SonicFileFinder is a free add-in for Visual Studio that allows a fast and convenient search for any file within every Project of the loaded Solution by entering the complete filename or just a part of it. The found file(s) can either be edited with a single keystroke or a Windows Explorer / CommandLine prompt can be opened at the file's location.

What's new?

Version 2.0 is quite a big feature release. Besides all the new features, the performance has been increased drastically.

Note: SonicFileFinder now requires .NET Framework 3.5 to run! 

• ADDED: In Visual Studio 2008 the keyboard shortcut, for starting the search with SonicFileFinder, will now work in the source code view of the HTML editor.
• ADDED: Unwanted files can now be excluded from the search using the same search language in the new exclusion field.
• ADDED: The order, in which the columns of SonicFileFinder are sorted, is now being displayed underneath the result list.
• ADDED: The font size used in SonicFileFinder can now be adjusted using the configuration dialog or hotkeys.
• ADDED: Files using a designer, like WinForms, will now be displayed in design view when opening them with SonicFileFinder. (Code view can be forced using the context menu.) Sadly this won't work for C++ projects and there seems to be no way to fix this.
• ADDED: The number of found files is now displayed in the title of the popup/tool window.
• ADDED: The history of files opened/explored with SonicFileFinder can now be saved between sessions.
• ADDED: SonicFileFinder will now detect changes (file added/renamed/removed) in Visual Studio 2008 Website projects.
• CHANGED: Significantly improved performance while searching.
• FIXED: The sorting of the columns in the result list is now saved between sessions.
• FIXED: The crashing of SonicFileFinder, which should have been fixed in Version 1.9.1, reappeared in some special cases and should have been fixed now.

Download it on the SonicFileFinder website.

Update: If you get the following error message, please download SonicFileFinder again.

Don’t forget: If you like SonicFileFinder, you might want to take a look at my amazon wishlists (US, UK, Germany).

Everybody owning an iPhone has encountered the small Sleep/Wake button button located at the top right. Normally it puts the iPhone to sleep or wakes it up, when it’s light asleep.

But it can do more!

After pressing it for about 3 seconds a “slide to power off” message appears. After confirming it, the iPhone will be shut down completely. To wake it again from its deep slumber, just press the Sleep/Wait button for 1 second and the phone boots up.

I guess you already knew that, right?

Well, it can do even more! (Now comes the good part ;)

When receiving a call in sleep mode (the screen is off), the phone wakes up, shows information about the caller and displays the “slide to answer” message, but there seems to be no way to ignore or kick out the caller. This is where the Sleep/Wait button comes in:

• Press Sleep/Wait one time to shut off vibration and ringtone
• Press Sleep/Wait rapidly two times to kick out the caller and send him/her directly to your VoiceMail box

How cool is that?

P.S: @Uwe: Yes, I am working on the 2.0 release of SonicFileFinder ;)

Since the Windows Live Writer Backup Utility won't work under Vista x64 at the moment, I'd like to describe how you can do this manually.

The complete settings consist of four parts:

• Blog Templates
• Blog Posts (drafts and recently posted)
• Plugins
• Registry Settings

Blog Templates

The blog templates reside at C:\Users\<your user name>\appdata\Roaming\Windows Live Writer\blogtemplates or when using C# you should use Environment.SpecialFolder.ApplicationData followed by \Windows Live Writer\blogtemplates to get the path.

Blog Posts

Your blog posts are located in the "Documents" folder inside a sub folder called "My Weblog Posts". C# knows the "Documents" folder as Environment.SpecialFolder.Personal.

Plugins

If you installed any plugins for Windows Live Writer, you will find them inside your "Program Files" folder underneath "Windows Live\Writer\Plugins"

Registry Settings

Last not least, you have to open regedit.exe and navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows Live\Writer. To backup, simply right click, click "export" and write the settings to a .reg file. Double click this file to import the settings again.

When using Windows Live Writer for blogging with Drupal you have to consider a few things, when setting up your account as explained here for example.

But even then, you cannot download any categories from Drupal for use in Windows Live Writer. There is a small bug in the blogapi.module (located under /modules/blogapi/ in your Drupal installation).

Inside this file there is a function at the end of it named _blogapi_get_node_types().

function _blogapi_get_node_types() {
  $available_types = array_keys(array_filter(variable_get('blogapi_node_types', array('blog' => 1))));
  $types = array();
  foreach (node_get_types() as $type => $name) {
    if (node_access('create', $type) && in_array($type, $available_types)) {
      $types[] = $type;
    }
  }

You simply have to delete the red marked parts and everything will work as expected.

So, after my first and kind of overwhelming FedCon XVI last year, I tried out FedCon XVII two weeks ago. Well, maybe I was a bit more down-to-earth, maybe I didn't see the thing through rose-colored glasses, but this FedCon wasn't nearly like my first. It may also have been the fact, that "Jägermeister" - the big sponsor this year - was everywhere! (Well not inside the restrooms. At least I haven't seen them there.) Even Marc B. Lee called it the "JägerCon". There were other things I very much disliked, but I spare you the details. As you may have experienced yourself: The good things stay in memory and the bad things (were there any?) will pass away.

"Stop whining and bring up some of the good stuff!" you say. Well, here it comes...

Mary McDonnell alias Laura Roslin from Battlestar Galactica was very much a pleasant surprise. She was moved to tears at the closing ceremony and she didn't play her role there. Throughout the panels, she formed one of the running gags at FedCon. Wanting to say a few words in German, she said: "Es ist so geil hier zu sein!" She thought that "geil" means awesome, but in German it's more "horny" than "awesome" ;) Another quote when answering a question: "I ordered someone out of an airlock. I don't know whom, there were so many."
	I still don't know, where that question came from, but another running gag was: "Have you ever seen Jamie Bamber naked?" Even people from the audience, even Marc B. Lee himself inside the audience asked the different actors/actresses on stage this question more than once.
Brent Spiner alias Data in TNG - he would make a great stand-up comedian - was hilarious on stage. He came up with the theory, that you tell a bad joke, no matter how bad, and repeat it 10 times, the audience will die of laughter. So he told us: "How proud he was playing on Battlestar Galactica.". You may know, or may have guessed, Brent never played on BSG. But after the 10th time telling this in the strangest situations, the audience was rolling on the floor laughing.
	Did you know, that Rene Auberjonois alias Odo in DS9 actually played with the great Audrey Hepburn on Broadway? And that he and his wife are calling their house in LA "the house that Star Trek built"?
Bruce Boxleitner (left) alias John Sheridan in Babylon 5 had a panel together with Peter Jurasic alias Londo Mollari in Babylon 5. Those two also did Tron together by the way. This panel was clearly the highlight of the whole weekend! You really had to see those guys to believe it. Some quotes: Bruce: (responding to a question about the making-of of a movie) "I don't know, if they put it on tape". Peter: "It's called DVDs now!" Bruce: (responding to a question concerning what happened to the planet next to Babylon 5 after its destruction) [serious facial expression] "Well, I guess it's still there."
	LeVar Burton (Geordy La Forge), Marina Sirtis (Deanna Troi) and Brent Spiner were great together. Shame on LeVar and Brent, leaving the panel after 20min, to catch their plane. But afterwards Marina told us much funstuff from the set at TNG. Her standard quote as the ship's counsellor was "Captain, he's hiding something". One day after that quote saying it to Patrick Steward (alias Jean-Luc Picard), he answered (in a funny way): "Yeah, I know that you stupid cow! You waste of space!"
This year's costume contest was great as always, but the about 3 meters high an 4-5 meters long At-At was amazing!
	You are dooooomed!!
What a nice couple!
	Even Stormtroopers have to go shopping from time to time.
Last, but definitely not least Giles Aston in his fabulous Nemesis costume taking a picture with me at the end of FedCon.

I'd like to close now with words from Londo Mollari: "That wasn't so bad after all, yes?"

Like last year, you will find a selection of the photos I took in the gallery. (Don't use the internal gallery located at http://jens-schaller.de/gallery, because the Drupal integration is somewhat slow.)

I was very delighted this morning seeing that SonicFileFinder got "morning brewed" by Chris Alcock! This is so awesome, thank you Chris!

After the Daily Grind was gone, Chris jumped in and continued the tradition. I really enjoy reading his blog and I already infected some of my colleagues. If you don't know the "Morning Brew" yet, I strongly advise to get there. Chris blogs about interesting finds regarding .NET with a lot of "must reads" in it.

SonicFileFinder is a free add-in for Visual Studio that allows a fast and convenient search for any file within every Project of the loaded Solution by entering the complete filename or just a part of it. The found file(s) can either be edited with a single keystroke or a Windows Explorer / CommandLine prompt can be opened at the file's location.

What's new?

Version 1.9.1 is a bugfix release due to changes in Visual Studio 2008 automation model. Big thanks to Jacobo Amselem for reporting the bug and testing the beta version! 

• FIXED: SonicFileFinder sometimes crashed Visual Studio or simply closed itself without a warning, when using some of the new projects types in Visual Studio 2008. This problem occurred for example using the new database project types in Visual Studio Team System 2008.

Download it on the SonicFileFinder website.

I just went live with my new website based on the Drupal CMS system. It's not perfect and some stuff is missing, but the basic stuff should work.

Links to content of the old typo3 based site should be completely redirected to the new site. Although I expect there will be a few links I forgot, so the next days could be a bumpy ride. I'll check the log for dead links, but please tell me, if something doesn't work as expected.

Regards
Jens

This great tip is masterminded by a colleague of mine, Prakash Punnoor, who fell in love with the Penguin OS.

He says that

...would be the right thing to do with Vista.

Well, as you may have guessed, I don't share his opinion ;)

No really, I like Vista. It's not perfect, but it's on the right way. SP1 won't fix all problems and the Media Center still has a long way to go, but it never really let me down since I first installed it using the Beta 2. And since this is the last tip in the Vista Tips Galore, I thank you all for reading and for your feedback.

When watching TV or other videos, the video decoder integrated into the Vista Media Center isn't really that great. The PowerDVD video decoder is much better and faster, which for example eliminates the sometimes stuttering video when using the standard video decoder.

After installing another video decoder, you have to tell Vista which one to use. You can either do this performing some artistics in the Vista registry, or simply by downloading a very small tool from Garry Whittaker called VMCD.exe.

After starting it, you see the following dialog allowing you to choose a video as well as an audio decoder for use with Vista Media Center.

I would recommend leaving the audio decoder as is and setting the video decoder to PowerDVD as shown in the picture.

If you don't like the view in which Vista Media Center starts up by default, you can change that using some command line parameters:

Aero effects are quite nice, but some of them can be annoying after some time. If you also like Aero and don't want to switch back to the old XP Standard Theme, you can tweak the Aero settings quite a bit.

You find those settings buried inside the performance options:

• Open the Control Panel
• Go to System and Maintenance -> Performance Information and Tools
• Click on Adjust Visual Effects in the Tasks area.

In the popup window go to the Visual Effects tab and select Custom. Now you can disable certain options:

I disabled the following:

• Animate windows when minimizing and maximizing
• Fade or slide menus into view
• Fade or slide ToolTips into view
• Fade out menu items after clicking
• Slide open combo boxes
• Smooth-scroll list boxes

For those of you not liking the transparent glass effects (e.g. in headers of windows) you can disable those too by deselecting Enable transparent glass.

As I mentioned in the Vista Tip 16: User Folders in Vista and How To Move Them post, Vista finally(!!) supports symbolic links similar to those Linux ones. Although there are a few restrictions, symbolic links are quite useful!

Why use symbolic links?

Let's say you have a server for storing your digital pictures and you want to access them on your desktop. You could create a network share for those pictures and mount a drive under a new drive letter on your desktop. Let's say you also like to store some pictures locally and not on the server. Since Windows allows you to have only one Pictures folder you cannot wrap both local and server stored pictures under the same Pictures folder.

Well you can with symbolic links: Vista brings a command line tool called mklink. Using the tool symbolic links (as well as hard links) can be created with a snap.

To merge your local and server stored pictures you simply open a command line inside your Pictures folder and use the following call:

mklink /D myServerFolder \\<my server name>\<my server share for pictures>

This would create an new directory called myServerFolder inside the Pictures folder pointing to a network share on your server containing the server stored pictures. You can then simply browse your pictures regardless of whether located locally or on the server. It's completely transparent to the Windows Explorer besides a small shortcut icon for the symbolic link folder.

Try it and I promise you will love it!

The somewhat unimpressive input field in the Vista start menu yields great power, but it can be extended even more. A small program called Start++ from Brandon Paddock extends the start menu with powerful, customizable extensions called Startlets.

You can:

• Perform a web search
• Look-up something Wikipedia or Dictionary.com
• Play all music matching certain keywords, or by a particular artist
• Send an e-mail to a specific contact
• "sudo" - Run a command as an Administrator
• etc.

Start++ is expandable through Startlets in the form of Commands or Gadgets. Yes, you get it for free, but since it's CareWare, you might consider a donation.

By default Vista fills the initial view of the start menu with often used applications. The order of those applications may change based on how frequent an application is started. One can make sure, that an application stays permanently in the start menu.

Just Right click on an application in the start menu and select Pin to Start Menu.

This even works for any .EXE file in the Windows Explorer! Right clicking and selecting Unpin from Start Menu detaches an application from the start menu.