What happens to Outlook add-ins when Outlook goes away?

October 15th, 2006

I tried writing another Outlook extension tonight. This time, a desktop widget to display a dashboard-style at-a-glance view of how busy I am (based on my Microsoft Outlook task list).

screenshot of the app I wrote it to run in the background, and update itself once a minute. This raised an interesting question – what to do with the handle to Outlook.

Getting the handle to Outlook is probably the slowest bit of the app, so I don’t want to do this every minute. But caching a handle and reusing it ad-infinitum probably isn’t safe – what if Outlook is closed or restarted, (or… whatever happens when Windows hibernates?) while the widget app is running? Would the widget hold locks on the Outlook data file and cause a closing Outlook to hang? Or would the widget just fall over the next time it tried to use an invalid handle to the Outlook object model?

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in code | 4 Comments »

Arranging meetings is easier with Doodle

October 14th, 2006

I seem to spend a lot of evenings in meetings. Annoyingly, this also involves spending far too much time trying to work out when is a good time to have meetings. It can be SYA, or Norwood, or Sams, OTL or whatever – but it always involves a bunch of people with different jobs, different commitments, and diaries stored in different ways, trying to find a time when we’re all free.

So, when I read about a neat web-based tool to arrange meetings on 43folders today, I kicked myself for not thinking of this myself.

Doodle is simple, but brilliant. The person scheduling the meeting goes to www.doodle.ch and puts in a description of a meeting, and list of dates/times that they could make. This gives a link which you can email to anyone else you want to invite to the meeting. They then visit the page, and tick the times that suit them. The page aggregates the responses, and gives you a quick visual way to see the best time.

I love it.

Posted in web | Comments Closed

WebSphere MQ 6.0.2.0 is out today

October 13th, 2006

Just heard that we’ve (finally!) released refresh pack 6.0.2.0 for WebSphere MQ V6.

As a service engineer for WMQ, this is something that I’d be interested in anyway. But 6.0.2.0 isn’t just any old bunch of fixes. Refresh Pack is the new-ish term that we use when referring to maintenance which is not only bug fixes, but also some new functionality. And one of the biggest bits of functionality in 6.0.2.0 is the inclusion of my WMQ Healthcheck (now called ‘Tests’, I think) – into the product for everyone!

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in ibm | 1 Comment »

xgl is sweet

October 10th, 2006

A friend from work played with setting up XGL on his ThinkPad this evening. Wow… I’d heard it was nice, but…. wow.

For those who’ve not heard of it, it’s a 3-D X server architecture. And for those to whom that makes no sense at all, it gives you a 3D graphical desktop environment – instead of your normal flat ‘desktop’.

That really doesn’t do enough to sell it. Take a look for yourself. Or better yet, give it a try!

Posted in tech | Comments Closed

What will happen to Millennium Volunteers?

October 9th, 2006

The times are changing for Millennium Volunteers. How and when isn’t exactly clear. How long it will be around in it’s current form is something that we’ve been talking about this evening.

Probably best to start with a little background. Millennium Volunteers, or MV, is a national government initiative which aims to get young people into volunteering. MV provides nationally accepted recognition for volunteer work done by young people, through Award Of Excellence certificates signed by a government minister. The vision is for young people to gain experience and skills while making a positive contribution to their communities.

In each town or area, MV can be delivered differently, by a different type of organisation – in almost a franchise-type way. I’ve seen MV projects run by organisations from the voluntary sector, the local government sector, and further and higher education sectors. They all sign contracts to provide MV (promising to meet certain targets like number of young people, quality of service, etc.) on behalf of the Department for Education and Skills (DfES). In return, they get funding and benefits like the use of the national brand.

Why do I care? Well, my organisation runs one of the 160 (?) MV projects. Although it’s not the only project that we run, it was how we started and still provides the biggest chunk of our funding. Changes to MV could have a big impact on our work, so I watch it with interest.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in charity | 3 Comments »

an app a day…

October 8th, 2006

I came across a new site – AnAppADay.com

I plan on writing an application everyday for 30 days straight. May the world benefit from the purposeful destruction of my personal life.

He’s been going for a while – I think he’s only got a week or so left now – so there’s a decent collection of apps there now. And some of them are clever ideas. A good example is the Mouse Heat Map.

Compared with most of the development that I do at work – where everything is carefully considered and designed and planned, there’s something appealing about this sort of approach. I wonder what sorta stuff we could come up with if we had 30 days to try as many ideas as we could.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in tech | 1 Comment »

Second Life – another excuse why I need a PC

October 7th, 2006

I tried Second Life for the first time today. It is mentioned fairly often at work (see here, there, or pretty much any post on eightbar).

It’s kinda amazing how much time you can spend without actually doing anything! 🙂 It’s been a while since I played games like Quake, so I spent quite a while on ‘Orientation Island’ and ‘Help Island’ to get the hang of the various controls, and customizing my avatar.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in tech | Comments Closed

winmail.dat … grr… damn Outlook!

October 6th, 2006

I work in a technical service role – which normally involves customers emailing some error messages, trace or logs to us for analysis. Had a bit of problem with this today, as every file the customer sent – no matter what it was or how many they had included – ended up arriving in a single attachment called winmail.dat that we couldn’t seem to open.

Even using strings, the files still looked pretty mixed-up, but I could see that the one thing that they all had in common was that they all contained “IPM.Microsoft Mail.Note” fairly early on in the file. A Google for this showed that I’ve not been the first to come across this!

Turns out that Microsoft Outlook uses winmail.dat to preserve formatting information when sending HTML or Rich Text emails. We all use Lotus Notes at work (and that’s after a mail server script has had a go at incoming emails to scan attachments and file them somewhere safe). So, we couldn’t read attachments wrapped in the proprietary Outlook junk.

I found a bunch of different utilities claiming to extract attachments for you, but the one that seemed to do it quickest and easiest was WMDecode.

Good use of 5 minutes before I even got to look at the customer’s problem(!) Sadly, the problem described in the log files took slightly longer to figure out, but that’s another story 🙂

Posted in tech | Comments Closed

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »