After six years of living in Bethlehem, PA, USA, I am moving away. I have accepted a job as business consultant in Berlin, Germany. I will remain a Ph.D. Candidate here at Lehigh University as I will finish up my degree over the next two years.

My girlfriend and I are moving together. We are both extremely excited and are looking forward to our new life in Berlin.

This move is keeping me quite busy right now, so updates to my blog, forums and RibbonCustomizer will be sparse over the next few weeks. When I find some time, I will work on adding macro functionality to RibbonCustomizer though. I have parts of that already implemented.

Back to the move. The packers are coming tomorrow…

I am still not fully back installed on my tablet after upgrading it to Vista, but I am slowly getting there. My tablet has always been on the slower size performance wise (despite 1.25 GB of RAM and a rather new 100 GB HDD). So I figured, I’ll give ReadyBoost a try. Unfortunately, none of my current USB sticks were fast enough for ReadyBoost. NewEgg however offers a 4 GB ReadyBoost-able USB stick for $36.99. The price made me decide to give it a shot. The drive came today and it is barely ReadyBoost-able. It actually took me several tests to get Vista to offer ReadyBoost as a choice for it. When it eventually did, I just allocated the entire drive to ReadyBoost.

My first impression is that my tablet seems to be more responsive now…I tried to find any information in the Task Manager telling me how Vista is using ReadyBoost. Unfortunately, there is nothing there. When I opened the Resource Manager though, I found the activity information for the ReadyBoost cache file in the Disk section. The stick has a response time of 350 to 450 ms there. I think it was a pretty good investment and hopefully this will give my tablet quite a boost when it is plugged in.

Unbelievably though, I am starting to slowly like Vista.

Update: It seems that Vista needed some time to first move stuff to the stick. The response times I now see in the resource manager are very low (right now 7 ms) and mostly below 50 ms.

I decided that it was finally time to move one of my two machines to Vista. My tablet, an Acer TravelMate C300, ended up being the victim. That particular tablet is not officially Vista-compliant, but fellow MVP Robert Sparnaaij told me during the MVP Summit that he had Vista working just fine on this particular model. So I decided to give it a shot…

The Vista Ultimate Upgrade DVD arrived Wednesday and I immediately tried upgrading my tablet. Unfortunately, the upgrade failed several hours into it and my XP got restored. I went once more through the Vista Upgrade Advisor, this time removing everything that was only listed as minor issue. Unfortunately, the upgrade failed once again after several hours with the extremely informative error message: “Windows could not configure one or more system components“. With Google’s help, I figured out that the system component in question was Windows XP’s Internet Information Service (IIS) installed due to Visual Studio 2005 being on the machine. I also found the cryptic setup error log due to Google at C:\$WINDOWS.~BT\Sources\Panther\setuperr.log. The log didn’t help at all, so I removed IIS and tried my luck with the upgrade again. This time, it went through.

Everything seemed to be fine after the upgrade…except Windows Update wasn’t working (error code 80072EFD). I went through the steps suggested in help, disabled my firewall, tried everything in the linked Knowledge Base Article, and eventually gave up and called Microsoft Support. Two calls (each 1.5 - 2 hrs), two days later and two Indian support specialists later, it came down to either installing another Vista upgrade on my current Vista installation, or wiping the hard drive and reinstalling everything. I decided to go with formatting, because while MS Support was trying to get Windows Update to work, I had discovered that my Offline Files didn’t get upgraded correctly to Vista: My Documents folder is redirected to a network share on my desktop, which automatically makes all subfolders and files of the My Documents folder available offline. Unfortunately, after the upgrade, only half of my files were actually being kept offline and I found no way to reset the Offline Files setting for that folder and force Vista to recreate it (changing the Documents folder back to a local folder didn’t help, nor did the suggestion by an MS support specialist to boot Vista in safe mode).

As I had gotten an Upgrade edition of Vista, I couldn’t just boot from the DVD and format the hard drive from setup. Instead, after backing up the few things that weren’t already on my desktop, I formatted my hard drive with an XP installation, and then did a customized Upgrade to Vista (clean install, but the current Windows folder gets renamed into Windows.old). 24 hours later, I have a working Vista on my tablet (with working Windows Update) and my Documents folder is kept fully offline as well. My 2 GB of IMAP emails are still downloading and I am probably only 25% done with reinstalling all my programs.

I know one thing for sure: My desktop will not be a straight upgrade from XP to Vista. That means, it’ll probably be running XP for at least another year…

Edit: I am actually impressed now with the Microsoft Support based in India. The manager of the two support technicians just gave me a call to find out how I was doing and how good the support I received was. I spent 20 mins on the phone with him and he promised that if I had any further issues, I could contact him directly and he would get his best technician to help me with them. That is actually very impressive for free consumer support (free within 90 days of the Vista activation).

What if Microsoft were to buy Firefox?

Check out the MS Firefox page that lets you download MS Firefox 2007…well, it actually ends up downloading IE7

Lots of things have happened in the past week. Instead of me blogging about every single one, I’ll just do a weekly review post.

Released products

• Internet Explorer 7
• Firefox 2
• Windows Desktop Search 3 (not recommended with Office 2007 B2TR)
• Windows Defender
• Fedora Core 6

RibbonCustomizer Update

I have spent quite some time on my RibbonCustomizer add-in. It now works with Access, Excel, PowerPoint and Word B2TR. I am still working on adding Outlook support. One of the questions I am struggling with right now is what to include in the Freeware version of my add-in, and for what features I should charge something. If you have an opinion on this, read the overview of my add-in and post a comment here. Thanks!

Noteworthy things

• If you are developing a .NET add-in for Office 2007, and want to test it under Vista, you have to use Vista RC1 (build 5600). Office 2007 B2TR is only supported with RC1 and any .NET add-in will simply not load if you use a later build (like I did for several frustrating hours). I haven’t tried this, but you might alternatively able to install Visual Studio in a later Vista build and compile the add-in with it. That might make it work with a later Vista build as well.
• Office 2007 does not install the .NET framework. If you are developing a .NET-based add-in for Office 2007 that has to run under Windows XP, keep in mind that your users might have to install the framework to even be able to use it.
• Jensen Harris has returned to blogging the Office UI Bible. In his latest post, he posted the final RibbonX schema.
• Microsoft released a Junk Email reporting tool for Outlook 2003 and 2007. If you want to report email that the Junk Email filter of Outlook does not classify as spam to Microsoft so that it can be included in future updates to the Outlook Junk Email filter, download and install the tool today. If you use the tool for a spam message, you receive the following email from Frontbridge (an MS affiliate). I don’t think I really like the idea of receiving one email every 24 hrs (can’t this just happen quietly without me getting another message to delete?). Also, it’s not clear from the email how this will affect the Outlook Junk Email filter, as it talks about the “Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services”:
  “This is an automated reply from the Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services, Spam Analysis Department – no additional correspondence will be sent to you.
  We appreciate your spam submission. You will receive this auto-reply message only once per day if you submit multiple emails for evaluation in a 24 hour period. Some additional information is as follows:
  * Spam submissions are processed seven days per week and blocks for new spam become effective on the following day.
  * The best way to report spam is to send the offending message as an attachment along with the full original Internet headers.
  Thank you for assisting us in controlling unwanted email.
  

  Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services”