Thanks to Nick for pointing me in the direction of Office 2007 Beta 2.  As per Mark’s advice, I didn’t even bother try downloading from the public preview, instead going straight to MSDN.  Needless to say, the 1.3gb ISO still took a while to download, with the last 0.5mb almost grinding to a halt.

Installation took ages, but painlessly upgraded from Office 2003, keeping all my settings.  Outlook was my main worry, but everything is still working fine – no apparent problems with Google Desktop’s Outlook plugin, Plaxo, or Newsgator.

The application seemed a little more sluggish than 2003 initially, but then improved after that for a little while after finishing its background tasks, though it eventually ground to a halt.  Just look at this memory usage:

This was just when writing a simple email.  The memory usage does hover up and down though, from between 40mb, up to the 105mb mark, with Outlook becoming practically unusable as the memory usage gets higher; keypresses take at least a couple of seconds to register, and it feels like typing underwater.

I’m also not too impressed by the new skin, though this is more personal preference.  It seems like this only adds to the clunkiness of the application, and I’d at least like the option to use the traditional skin (yes, I’m old fashioned!).

Another annoying bug I’ve experienced is Outlook refusing to refresh my inbox when new email comes in.  The folder list on the left will show the number of new messages in brackets, but the messages won’t show up until I browse to another folder, and then back to the inbox.

This post is mainly geared around Outlook, as it’s the main Office application I use, though the bigger changes in Office 2007 are actually more apparent in the other office applications.  Word and Excel have been revamped completely, with the new ribbon at the top of the screen glaringly obvious as soon as you launch the application (it only shows up in Outlook when composing or replying to email).

It took a little time to get used to, but from a usability perspective, it definitely seems a lot nice than browsing through a maze of menus.  Despite being one of the most profitable divisions with Microsoft, It’s good to see the company making an effort to respond to users feedback and improve the Office suite.

I’m still not sure how long it will last on my system.  Despite 1256mb of RAM and a 1.5GHz Centrino processor, it still feels sluggish, and it things get worse before they get better, I might downgrade back to the more responsive Office 2003.  But, it deserves a chance, and I’ll give it a few days at least.

Update – 25 May 2006:

One thing to bear in mind if you are planning to install, is that the beta will expire on 1st February 2007, after which it will operate under reduced functionality.  By then, you’ll probably be so used to it that you’ll go out and buy a copy!

Also installed Office 2007 on my desktop machine, which is a 3GHz Pentium 4, and it runs significantly quicker.  If only it ran this quick on my laptop…

Update – 25 May 2006:

Outlook 2007 got too painful.  I’ve gone back to Outlook 2003, which feels a million times quicker.  Maybe something to do with my 1.5GHz Centrino processor only running at 598MHz, according to Windows anyway, with no apparent way to change this (even with the power profile set to always on).

Tags: office 2007, outlook

Whoa!  Red-Gate, the company behind the excellent SQL Compare tool have released SQL Prompt, a free utility to give developers intellisense for SQL Server in SQL Query Analyser, Visual Studio and a few other tools.

This is a very slick tool.  It’s not directly integrated into these applications, instead requiring the SQL Prompt application to be started, which puts an icon in the system tray and allows access to the application settings via the context menu. You could just put the application in startup, though there’s no way to hide the tray icon through the application settings (though it should be easy enough to do using a third party application).

To download it, you’ll need to register, which is free and only takes a few minutes.

Tags: redgate, sql prompt, sql server, intellisense

It’s good to see tagging come to Outlook.

Just found out about Taglocity via Alex Barnett’s Blog:

The other interesting find is Taglocity, an add-in application to Microsoft Outlook that provides a tagstatic interface into emails, calendar items, contacts and tasks … It’s a powerful application and well worth a play. Taglocity is entering Beta 2, but I’m very impressed with Beta 1 – the application is already very feature-rich today. Check out a screencast that walks through the various scenarios. It has huge potential.

From the Taglocity website:

People send and receive a lot of email, and a significant part of people’s time is in trying to manage their inbox, or find important information.

Using tags, through a simple user interface you already know, is more productive than many confusing inbox folders, complex rules or new applications to learn.

Although my email load is quite small, this application would still be very helpful. It’s a pity that this is in a closed beta, though hopefully they’ll have something out soon for the public.

It wouldn’t surprising if Microsoft acquired this company and just put the functionality straight into future versions of Outlook.

One of the biggest cause of problems with VS.NET 2003 and we projects is its insistence of using IIS. Today, I started getting this error:

Unable to open Web project ‘MyProject’. The file path ‘D:\Projects\MyProject‘ does not correspond to the URL ‘http://Localhost:/MyProject’. The two need to map to the same server location. HTTP Error 404: Not Found

This is one of those annoying errors, because IIS was clearly mapped to the same directory.  My other web projects worked fine, so it was something to do with this specific case.  After some digging around, the problem was found to be caused by mapping the * extension to the ASP.NET runtime.  This appears to stop Visual Studio from being able to load the project file correctly, but in typical Microsoft fashion, we get an error telling us something completely different.

If you are working on projects where you need map all extensions to the ASP.NET runtime, then be warned that this will have an adverse effect on your development environment. The only way to get around it is to remove the mapping, open the project, and then re-add the mapping into IIS.

Tags: visual studio