Dustin Mihalik's Blog

Longhorn Feature: Bluetooth

I often say bad things about WindowsXP's lack of built-in Bluetooth support. I know there are plenty of articles that state that Bluetooth is dead, but with support on the PocketPC, it seems like there should be some support in XP. Bluetooth support on the PocketPC is much better than on XP.

I assumed since I had not heard anything about Bluetooth support on Longhorn, that it was not there. I was actually thinking of writing a blog entry about what it was missing. I decided I should test it out before I started pointing fingers. I'm glad I did. As soon as I plugged in my Bluetooth adaptor, Longhorn recognized it and allowed me to connect to my phone and PocketPC.

There seems to only be support for doing dialup and serial connections right now, but hopefully sending files, sharing contacts, and other useful services will be available in later versions. Yet another feature I did not expect to see, but I am very happy it's there.

Now I just need to dig into the API's and see if they are any better than the Bluetooth API's on XP. Fingers crossed for a managed Bluetooth API.

Longhorn feature of the night

I've found quite a few new features in Longhorn that I did not see at the PDC that are not really development related, but are still worth mentioning. I figured I'd post a few as I came across them. This one is the solution to the problem of applications trying to take over as the default file handler for a file type. It seems that Longhorn will ask when a program changes the default type and allows you to select if you wish to use the new program or continue using the current program. The fact that any application can choose to be the default handler for a file type was a major frustration in previous versions. Here's a screenshot of the dialog I got when Firebird tried to handle jpg images.

Longhorn RSS Sidebar

After installing Longhorn, I was very disapointed with the number of sidebar tiles it included.  As much as I need 1/8th of my screen taken up by a clock and a quick launch bar, I've kept it off until tonight.  Tonight I went looking for some sample sidebar tiles before I started working on my own.  There are a few samples in the Longhorn SDK, including the tile RSS viewer tile that was running during the PDC Keynote on Monday.  I've been doing all my development in Notepad since my packet of “the goods” was missing the Whidbey DVD (really need to email someone about that), but I've gotten a little bit done with the aid of these samples. Hello World French Flashcard Contact Lookup RSS Reader One more tip: be very careful when testing your sidebar tiles.  Since they run inside explorer.exe, a crash in the sidebar tile can cause explorer to crash.  And since the sidebar starts with explorer and does not keep tabs on what crashed last, it's pretty easy to get stuck where explorer crashes everytime it starts.

Longhorn: First impressions

I installed Longhorn on my home dev box this weekend.  Since I only played with it on the lab computers, I did not see much of the install and setup.  Since the major thing that I had drilled into my head at the PDC was that Microsoft want's my opinion, I thought i would post my first impressions.

The install was very nice.  When I put in the DVD, I got a very nice GUI installer rather than the text-based ones from 2000 & XP.  UI on the installer was very clean, and it gave me fairly accurate guesses on how long it was going to be working.  It hardly gave me any options on how to set things up, though.  This is somewhat good, somewhat bad.  Most of the time I just take the defaults, but there are some things (like timezone) that need to be changed and I hate looking through the control panel to figure out how to change them.  This could just be because it's such an early build.

I'm pretty sure the sidebar will be very useful in the futre, but in this version, there are no useful tiles (as much as I love the huge clock...), and it's just a waste of screen space. 

The memory leaks are very bad.  Woke up this morning to a machine that was using 1.5gb of memory.  Killing explorer every now and then seems to keep it down.  Not a major problem for such early software, but it makes it diffucult to use for too long.  Also, File IO and networking seem really slow.  Once again, not major because it's so early, but it's somewhat annoying

WinFS seems pretty good, but I've not figured out a whole lot about how to use it.  I was hoping it could just scan my drives and figure out where things were.  I guess that's not (currently) the case, so I dropped some stuff into my default store and it seemed to work fine.

Overall, I'm pretty impressed with the new stuff I've seen.  Once I get Widbey installed (more on that later), I'll start playing with some more of the new Avalon stuff and posting what I think abou the new API's.