If you happen to be in the Phoenix area on December 20th there is an MSDN event taking place.  The morning consists of developer focused topics including Visual Studio 2008, Astoria, and Silverlight.  You can register for the morning event at this link.  The afternoon is focused on architecture topics and includes Software + Services, Windows Live Platform, and Office Business Applications (which I am presenting).  The afternoon event registration is located at this link.  Hope to see you there.

Personally, I have been very happy with Vista.  Working for Microsoft, I get to hear people complain/bash it quite a bit and there are some things that can be improved but as a generalization I have been very happy with the experience and I love the security features (once I got used to UAC).  However, I am one of those people that noticed that battery life was not as good with Vista as it had been with XP (no hard data, just felt that way).  Recently I heard about a program called Vista Battery Saver that has gotten great reviews for drastically increasing battery life.  Here is the configuration screen:

Basically it turns off Aero and Sidebar (I don't run sidebar by default so it is deactivated in the configuration screen) when the laptop is on battery power and restores them when on AC.  I'll report on the effectiveness of the tool.

UPDATE: I have been using this tool for the last couple of weeks in many situations where I needed to test out the battery.  I would anecdotally suggest that battery life is improved in the 50% area.  Well worth it if you have to rely on your battery in many situations.

One of the newest features of Word 2007 and MOSS 2007 is a much tighter integration between the two applications, particularly when it comes to metadata.  There is a capability to integrate the metadata into the actual document rather than attach the metadata as an afterthought.  This example shows how to set this up.

Create a document library with the appropriate columns (attributes) you want to track.  In this case I have created document library called Features Requests with columns for tracking Description, Request Date, Status (choice of New, In Process, and Completed), and Priority (choice of High, Medium, and Low).

Bring up the Advanced Settings for the document library and click on the "Edit Template" link under the Document Template section.

and Word will open in the following fashion:

I created a quick shell document to capture the information required.

The attributes from MOSS become Document Properties that are exposed as Quick Parts in Word.  Word will respect the data types and try to infer the appropriate content control.  If the data type is a choice in MOSS, Word will create a drop down list.  For a date, Word will create a date picker.  One thing to note is that while I changed the column name for the Title to Description, the Quick Part still calls that data Title.

The fully laid out Word document will have the content controls embedded in the document itself and fully connected to the MOSS library.  You can change the properties of the content controls and nest them if you want to lock down certain sections of the document.

Now you can save the document and it will update the document template in the document library.  If you return to the document library and create a new document it will use the template that we linked to the document library.

As fields are filled in within the document the attributes change

As the document is saved back to the document library, all of the attributes are saved back to the columns in the document library.

The metadata about the document will fully round trip - if I change the metadata in MOSS, the document will change and vice versa.  If you want to understand the mechanics of this, you can crack open the document (save it locally, rename to use a .zip extension, and open it in explorer) and look at the custom xml folder.  The data is not embedded in the content of the document but is bound via custom xml.

At my house I allow my son (11) and daughter (9) to have computers in their room with Internet access. The only reason I do this is because I have locked down their computers with some type of "Nannyware" over the years. The problem with most of these types of software is that is slows the computer down significantly and is obtrusive while the kids are on the Internet.

Last year I tried the OneCare Family Safety program and thought it was ok (with a bonus of being free). I had to create LiveID accounts for each of my kids and they had to login to LiveID to access the Internet. It worked, but was a little painful. On one of the computers (the one in my son's room) the software would randomly disable which was pretty scary.

This last weekend I decided to rebuild the computers and realized there was a newer version of program available on Live. It installed cleanly and they have integrated the accounts with Windows accounts and provided an option to automatically login to the LiveID account. Additionally, the performance is much better than it was before so the kids login to their Windows accounts and are off and running. They know the software is there and get blocked from certain sites, but it is unobtrusive and sits silently in the background.

Furthermore, the online reporting is drastically improved. I can quickly scan my kid's Internet activities and add or block specific sites even from the office. If they run across a site that is blocked they can automatically ask for permission and an e-mail is sent to me immediately.

Overall, I would say this version of the program is a home run and I feel much more comfortable about my kids being protected during their online experience. I highly recommend this software for your computers if you have kids.

I am hosting an afternoon MSDN event around Silverlight in our Microsoft offices on October 29th from 12:30pm to 4:30pm.  If you are interested you can register here.  This session will cover the basics of Silverlight, using Silverlight with ASP.NET and AJAX, and media integration.  Our friends from Statera will be delivering these sessions.