Windows Workflow can be a bit of a pain to debug some days. In particular there are often scenarios where an exception gets swallowed somehwere in the runtime and you go off and spend 20 hours barking up the wrong tree.

Someone had one of these issues using some of the sample code from one of my MSDN articles today.

http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/AddPost.aspx?PostID=575571&SiteID=1&ReturnUrl=

A hot tip is to turn on some of the debug tracing in the runtime- easy to do. Just bigg the following into your config file.

<system.diagnostics>
    <switches>
      <add name="WorkflowTraceToDefault" value="1" />
      <add name="Host" value="All" />
      <add name="Runtime" value="All" />     
      <add name="Activity" value="All" />
    </switches>
  </system.diagnostics>

Was grabbing some Sysinternals tools today and they have posted about the fact that they have been acquired by MSFT. Well done guys!

http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2006/07/on-my-way-to-microsoft.html

So I am still here.

Just been a bit quiet on the blog front.

I've finally made the jump to Vista as my primary OS- I havbe two vista boxes on my desk and one XP box that I share with Skip... about to upgrade to 5472 this morning.

So far my thoughts....

1. Sick and tired of playing “UAC-A-Mole*...
   i.e. constantly having to press those bloody security dialogs away. I am VERY close to running as Administrator again which should make all this go away. I have to run a few apps elevated- running VS2k3 elevated for example
2. The search box still rocks the Casbah.
   THis is the little box at the bottom of the start menu. I've always been a big WindowsKey-R kinda guy.... now I just press windows key, type what I want and off we go. It is my fave feature of vista so far.
3. Outlook 2007 is working
   But only via RPC over HTTP (Exchange Anywhere in 2007). I LOVE the new flag for follow up management. This is my favourite new Outlook feature. It's let me reclaim my calendar from being a task pad again.
4. Vista is SLOOOOWWWW
   Quite obviously still running debug code all through it. It's slow as a gdog even on my highly spec'd 64 bit notebook with 2GB or RAM.
5. IE7 is flakey on Vista
   Not sure why... I was using it without trouble on XP but its being quite flakey

I'm now at about the stage where I couldn't go back to Office 2003. I could *probably* still bear to part with Vista.... but it's certainly growing on me.

NicW has just blogged about Te Ara, The Online Encyclopedia of New Zealand.

I personally think the $12 million would have been better spent encouraging/hiring content authors to work on the NZ entries in Wikipedia.

I'm not normally an Open Source kinda guy... but this is an obvious example of where aligning some national $$$ with an *open sourcish* kinda project would have been a good idea.

We've done quite a bit of Workflow stuff for Microsoft recently.

This morning two bits of stuff that we've worked on are featured on the front page of
MSDN.

There's a Virtual Lab- which is basically some hands on labs that we've been working on running in a Virtual Machine and also my article on Simple Human Workflow.

Neath huh!?!

You do yourself no favours if, as minister of finance, you accuse the entire parliamentary press gallery of being greedy and biased...

...as Michael Cullen does here....

He has surely caught, as My Denny Crane would say, Mad Cow Disease...

..for the moment I'm still using Windows XP as my primary OS.

This REALLY pisses me off.

The reason it pisses me off is it's not an issue with Vista or Office, but rather something wrong with my Domain Controller (SBS2k3) that's stopping me from joinng the domain and thus using email and all that Jazz...

Need to rebuild the DC sometime soon and I'm almost certainly going to do it in Virtual Servr this time around.

"In this two-hour episode, the teams must create a 60-second promotional video for new Microsoft software, with execs from the technology giant as the final judges. With only two people left on each team, stakes are high."

So, as Phil Blogs, we did our Vista install and Mountain Bike session on Saturday arvo.

By the time that the foggy rugby finished on Sat ngiht I had my machne pretty well setup with Vista, Office 12, VS.Net 2003 and 2005 and a bunch of other crap.

Setup for Vista took BLOODY AGES, but, was relatively interaction free, i.e. I just set it and went MTBing.

Office and OneNote installs were just as pleasant.

I've started a OneNote Notebook to keep thoughts on my fave and least fave aspects.

A few here to start.

Fave new feature: That little search mox at the bottom of the start bar- no need to navigate my filthy start menu any more. Just press the Windows key and type whatever I want to run. Like WindowsKey-R... but on 'roids!

Least fave new feature: All the bloody security dialogs. I am utterly desensitized to them now. I know where the 'Continue' button is and my braiin just goes on autopilot and clicks it.

Thing I was most surprised that I actually like after bagging it for almost a year: The new Office UI. It is actually REALLY usable. I mean REALLY usable. On on that basis why on earth did they not apply the new UI to the application that would get the most benefit out of it- the tablet PC oriented OneNote! FFS!

...more to follow!

Stuff has details on the refloating of the fishing vessel Kotuku.

Looking at the photo you can see what looks to be a Liferaft still strapped to the roof. Most vessels have the straps setup with hydrostatic releases so the lifeboat is released automatically if the boat sinkz. I wonder why this one did not.

Dare has posted a PR about MSN Spaces now being the largest blogging system on the net.

This kinda got me thinking.

There's all this MSFT vs Google stuff at the moment. MSN Search (or whatever the %*&%$ they are calling it this week) vs Google. Wil Google become the next Microsoft... blah blah blah....

And it's all got me thinking. Who cares about search really anyway.

I mean search is now such a fundamentally ubquitous internet feature that it's almost becoming genericized beyond commercialisation. What I mean to say is that I think it's going to become harder and harder to make search make money.

How many of you actually ever click a Google Ad Link on Googles site?

I find that really the only time I click em is on other peoples real estate. And I think that's quite important. The battle for the years ahead is not around search but rather it's around controlling the channel by which others deliver their content. To this end Yahoo, MySpace and even MSN have a big jump on Google in my opinion.

Phil has a post up about different UX approaches to doing mutually exclusive selection (think radio boxes).

Thought I'd chime in with the way that Vista now does it (most of the time).

This is a new Win32 control in Vista designed for scenarios where in the past you'd lick the radio button and hit next... when all you were doing was making a single decision.