Shell Team - Exploring and Using Windows Vista

Search -- Does it support a wider range of queries, such as Google's  minus (-) or quotations (" ") or some other Microsoft home-grown format for getting exactly what you want?

I have also always wanted to be able to do sub-searches. So you get some search results and then search within just those results, like this:

cat  = cat.doc; hat.txt; cats and such.html
ball = cat and such.html

The reason is that you can search for "cat ball" but then that will return 'cat' and 'ball' results or "cat ball", but what if it isn't one expression but you just wanted a sub-set of the documents that contained 'cat'? Where the sub-set of 'cat' also contain 'ball'?

-- I don't know if I explained that well at all.... I might edit this a bit...

Pretty neat video, great to see they dive straight into the demos

that keyboard in the background looks kinda interesting.  Any idea what make/model it is?

Some nice demos there. Would have preferred the evangelist not being there though, feels very fake when somebodys asking questions to point out what marketing wants you to know. Not very Channel 9 like IMO. Very cool stuff though.

Fair enough, I stand corrected, didn't mean to question her technical prowess. Maybe I just don't like the style of interview quite so much.

Has there been any mention of the sidebar anywhere yet or was that taken out entirely? Also, anyone know if there will be a text box on the taskbar for search like in Windows Desktop Search? It's nice to be able to search without opening a new window up.

Great video, thanks.

I was wondering how this links up with the WINFS ?
The shell team did not mention it but the fonctionnalities are pretty close to it , aren't they?
Is it based on winfs ?

adrien wrote:

Great video, thanks.

I was wondering how this links up with the WINFS ?
The shell team did not mention it but the fonctionnalities are pretty close to it , aren't they?
Is it based on winfs ?

WinFS won't be in Vista unfortunately, but it's not needed for the search functionality anyway. Will be interesting to see how they integrate WinFS features into Explorer when it does arrive.

Cool. I never realised how powerful that little serach box is. When I was poking around beta 1 for the first time I met the new control panel for the first time and thought. o - cr*p where is eeverything these days. Didn't realise I could just search for "resolution".

hmmmm no yet sure about some of the UI, the search facility is looking good! no longer should I lose a document.. I'll wait to pass judgement until i've actually played, broken, fix and caused a few BSoD

I do see what people are saying that this with Catherine prompting people to give more info... makes it look like she's from PR! (no offence Catherine... can tell you far to techie to be from that team )

Interesting..... we'll see what users think when they get it... also is MS going to come and train all the users who have only just got used to XP and/or 2k? Or is there going to be a way that users can see Vista in an XP style by default?

Also i've read that at another source that there might be more than the current 3 XP client OS's of different (IE Home, Pro, MCE)... is this true?

Excellent!  Finding files will be so much easier.

Cheers,
- Deg -

mycroft wrote:

WinFS won't be in Vista unfortunately, but it's not needed for the search functionality anyway. Will be interesting to see how they integrate WinFS features into Explorer when it does arrive.

I always thought WinFS was pretty much a file search function.  This already seems to be part of Vista.

So "what else" is WinFS all about ?

mycroft wrote:

Would have preferred the evangelist not being there though, feels very fake when somebodys asking questions to point out what marketing wants you to know.

I thought it was great having her there to interpret what the programming geeks were talking about into some benefit for me.

Not the most exciting video - I still don't see anything Dead Sexy about Vista.  Office 12 looks awesome - Vista just looks more of the same.

Robert - when video taping scenes where a standard CRT monitor is going to be in shot.  I think setting its refresh rate to 60Hz gets rid of the scrolling effect.

I would like to know (if those guys are listening): I have WMA files with plenty of meta-data, what I have done is to label some of the files genre as "rock" and some as "rock/pop". Will vista be able to place one file under two genre headings by understanding that the "/" is a divider of categories, this is really important for me thanks.

Nice one I've done that with Word files for recipes and saved a picture as the thumbnail, unfortunately XP doesn't show the image unless it’s below a certain MB size. You should let the BBC Food section see this, they have a recipe binder based online, it would be good to get it on the HDD and then have it read by my LG GRD-267DTU fridge and projected onto the wall.

Can Vista can do that?

Oh and for the above it would be good to have a field that warned if the food gave you bad breath i.e. lots of Garlic

How do you plan on stopping poorly written "property handlers", "thumbnail providers", and other shell extensions from hanging, crashing, or otherwise interfering with the shell? I didn't get the impression from the video that managed code is required.

Hopefully these shell extensions run in a completely seperate process from explorer that is killed automatically if it blocks for more than 5ms, or starts leaking memory.

Manip wrote:

I have also always wanted to be able to do sub-searches. So you get some search results and then search within just those results, like this:

cat  = cat.doc; hat.txt; cats and such.html
ball = cat and such.html

The reason is that you can search for "cat ball" but then that will return 'cat' and 'ball' results or "cat ball", but what if it isn't one expression but you just wanted a sub-set of the documents that contained 'cat'? Where the sub-set of 'cat' also contain 'ball'?

As I understand it, you will have the ability with Windows Vista to save such a search query as a virtual folder, which would continually add/remove files to/from this virtual folder as they are created and deleted, or their meta-data is modified.

It would make sense to be able to run sub-queries, as executing a query on files in a virtual folder is essentially a sub-query. The virtual folder contains files which have been obtained through the query that defines the virtual folder, and then the query that you have applied to the virtual folder is a sub-query to the initial query.

Virtual folders are available out of the box with Windows Vista, are they not? Or is this something that WinFS will be adding to the dish? 2 minutes into the video BTW.

Edit: Virtual folders are indeed included out of the box. I would be surprised if sub-queries are not included... although the breadcrumb bar at the top of a virtual folder kind of allows you to run a sub-query... Not sure if that breadcrumb bar will provide the same functionality when using the quick search box.

And I appologize... but I must say that I do not like the style of this video. Having someone ask pre-rehearsed questions to invoke answers is readily aparent and quite anoying... It'd be much better to just have the demonstrator to explain it on their own and have Scoble ask the questions. It's getting pretty anoying...

scobleizer wrote:

These were not pre-rehearsed. At least not that I know of. The team, I'm sure, did some practicing since they needed to be ready for the PDC, though, but I didn't sense that they had pre-canned responses. Not sure what made you feel that way about this one.

I just found the way Catherine kept asking all kinds of questions to keep the interview moving along rather painful. I felt it made it resemble one of those segments on the shopping channel when they're trying to sell you a computer. They've got the one person running the machine, and the second person is asking all kinds of simplistic questions to get the first person to do a quick how-to demo.

I much prefer the previous style that has dominated Channel 9 videos where the person doing the demo gets the screen time and just continues to explain the different functionality. I don't think I've heard you ask more than 2 questions thus far Scoble... which is odd as I'm 25 minutes into the video. It just feels so much more natural when you're moving the interview along (if it needs help). Otherwise it just seems like you're a fly on the wall in some seemingly scripted (sorry but it must have been because of the practicing for the PDC) commercial, much like the Conservative Party of Canada's recent television commercials, which are laughable.

My intention is not to insult anyone, just to explain why I feel as I do about this style of video.

I just watched the video and an idea popped into my head ....

What about tabs in Windows Explorer?

I usually have many Windows Explorer windows open and as Windows XP groups them by default, picking the right window from the popup menu tends to get really ugly - especially if folders have the same name.
I mean we have them in browsers (Firefox, IE7, ...) so why not in Windows Explorer?
Wouldn't it be nice to have commands like "Open folder in new tab" or just have to press the middle mouse button (Firefox, IE7, ...) to do the exact same thing?

IMHO this would be a really cool feature. How do I make sure this idea reaches a developer or someone else from the Shell Team?

Is the windows version in the video a 32 bit or a 64 bit version and will they release a 32 bit final version of windows vista or only a 64 bit version.[6] 

wow.... the windows programming bible (Charles Petzold) is now a monitor stand.....

Another thing, C++, COM, WTF ?!?!?!?!??!?!?!?
Do the work and let us do this in managed code!!! get a grip!

Finally, one of the guy mentioned that if the one of the handlers doesn't work properly the UI will hang! I don't think that's acceptable, spin another thread (call each handlers in different thread), cache thumbnails, disabled badly behaving handlers....
don't repeat the mistakes of the past
Make the UI/Shell look nice is very nice.... but I think you must make it multi-threaded

TheAsher wrote:

Finally, one of the guy mentioned that if the one of the handlers doesn't work properly the UI will hang! I don't think that's acceptable, spin another thread (call each handlers in different thread), cache thumbnails, disabled badly behaving handlers....

don't repeat the mistakes of the past

I agree. Not only do I agree, but Microsoft agree's as well. I've seen it posted on the Microsoft Patterns and Practices website where Microsoft is encouraging developers to create a separate thread for asynchronous service calls so that the UI doesn't hang. You'd think they'd heed their own advice...

Apart from that... shouldn't we be looking forward to be making improvements now for multi-core processors? Spinning off the extra threads right now to make the UI not hang would theoretically increase performance in the long run when people move to multi-core systems.

I want to know something simple about the meta-data in vista, see this program:
http://it-falke.com/software/renamefiles/us_description.php

It formats files names in a folder in batch, this relly save on RSI. I find that I really need it when for example having obtained some data from a database and the music files I ripped are ALL IN CAPS, with one click this changes them to say Title Case, a bit like in MS word.

The problem is I have to still change the meta-data manually as the song title imbedded within the files meta-data is still in caps. Any cool tools like this one for vista?

What kind of keyboard is that?

With Vista also maintaining index data of all (well, most) the data on the search scope, Isn't the replication of data (google's desktop search and others) a cause for concern? Any means being worked out for a standard index file format that can be used by other applications?

MS has done a pretty horrible job of explaining WinFS, so perhaps I am way off on this, but...

WinFS is common data store with an advanced form of relations. Lets say I work in the Widget industry, and I have to run an Widget Specific application. Using WinFS I could develop a schema for the data that I want to store -- and just by using WinFS I would get a lot of advanced capabilities.

Where it gets really interesting though, is if your industry adopts your schema, or comes up with one on their own, another application would be able to use the same data store, if you set the security permissions to allow them to do so.

Contacts is the obvious example used, because it is a concept that everyone uses -- the scema will be a little more specific, but once you have your contacts in WinFS, other applications that deal with Contacts can use that common data store so that they are dealing with the contact objects, or sub or super sets, in the same way. If I change the Work phone number for a contact in my Widgets application, that information will also be changed in Microsoft Outlook.

It is hard to imagine right now what this means, but it opens up enormous potential in applications interacting with one another. Presumably, this puts a lot of pressure on industries to agree upon schemas, and all sorts of new incentives for developing software.

In my opinion it is a bigger change in software, if it works, than GUIs or the Internet.

Thanks for an interesting video. I had a small problem with it. Why can't I seek forward and backward in the video, it would be very helpful because I tend to miss a few words here and there because I'm not a native English speaker and thus it would be very every nice to be able to seek few seconds back and watch it again? Is this intentional, limitation of the WMV format or just limitation of the Windows Media Player for Macintosh? BTW, an update to WMP for Mac to make it faster and have a better UI would be very welcome, hopefully it is in the works! Greetings, Jussi

Seeking works fine in WMP10 on Windows when streaming. Is it the downloadable version you're watching?

A feature that I would have liked is the ability to sort folder listings by most resently used item. What I mean is the more I access a file the further to the top of the folder listing it should appear. This will be very useful since I will be able to find the files eg. documents that I have recently accessed without the need of a recent documents menu. All document folders should support this. I should be able to switch between sorting the files by any of the columns eg. name, date, etc and also sorting the files by most or least recently used (accessed, opened). Can such a feature be implemented?

I like the idea of tabs in explorer, it would keep things a lot more cleaner, in line with the whole 'vista' clarity thing.

What about Project M. Whats that all about? I thought that had something to do with the shell and explorer

I wish that woman would stop talking

I second the motion that .NET should be supported for writing shell extensions. I hope I never have to write another COM object in C++. Life it too short. If the future of MS development is WinFX, put your money where your mouth is.

TheAsher wrote:

wow.... the windows programming bible (Charles Petzold) is now a monitor stand.....

Another thing, C++, COM, WTF ?!?!?!?!??!?!?!?
Do the work and let us do this in managed code!!! get a grip!

Finally, one of the guy mentioned that if the one of the handlers doesn't work properly the UI will hang! I don't think that's acceptable, spin another thread (call each handlers in different thread), cache thumbnails, disabled badly behaving handlers....
don't repeat the mistakes of the past
Make the UI/Shell look nice is very nice.... but I think you must make it multi-threaded

Agreed, XP Explorer is still very flaky and hangs all the time, especially when accessing network shares in a workgroup, ftp sites and thumbnail previews. Heres a good example... http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/08/case-of-intermittent-and-annoying.html/
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1855391,00.asp

Can we get some feedback from the devs on multithreading in Vista Explorer?

I've tried to download the movie but .... ~590MB ?!?
What did you ever put in it ?
I've seen longer movies in smaller files. Is the resolution of the movie higher or what ?
Thanks.

BrandonFurtwangler wrote:

that keyboard in the background looks kinda interesting.  Any idea what make/model it is?

It looks like a http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/advantage.htm keyboard.

BOb

 The keyboard is made by http://www.maltron.com/

ezekio wrote:

I've tried to download the movie but .... ~590MB ?!?
What did you ever put in it ?
I've seen longer movies in smaller files. Is the resolution of the movie higher or what ?
Thanks.

I think it is high resolution. Not sure how high though.

I have 175MB files at 640x480 resolution (23 minutes long, 128kbps audio, 24fps XVID). So I guess it must be at least DVD quality and 30fps.

It was nice to see how the shell supported the dynamic display and creation of metadata ot files. This was long overdue, must of us expected this to ship with XP.

Questions:

1. Isn't OLE DB about a ten year old idea at this point? Not that it wasn't great but isn't there an all managed technique for doing these days?

2. If all the shell people do is write new COM interfaces why wait for an entire OS rev to ship updates, couldn't these revs come on a more regular basis without the underlying OS dependencies? Wouldn't that be a lot less of a headache for all concerned. Politics aside couldn't the shell just be considered another application distinct from the underlying OS services that run in kernal mode? Especially since the Windows OS must ultimately target nonPC platforms to grow, doesn't it make sense to decouple formally in this way?

3.  Isn't it about time Windows kicked the whole registering stuff habit?  Maybe the new dumping ground for file registration is a local copy of active directory, rather than the win32 registry, but this is not clear from the video.


4. Do file extensions even make sense in a world of metadata, when the associations of a file can have much richer descriptions? Why in the world is Microsoft still dealing with file extensions 20 years after DOS?

4.Isn't it about time that the Windows Shell kicked the COM habit now that its 2005? Shouldn't the shell really be entirely written in Avalon/.NET, given that Avalon/.Net will ship Nov. 7 of this year and Vista is not shipping till next year? If Sparkle can work why not the shell, which seems to do much less visually. Okay you have some cool algorithms working with the file system kernal under the covers- great, but isn't the real test of the next gen development platform making the kernal play nicely in the managed world?

5. Are you guys really eating your own dog food, or is it that things like office and the shell are too important to risk implementing with the technology you're forcing onto the developer community?

really impressive stuff. Virtual folders and new search centric meterphor. Not so keen on the brush metal look and feel on some of the windows tho. Really looking forward to Vista

Oh and how intelligent is vista going to be regarding meta-data like genre for say music files; if I have two albums one labelled as "Spanish" and the other as "Español" can Vista understand that its one and the same and group these two albums together?

Microsoft Demo's Post Beta 1 Vista Build - PDC 05

CyberReX:
Tabs have been available in IE for a while by means of the MSN toolbar. I use them and they work exactly as you say[H].

try them today: http://toolbar.msn.com

wow, i love seeing how happy this guy is over there work but y not use linux, its had all thos fetures sence 98 and it acualy works, in they had to make a new network stack for ipv6, so sad, and the costomer/developer feedback to microsoft is sapos to be impresive, in linux u could post the problems on any distros bords and see a patch in a week or fix it yourself(which is somthing microsoft will never let u do on there os), then theres there pride in improved driver managment and fixing probles with drivers which is a problem they wouldnt have if theyed let driver developers see the operating system code, the futer is linux, when longhorn aka vista comes out it will already be years behind linux, not to mention linux is free. linux(0$) or windows(anywere between 200-4000$ depending on the vertion) linux(comes with everything u need) or windows(u gota pay extra for everything u need) linux(open souce and developers can fix all the problems wetehr they work for the distro company or not) or windows(u r at the mersy of microsofts"finest") linux(user/developer/server/workstation all in 1) or windows(user(200$) developer(and extra 400$) server(starting around 4000$) workstation(200-300 + software and licansing)) im shure theres more but im thinking any 1 that knows anything about computers can see my point. power to the TUX

[C]

stop crying my child i speek the truth, u will learn it to some day[H]

Don't make me laugh.  Linux is a much harder OS to work with.  It is not really free when it cost so much to figure out how to fix problems.  Where on the Windows side there are programs out there that just work

I'd like to know what kind of keyboard that is as well...

minute 11:30... he's showing how typing "display" in the control panel searches for things that involve display. 

there're these 3 or 4 probably irrelevant items on the top yet the actual display applet (which title is a big bold "display" and is probably what the user was searching for) shows up near the bottom.

this reminded me somewhat of my typical search experience in msdn.

it would be interesting if the search would be a bit smarter about sorting the results and showing more potentially relevant ones at the top (i.e. rules like "if the title of the thing contains the actual word you are looking for... try to show it first").  perhaps something that will get fixed before rtm?

The keyboards are kinesis contoured ergonomic keyboards.
http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/contoured.htm

The keyboards are kinesis contoured ergonomic keyboards. http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/contoured.htm