IE9 and Rich Text Comment field

By Adam Cogan in Internet Explorer 0 Comment

For the last few years, I have been hoping that Scott Guthrie would give us a rich text field in Silverlight (and supported copying and pasting images on the clipboard)… Like Word gives us today.

Would it be better for IE9 to give us an awesome Rich Text Control that does this?

I am thinking about the use in CRM, TFS and SharePoint; however every blog out there could use it in their comments…
And everyone would want to use IE over the other browsers.

Here is just one example of people kind of requesting this feature on codeplex:
http://codeplex.codeplex.com/workitem/4756
Allow formatting in comments

Here is an other
At http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/community/add/ff400237.aspx

Figure: This does not allow adding an image (ideally you want to paste from the clipboard)

Figure: This does not allow adding an image (ideally you want to paste from the clipboard)

Can we have an official location for Bugs?

By Adam Cogan in Visual Studio Gallery 0 Comment

1. Add a new tab

An example: There is a known issue in the Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 RTW. Where does Microsoft put it? I am not sure, but I expect to find it on the product page.\ The product page in this case, is where I downloaded it.
E.g. http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/59ac03e3-df99-4776-be39-1917cbfc5d8e

Figure: Can we have a 4th tab?

2. Add a record into it

E.g. This is one entry I would like you to add to this new tab:

The Bug

Date format bug in the Sprint Burndown report in Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 RTW.

If you are in a non US locale, this prevents the current sprint being calculated and the report falls over with an error: 

Query execution failed for dataset 'dsSprintsCurrent'.(rsErrorExecutingCommand) The conversion of a nvarchar data type to a datetime data type resulted in an out-of-range value.

The Fix

The fix is to change the RDL.
Open the Sprint Burndown RDL file.
Change the “Today” parameter from “Text” to “DateTime”:

<ReportParameter Name="Today"> <DataType>DateTime</DataType> <DefaultValue > <Values> <Value>=today</Value> </Values> </DefaultValue> <Hidden>true</Hidden> </ReportParameter>

Make working with Categories better

By Adam Cogan in Outlook 0 Comment

Figure: Using categories is great for mailing to a group of people

Figure: Using categories is great for mailing to a group of people

I want to send an email to those tagged with ‘iphone’…
How would I do it?

Figure: Add an entry after 'Contacts'... As I would expect to find 'Contacts of a certain category' here

Figure: Add an entry after ‘Contacts’… As I would expect to find ‘Contacts of a certain category’ here

Figure: Looking for "Email" option on the right hand side... or it could be called "Send email to Selection"

Figure: Looking for “Email” option on the right hand side… or it could be called “Send email to Selection”

Figure: Bingo... found it on the Actions menu

Figure: Bingo… found it on the Actions menu

So I would change
“Create | New Message to Contact”
to
“Send email to Selection”

Slow Outlook – Fix the confusion in the KB

By Adam Cogan in Outlook 0 Comment

Regarding http://support.microsoft.com/kb/832925

I didn’t have any of the registry keys and I found the article a bit confusing. Especially when I could not copy and paste from the article to regedit.

The worse thing is that copy and paste from the KB to outlook fails. So I have 4 suggestions for the KB:
#A – Add another column

Figure: #1 Add a column in front to indicate ANSI or Unicode

Figure: #1 Add a column in front to indicate ANSI or Unicode

#B – Copy & paste from the KB doesn’t work because regedit doesn’t allow 0x0000c800 as hex number

Figure: You should be able to copy and paste from the KB to the Regedit

Figure: You should be able to copy and paste from the KB to the Regedit

#C – Add a little explanation on how to get the HEX numbers
E.g.:

  1. Open calc.exe
  2. Switch to “Programming mode”
  3. Make sure to have the calculator switched to “Dec”
    Calculator
  4. Enter the decimal number that you want to have as filesize
  5. Click on “Hex”
  6. Use that number


#D – How do I know that my changes were applied?
Tell me?

Slow Outlook – Add a KB explaining the compacting reason

By Adam Cogan in Outlook 0 Comment

Slow Outlook – Add a KB explaining the compacting reason

Outlook gets really slow when your mailbox hits certain sizes eg. 1.9GB (for 2007 ANSI) or 19GB (for 2007 Unicode) or 48GB (for 2010 Unicode)

Outlook gets really slow when your mailbox gets near its maximum… it kicks in a whole lot of CPU processing

The performance problems happen because the OST/PST silently takes it upon itself to compact much more aggressively than it would in a situation in which it’s got “room to spare”.

    The specifics are:

  • Outlook 2007 is 1.9GB (for ANSI OST/PST)
    The 1.9GB limit is a hard limit (it relates to a fundamental limitation in the on-disk format) and, therefore, there is no work around (short of moving some of the data to another store or deleting it and allowing compaction to run its course).
  • Outlook 2007 is 19GB (for Unicode OST/PST)
    This is not a hard limit, the file format is capable of growing larger and so there is a work-around that can be found at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/832925.
  • Outlook 2010 is 48GB (for Unicode OST/PST)
    The new defaults in 2010 are 50GB for max file size and 47.5GB (95% of 50GB) for the warn file size in Unicode OSTs/PSTs.

Note: It’s also worth looking over the information in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940226, which covers some of the more common root causes of Outlook performance issues. In particular, the table about SSDs can be useful for setting expectations (and keep in mind that the Vista WinSAT tool is fundamentally different than the Win7 WinSAT tool and you should download the Vista one and run it on your win7 machine if you want to compare your numbers to the numbers in the chart).

Syncing Offline Address Book – need more info so we don’t think it is a corrupt ‘offline address book template file’

By Adam Cogan in Outlook 0 Comment
  • This is a weird thing… what is it doing when it gets to this point?
  • If you google, many results incorrectly seem to be talking about a corrupt ‘offline address book template file’. Am I correct in assuming that they just were not patient enough?
  • Why does it take so long?

(feels like an eternity… actually, you think it is hung… but it does complete)

Figure: Takes so long you need more information

Figure: Takes so long you need more information