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  • 5 Things you (maybe) don’t know about Me

    By in Myself on

    I really thought the Blog-Tag game would spare me, but thanks to Albert I have to jump on this train. So let’s see, what we have here:

    1. As a child there was nothing greater than dismantling and sometimes reassembling electronic devices. When I grew older, I decided to do a vocational training in the field of energy electronics. Later on at technical college, I decided to dig deeper into electronics. Since I was also always interested in computers and software, I studied automation engineering. Nearly a third of my studies consisted of software development. After finishing my diploma, I thought: “Well, software development is actually quite nice!”. In May 2007 I’ll have my 10th anniversary in being a software developer still loving it.
    2. I really do like well designed things in all areas of life. This includes of course well designed user interfaces in computer software. Knowing that it’s really no wonder, that I am totally nuts about the possibilities we have with WPF and its derivatives.
    3. I got a table named after underwear ๐Ÿ˜‰
      ivory_walnut_pantspath_series11_SMALL
    4. I love Swing and Ska music.
    5. I am a huge fan of good comic book film adaptations. Yeah, I know some of you think this is an oxymoron, but I can’t help it ๐Ÿ˜‰

    I hereby summon the power of tagging the next bloggers: Ingo, Jeff, Martin, Sascha, Thomas

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  • IE7 SearchProvider Round-Up

    By in IE7, Tools on

    If you are using IE7, you surely have noticed the search box in the upper right corner of the browser window. Typing something in there (you can jump to the search box by pressing Ctrl+E by the way) and pressing Enter executes the search using the configured default search engine aka SearchProvider. Right after installing IE7 there is only the Live Search SearchProvider installed and thus set as default.

    image04

    Today I’ll show you how to

    • Add more predefined SearchProviders
    • Create your own SearchProvider
    • Adding a SearchProvider from inside an HTML-page
    • Exporting SearchProviders for backup purposes

    Adding predefined SearchProviders

    It will not become any easier: Just open the SearchProvider drop-down list by clicking the small arrow or by pressing Ctrl+Down, then click on Find More Providers.

    You’ll end up on a webpage allowing you to add some new Providers:

    image0

    After clicking on a SearchProvider entry, you get the following dialog, asking you if you really want to add it.

    image01

    You can also choose to make this Provider the default.

    But what if the SearchProvider you are looking for doesn’t exist?

    Creating your own SearchProvider

    Creating a SearchProvider for a search engine of your choice is just as simple as adding a predefined one: On the right side of the webpage showing the predefined Providers, you see a yellow box providing you with some instructions for creating your own.

    image02

    Adding a SearchProvider from inside an HTML-page

    If you are hosting a website with your own search engine onboard, you can simply call

    window.external.AddSearchProvider(http://www.example.com/provider.xml);

    when a user clicks on a link on your website spawning the Add Search Provider dialog as seen above. Note that this dialog cannot be spawned automatically by a website. I will be blocked by the pop-up blocker!

    You have to provide some XML code for the SearchProvider. Let’s take a short look at that format.

    image03

    You see, that it relies on the OpenSearch specification from a9.com (amazon’s search engine). The template attribute of the Url-tag contains the URL to perform the search where {searchTerms} is replaced by the actual search terms.

    More information on this can be found at
    http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/browser/external/overview/ie7_opensearch_ext.asp.

    Exporting SearchProviders for backup purposes

    After adding and defining your SearchProvider collection, you should make a backup just in case. To do that, simply export the registry key located under

    HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftInternet ExplorerSearchScopes

    That’s it!

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  • Which Superhero / Supervillain are you?

    By in Useless stuff on

    I normally don’t post such quiz results, but since I very much like good comics and their real film versions I simply couldn’t resist this time…

    You are Green Lantern

    Green Lantern
    55%
    Spider-Man
    50%
    Robin
    47%
    Supergirl
    40%
    Wonder Woman
    35%
    Catwoman
    35%
    Superman
    30%
    Batman
    30%
    Hulk
    30%
    The Flash
    30%
    Iron Man
    30%
    Hot-headed. You have strong
    will power and a good imagination.

    RTEmagicP_ca30e6594a_5

    Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz

    Well, what can I say: He even matches my website colors ๐Ÿ˜‰
    If you don’t know this Green Lantern dude, you may take a look at the associated wikipedia entry.

    Where there is light, there has to be darkness. In this case my Supervillian part would be the following:

    You are The Joker

    The Joker
    39%
    Mr. Freeze
    32%
    Green Goblin
    32%
    Venom
    30%
    Magneto
    27%
    Dr. Doom
    27%
    Lex Luthor
    25%
    Apocalypse
    25%
    Juggernaut
    24%
    Dark Phoenix
    24%
    Kingpin
    21%
    Mystique
    20%
    Catwoman
    18%
    Riddler
    15%
    Poison Ivy
    14%
    Two-Face
    12%
    The Clown Prince of Crime. You are a brilliant mastermind but are criminally insane. You love to joke around while accomplishing the task at hand.
    RTEmagicP_b678cabdc7_58d91199-4a83-41ba-ba19-836487968dfc

    Click here to take the “Which Super Villain am I?” quiz…

    The Joker should be fairly known, there is of course a wikipedia entry for him.

    The strange things is, that both percentages nearly add up to 100%…

    I wish you all a Happy (and most of all Healthy) New Year!

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  • SonicFileFinder 1.2.6 released

    By in Development, SonicFileFinder, Tools on

    SonicFileFinder is a free add-in for Visual Studio 2005 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 can be opened at the file’s location.

    It’s been a while since the last release of SonicFileFinder. Besides much other work, I have been playing around with Vista and been to the TechEd Developers conference in Barcelona. (Check out the gallery for some pictures, if you like.) Also, I changed my webspace provider. This site is now hosted by hostmonster.com. They are a bit slower, but hopefully more stable. Anyway, I hope you will enjoy the new SonicFileFinder release. There’s only a small change, but aint it the small things that matter? ๐Ÿ˜‰

    I wish you all a great Christmas and a Happy New Year, if we don’t see each other before!

    What’s new?

    This is just a small maintenance release. John v. Barone asked me, if I could implement support for the Database Project. Unfortunately there is no chance to do that, because this project type does not implement the Visual Studio Automation Model. Sorry for that!

    • ADDED: Support for all project types which are using the Visual Studio Automation Model. Only C#, VB, Web and C++ Projects were supported before.

    Download it on the SonicFileFinder website.

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  • Rerouting blog traffic (please help)

    By in General on

    I really like Feedburner. I like it’s features for automatically transforming a feed into different feed types and much more.

    But after setting the default feed of my website to the Feedburner feed it slowly drew google, etc. away. As a result you’ll find my Feedburner feed on google, but not my website until you really keep looking for it.

    Why am I writing this? I’d like to ask you to point your feed subscription back to the main feed of my website, if possible.

    The main feed exists at https://jens-schaller.de/blog/rss.xml. (The default feed for this website is now also pointed to this location.)
    Anyway, the Feedburner feed will of course not be shutdown!

    Thanks,
    Jens

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