Girish Gangadharan

Shishir Balamurali – my nephew announced his arrival in style on March 16th 2007 at 2:51 AM. He’s my elder sister’s second child. Her daughter – Shreya Balamurali (6 years old) is understandably all excited about her lil’ brother.

He weighed 7.11 lbs and 20.5 inches long.

The last 3 days have been crazy and i barely got any work done. But you know what? It’s ok. You don’t get to celebrate a new addition to your family frequently unless you are on a mission (and/or rampage ).

First of all, the Vista sidebar SUCKS! Stupid crap! I hate it!!! You can’t resize it! Why would you not want to be able to resize it? Google desktop’s sidebar is resizeable. If you really want to be inspired by others (Konfabulator, Google Desktop), do what they do and MORE!

Compare Google’s Scratch Pad gadget to Vista’s Notes. You can’t resize Notes. You can view only one note at a time. I don’t like that!

Compare Google’s Outlook Tasks plugin to its counterpart in Vista. Same issue. But here it gets worse – since you can’t resize the width of the gadget, the text actually gets cut off. I dissected the code and the CSS style for each list item (holding the task) is set to “overflow:hidden”.

You can’t even resize the whole sidebar horizontally. It just sits there, stuck!

But guess what? I downloaded and installed the latest version of Google Desktop that plays great with Vista. Fantastic! I got everything i wanted. Now my sidebar looks better than what i actually had on XP Professional.

For a developer, desktop real estate really matters. He tries to fit in as many windows as he can on his screen. And for some of us freaks out there, one monitor is not enough. We are like the moguls that just can’t be happy with all the space we have. So we get a second monitor (19″ or more…believe me when i say freaks, i mean it) and extend the desktop further (up, down, left or right).

So this sidebar issue is not really a big deal… i got more coming. Stay tuned.

P.S: No worries. I still am fascinated by Vista. And to be honest, haven’t found a show-stopper yet. There’s always a work around with MS products.

But if you really can’t afford to take risks or just the cost of it, here’s a cheaper way of getting the look and feel of Vista on XP.

Download the MVRTM.rar file and unzip the files with Winrar. In the “Visual Style” folder, you’ll find the MVRTM folder that holds an .msstyles file and a “Shell” folder. Copy the MVRTM folder into the C:\Windows\Resources\Themes directory. Double-click on the MVRTM.msstyles file and take it from there.

Before all that, you might want to download and install the uxtheme.dll patcher.

NO, IT’S NOT A 3rd PARTY SOFTWARE. Just a little hack of the uxtheme.dll file to customize your windows skins. That’s all. Google it and see for yourself.

Last weekend I installed Virtual PC 2007 on my new Dell XPS M1710 Code Red Special Edition and have been trying to get all my tools installed in there on XP Professional. Why? Because i have Vista Ultimate loaded on the new box and as we all know, Microsoft decided not to support VS.Net 2003 on Vista. My full-time job requires me to build apps on 1.1 framework and i have no choice but to use Visual Studio 2003.

Anyways, so i download Virtual PC 2007 (download free from MS) and install it and i must say, it was pretty fast! And smooth. And then i installed Visual studio and VSS 2005 on it. Visual studio was painless and easy (surprised again).

But Visual Source Safe asked me to install XP Service pack 2 as a prerequisite. No problemo. Installed SP2 followed by VSS 2005 and voila! Here’s the message i get for successful installation.

Check out the pic below and tell me what’s wrong with the picture.

2 Free 7-11 beverage coupons to the correct answer.