'm better looking...

Am I Interesting?

darkcanuck — Fri, 24 Oct 2003 00:25:00 GMT

Blogging seems to be the new fad so I thought I'd try it out. It also seems to be a really good way of communicating with customers and hopefully getting some feedback on what we've been building in Windows "Longhorn", which you're about to see during the PDC next week.

Frankly, I'm not sure that I have enough interesting stuff to tell anyone though. Actually, that's not true. I really love my job and I work on some totally cool new stuff for Windows: People & Groups. I'm just not sure how much I'm allowed to tell the world yet. Eventually someone from LCA at Microsoft is probably going read this and get me fired. Maybe I should post my resume next...