*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

I’m sitting on a bus right now on interstate I520 in Redmond, Wa after leaving the Microsoft Company Store.  I picked up some shirts for my wife and myself, and I also picked up a Windows Media Center Keyboard.  But the reason I am sitting in the middle of the interstate is the bus we were own got into an accident. Some crazy chic was trying to force her way in front of a charter bus.  What an idiot.  Andy, John, and myself are in front of the bus.  John and I saw everything and filled out a report in favor of the bus driver and John had her approaching the bus on video.  She’s hopeless.    Right now I’m watching the state trooper explain to her that she’s an idiiot and was in the wrong.  I think she’s crying now.  Oh man, now I feel sorry for her.

Funny things that have been said on the bus while we’ve been waiting:

Geek pretending to be the officer – “So you hit the bus and you think its his fault?”

Geek onboard – “Hey, there’s a WIFI connection near by, awesome!”

[Update - 9.26.2006]
John has a video of the bus driver and the lady that hit us getting into it.  Again, never hit a bus of gadget toting geeks!

I’ve got to catch up on a few blog entries from a few sessions today but I want to take a little extra time to write up a little nicer article on them.  Until then I thought I would throw out a few IE 7 tips that Dave Massey spoke to us about.  Here is the first one up.

I’ve been using IE 7 for a few months and I really like the tab browsing.  But that’s not the only reason users are going to like IE 7.  However, I’m a keyboard hot key nut.  One of the features I like is the tab browsing preview.  Let’s say you have 6 tabs open and you want to go to a certain tab, but you can’t remember which one it is in.  The best way to accomplish this is to use the quick view.  Here’s a screen shot:

(hotkey – CTRL-Q)

Once you hit CTRL-Q you can view all the tabs you have open and then use arrow keys to navigate.  Another useful feature is one Jason mentioned earlier whereby you can type in something like “apple” and then press ctrl-enter and it will add http://www.  and .com to the end giving you http://www.apple.com. 

Dave also turned us onto a quick reference guide on the IE7 blog where they have a quick reference that lists a lot of the hot keys.  Some other ones that are worthy of mentioning are ALT-ENTER which opens a search in a new window.  IE 7 also allows you to add your own search engine into IE 7 really easy.  Go here to look at companies that are already adopting this.  Kinda interesting because if you add this HTML into your page, IE 7 will auto detect your site’s search and allow users to add it to their browser.

<link rel=”search” type=”application/opensearchdescription+xml” title=”Ebay” href=http://yourdomain.com/file.xml />

Here is a sample Ebay xml file from the list of sites:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″ ?>
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns=”http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/“>
<ShortName>eBay</ShortName>
<Description>Search Online Auctions</Description>
<Url type=”text/html“ template=”http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?satitle={searchTerms}“ />
</OpenSearchDescription>

For more information about how to use the Open Search definition see this url:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/browser/external/overview/ie7_opensearch_ext.asp

Latest update from the Asp.Net Technology Summit is geeks are going wild!  In particular Scott Guthrie.  Last night we were at Trader Vic’s eating and mixing with the presenters along with the attendees.    Andy Stopford and Scott were chatting about LINQ and Scott couldn’t resist pulling out his laptop and doing an adhoc show and tell to show off the new data binding bits with LINQ and Asp.Net.  Conversation is great but a picture is worth a thousand words, and Visual Studio + LINQ is worth a couple of million.

Here is a video I took with my phone of Scott, Andy and myself geeking out and talking about LINQ.