Jan 22 2007
SyncToy for Vista
I got this via the Avanade communities and was not aware of it. There is SyncToy v1.4 for Vista! BTW this also works with XP and there is a white paper showing how to do this on XP.
Jan 17 2007
Book Source-code online
Dennis earlier was responsible for collating the code from us for the book, and he just informed us it is available online! Sweet! You can get the code from here and have a play. You will of course need .NET 3.0 RTM and preferably Visual Studio 2005.
It is good to see some reviews starting to come along, if you have any questions feel free to ping any of us and also let us know if you find any issues with the code – or the book if you need some help.
Don’t forget you can submit the errata here and see the Table of Contents here. 
Jan 17 2007
Solved – Case of the "Invisible" folder in Outlook and Exchange
If you recalled my post from a few days ago where I have a folder which mysteriously became “invisible”, well there is a fix! Thanks to some of my friends at the mother ship (read Microsoft) in helping out with this – they know who they are and do not need to be named here.
One thing before you continue to the steps below, ensure you are connected to Exchange and logged in to Outlook. As always you can click on the images to see them in full size.
- Download MfcMapi – also known as the Microsoft Exchange Server MAPI Editor. If you are like and never heard of this tool it is very impressive. I think the Exchange support guys use this and is fairly well known by then.
- From the ‘Session’ menu, choose Logon and ‘Display Store Table’.
- You will be asked to pick a profile first.
- Double-click the store that contains the hidden folder. In my case this store was Exchange and you can see I have the “Mailbox – Amit Bahree” store selected.
- Expand the ‘Root Container’ of the store, navigate to the hidden folder and select it. Please note that your visible folder hierarchy is contained in a sub-folder of the ‘Root Container’ that is likely named ‘IPM_SUBTREE’ or ‘Top of Information Store’. This again in my case is “Gadgets”.
- Right-click the PR_ATTR_HIDDEN (tag 0x10F4000B) property in the property list of the hidden folder and choose ‘Edit Property’ from the menu.
- Disable the ‘Boolean’ check box and press OK.
- Select File | Exit to close the current window. From the Main window, select ‘Logoff’ from the ‘Session’ menu, and then Exit MFCMapi.
There is also a KB Article (924226) from Microsoft which seems to be similar, although that talks about Contacts specifically the steps are the same. The cause as per the KB article is the improperly formatting the Provisioning registry keys for OWA on the Back-End (mailbox) Exchange Server.
Jan 17 2007
Go Karting
We had a team event from work yesterday and went Go Karting – which was the first time for me! It has been something I have been wanting to do for a while but never got around to for one reason or another. It was a lot of fun – we did three rounds of about 15 minutes each with about 10 minutes break in between each session. And other than our team there was no one else there for some reason so we had the whole place to ourselves – which made it quite easy and flexible.
My first go was quite crap and I was the second slowest in the whole group – but given it was my first time ever Go Karting it I was still lots of fun. At the end of it I think I did pretty well and dropped 4 seconds on my fastest lap! Hand in hand with that is the number of laps I did also went up. Below are my statistics (fastest laps only) for the three run:
- # of Laps – 17; Fastest Lap: 38.30 seconds
- # of Laps – 19; Fastest Lap: 35.26 seconds
- # of Laps – 22; Fastest Lap: 34.30 seconds
If you have never done go karting, I would highly recommend it. I can’t wait for the next time around. 
Jan 14 2007
IE on Linux
Well this is quite old news but it is new to me – running IE on Linux – how cool is that. Click on the screenshot to see IE running on Ubuntu at one of the machines at home.
If you would like to run IE 7 on Linux, then check out this link.
Jan 12 2007
Carbon Neutral – Be Greener
I am quite surprised on how ignorant many people (like I was) are about understanding how the day-to-day activities contribute to Global Warming and the issues we face on this planet. As much as we wishes, unfortunately there is no backup or Undo feature 
. To understand how our daily lives contribute towards global warming check out the Carbon Calculator and then read up on how you can offset those emissions and be Carbon Neutral.
However, personally I am not a believer of offsetting, while it is a step in the right direction it is not the solution.
Jan 11 2007
Vonage Dialer
I had been thinking of writing a program which will allow be to dial a number using Vonage especially being the fat-butter-fingered-lazy-ass that I am. . Although I wanted to do this for a while, I could only get around to writing it over the holidays. The program is fairly simple to use as shown below.
- Enter your User Name and Password
- Click on Connect
- This will connect to Vonage and authenticate your user name and password.
- If successful I retrieve a list of the Phone Numbers associated with your account. These could be more than one lines or soft phones you have.
- Select the Vonage line you want to use.
- Enter the Phone Number you want to dial.
- Click on Dial.
- Your Vonage phone should start ringing, when you pick up that line it will automatically start dialing the phone number you entered in Step 4 – how cool is that.
There are two ways you can install this, but before you do that you need to have the .NET 2.0 runtime installed on your machine. If you don’t have this you can download the v32 bit or the v64 bit.
To install Vonage Dialer you can either:
- Use Click Once and install the application over the internet – this is easier for most users but you will need to use Internet Explorer.
- Once installed successfully you will find the application under Start => All Programs => Vonage Dialer
- Alternatively, you can download the setup file (395 kb) and unzip it and double click on setup.exe and install the application.
- Once installed successfully you will find the application under Start => All Programs => Amit Bahree => Vonage Dialer
Note: The installation is different between the two installation methods!
If you don’t want to enter the user name, password every time then you can enter these values in the VonageDialer.exe.config file which will be in the location where you installed the program.
A couple of variations that I would like to work on are:
- Write a Outlook add-in which will allow you to right click on a contact and dial it from there.
- Write a Sidebar gadget for Vista – allowing you to dial any number from your desktop.
Let me know how it works out and if you would like any enhancements. As always usual disclaimers apply (read – if this breaks something on your program, don’t come crying to me). .
Jan 08 2007
Windows Home Server
Thanks to my colleague, Ian, for pointing this one. After some initial rumors, Bill Gates has announced a new product called Windows Home Server which will automatically back up all the data on Vista and XP providing centralized storage and make it available on the Internet. Bill also promised that the Home Server will be easy to setup and the user won’t have to even worry about formatting, partitioning,installing, etc as the OS would do all that automatically.
You can get other Microsoft CES related information here.
Jan 05 2007
Case of the "Invisible" folder in Outlook and Exchange
I have a weird problem which does not make sense at all and I am hoping it is something stupid on my end.
One of my folders called “Gadgets” which resides in Community \ Social folder structure has somehow become invisible. I know the folder is present because I can still see my un-read emails (via the Unread Email Search Folders). Also if I search for emails in that folder I can find the emails, but I cannot see the folder in my list and as a result any of the emails in that. I tried creating it again but I get the error saying the folder exists. (See the various screen shots below).
Also it does not matter if I am using Outlook for this or I am connected to OWA – it is the same behavior.
The question is how do I get this back? Has anyone else seen this? A few things to note:
- I am on Exchange 12 a.k.a Exchange 2007 and the client is Outlook 2007 running on Vista x64 (RTM).
- Everything was fine and I just started getting this, so I know this is something new. Also I have been on Exchange 12 for a very long time now so unless something has crapped out very recently this is something else.
- This is not an Outlook problem as I can reproduce the same issue on OWA (though I don’t have screenshots for it below).
Note: you can click on most images below to see them in detail.
Figure 1: Missing “Gadgets” folder from the above list.
Figure 2: This shows that I have unread items in that folder (which I cannot find) and when I open that I read that folder just fine!
Figure 3: This shows that when I search for something in that folder (even when it is read) it does work and I can again have full functionality.
Figure 4: I try creating the folder called Gadgets under the Social folder and I get the error shown in the next figure.
Figure 5: Error when adding folder.
This is quite irritating and I am at my wits end – any help is highly appreciated!
Jan 05 2007
Upgraded to CS 2.1 SP2
I just upgraded to CS 2.1 SP2 (I was on SP1) and from my quick smoke test all seems to be well; if you find something not working then please let me know.
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