Shell Team - Exploring and Using Windows Vista
- Posted: Sep 13, 2005 at 11:49 AM
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At the PDC this morning Microsoft demonstrated the latest version of Windows Vista. Here you get to meet the Shell team. Now, what does the Shell team do? They make the Explorer and do a variety of other things. You will not want to miss this video because
you'll get a good look at Windows Vista from both an end-user perspective as well as a developer perspective. You'll get to see just how powerful the desktop search feature is that's built into Windows Vista.
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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...
I think they're supporting the same or similar syntax to what the current version of Windows Desktop Search uses for Advanced Query Syntax. Vista uses our indexer but the Shell team is kind of doing their own thing... So I can't say for sure.
But I believe you should be able to say "kind:email" or "To:John Smith"
And stuff like that.
mycroft: evangelists are NOT marketing.
Catherine is a hard core C++ programmer. She knows more about development than most people I know.
She also knows more about Windows Vista than most people who work on the team know about it.
I wanted her along so that we'd cover the depth of what's going on here.
Evangelism is about working with developers to help them build software for the next version. Most evangelists I work with are very good software developers.
If anything, I'm the one who isn't technical.
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.
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.
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?
Cheers,
- Deg -
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 ?
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.
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
The Deskbar is not part of Windows Vista.
The current plan as I'm aware of it, is that we'll probably still have a Deskbar for you to install onto Vista.
Of course that's a ways out and subject to change.
WinFS is not a search technology. WinFS is a new kind of relation data store, kind of a hybrid between a database and a filesystem.
Instead of putting a Word document into a Folder, you'd just submit it to the database. Then instead of browsing through a specific folder path, you would run a query to retrieve the document.
Of course, you can still represent the data as a hierachical set of folders, but the same file can be reached through many paths.
To the user, the basic functionality is a lot like what Desktop Search and the Vista shell will provide. In my blog, I've posted about why I think WinFS may ultimately be unnecessary - or at least not as revolutionary as it once might have been.
However, there are major differences between WinFS and Desktop Search - and WinFS is not directly comparable to anything currently available... except perhaps SQL Server, which is basically what WinFS is.
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.
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...
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 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.
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?
A) Get explanations for things that she thought might be too technical.
B) Sort of marketing-esqe as another poster said above - like in a bad TV advert. "So you mean I can add my own thumbnail provider? Wowzers!!!"
Nothing at all against Catherine, I just like Scoble's interview technique a bit better
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
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?
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.
Any developer can interact with the Windows Desktop Search indexer in three ways:
1) You can add support for your file formats using an IFilter
2) You can add support for non-file based data stores using Protocol Handlers
and...
3) You can access the data in the WDS indexer by sending a query and consuming the results. Right now this is done via OleDb. At the PDC, we showed some of the changes and enhancements that are being made to the WDS APIs for Vista and our future down-level releases.
Having multiple indexers is a possibility today and will continue to be a possibility in the future. However, there will obviously be a performance concern if you run more than one simultaneously.
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?
What about Project M. Whats that all about? I thought that had something to do with the shell and explorer
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.
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?
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.
It looks like a http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/advantage.htm keyboard.
BOb
The API makes me "hmm"ing. I mean once WinFS is available we have to build the WinFS interfaces into our application and the OleDB provider to access also the other data in the other Windows store.
There should be a common interface. It's not very wise to publish directly an OleDB provider. It should be classes and stuff, that are then using directly WinFS when installed etc.
I think the current implementation is not that good.
I mean there is no invention going on here: It's only an SQL Database in the backend... and the search engine of MSN Search (perhaps a little bit modified).
Cool stuff would be generic interfaces that search the Windows Database if WinFS is not installed and search WinFS if installed... It's to row (the way to access).
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 is great quality. Finally! You can't watch the videos at the old resolution on a 1920x1200 TFT... it looks so blocked. This resolution is great.
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?
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
[C]
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?
http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/contoured.htm
http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/contoured.htm
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