Well, sort of :) Tonight we've officially launched the Enterprise editions of Windows Desktop Search and the MSN Search Toolbar. Unlike the current consumer release, there are 2 seperate installs (one for WDS, one for MSN Toolbar). Unfortunately, the consumer version won't be updated right away. But we're working hard to deliver a new version for consumers that will upgrade the current “MSN Search Toolbar with WDS” package. That way everyone can enjoy the latest and greatest we have to...

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We're hiring! We're building out a new test team based in Redmond, and we need your help! We have a pretty small, close-knit, fast-moving product team - and our developers love to do what others have deemed impossible. As a Software Development Engineer in Test, you'll help us make sure we deliver the highest quality product possible to our users. You'll define test strategy for your features. You'll interact with a team of remote testers. You'll build automation systems and tools to help testers...

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First off, let me say that I am very impressed with the work the WinFS team has done and that they've already won a great deal of respect from me. That said, I'm not 100% sure I see the need for their product. This opinion is certainly not set in stone, but from what I've seen and what I understand so far... I'm not sold. Why is that? Well maybe it's because I watch videos like this one and I think... why is that different from what we already do? You can tell that these guys are super fired up about...

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Check it out! Steve Ickman's WDS blog

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Jeff Schoolcraft wrote in his blog about a problem he had getting WDS to index his Trillian log files, which are text files with a “.log“ extension - an extension we ignore by default. Removing that extension from the ignore list will get the files indexed (assuming you choose to index the appropriate folder), but it then displays some bizarre behavior when returning results. As a fellow Trillian user I sympathized with Jeff's problem, although I hadn't yet tried to index those logs....

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So our (beta) SDK sample includes a sizeable list of column names that you can ask for from the indexer (in the QueryBuilder.cs file)... but it's far from a full list. These are the string constants that you pass to ExecuteQuery in the second parameter (and also you pass one of them as the third parameter to sort by). ExecuteQuery works like this: _Recordset resultSet = foo.ExecuteQuery(“a query to search for“, “DocTitle, DocAuthor, Url“, “DocTitle“, null) Let's...

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Some people in the Aqua-Soft forum had questions about how to call the Windows Desktop Search API from VB .NET. There are two ways to do this right now, using our beta SDK. 1) Download the SDK and Sample (see my post below) files. Reference WDSQuery.dll and include QueryBuilder.cs in your project. Then you can instantiate a QueryBuilder object and use that (the comments in that file, or IntelliSense, will guide you). It's pretty simple. OR 2) Use the COM API directly. Here's what I posted over there:...

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A little over a week ago we released our international version of the MSN Search Toolbar with Windows Desktop Search. As part of that release, we shipped BETA support for our developer API. Actually, CNET and some others found our SDK without us making any fuss about it. The reason we didn't (until today) is that we wanted to fix up a couple things before doing so. So Steve Ickman went back and made a few changes, including seperating the IDL file into two (one for the query interface, and one for...

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I think it was Wednesday, maybe Thursday. Given what I said before, take that as you will :) I think my first week at Microsoft went pretty well. Working here with these people is simply amazing. Discussing the future of technology with the people that are making the future of technology can be quite invigorating. Working on that technology is quite a responisibility. Here are couple of Windows Desktop Search related links... http://spaces.msn.com/membe... - the blog of Steve Ickman,...

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http://desktop.msn.com Download away :) Also, http://addins.msn.com is up as well. 64-bit users will find that Windows x64 Editions are not supported in this release. HOWEVER: Watch here or Extended64.com for more on that

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