Windows Live Dev blog

Today I ended up on the Windows Live Dev blog (link) by chance. I read what these guys are publishing and I was amazed how many interesting things they got. The cool thing with this blog is that you receive very valuable information about different products part of the Windows Live group. For example the last post I see there is about how to do advanced searches with Live Search (check it out here). If you are a developer using or interested in some of the services out there, you will find posts about controls, SDKs, gadgets, Virtual Earth etc.

Some interesting features of Windows Live Search

Today I found this great feature available with Windows Live Search - that's the contextual suggestions that this search engine gives to you, when it finds something relevant to what you are looking for. For example, I was looking for "mazda3" and here is what I've got:

Now, as you see, on your right side there is a bunch of sites, among which are reviews and different trims of Mazda3.

But to go further more, I want to touch base here with another interesting and very cool service, part of the Windows Live - namely "Live Q&A". If you just switch real quick to it, you will se the following:

What this service brings to you is some user opinions and real-life experiences related to your search pattern. What this service brings to you is very obvious from this service motto: "Live QnA connects you to the best answers from the right people.". So what I've got here is a rated list of user reviews on the Mazda3, which may prove to be very useful to me.

Another very cool service part of Windows Live is Image. Besides its sleek way of doing previews while hovering a single image, it has many other useful gadgets such as the zoom-in/out panel at the top to control image sizes, the scratchpad (where you can drag & drop images). The search capabilities are fully integrated and are very sophisticated. For example, if you do a search on "John Kennedy", here is what you've got:

What's actually interesting here is the right side pane, which displays what? yeah, that's right - related people to John Kennedy. Sweet! Needless to say that the search is not just keyword based, but it does some relevancy checking and is contextual based.

Copy music from iPod to your PC

I've been recently trying to download some music off my iPod. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a way using iTunes. And this was the moment I searched for some help in Internet. And I found a great article on this topic (link). It seems like iTunes has no longer this ability to drop off music from your iPod. And what is the solution then? Put simply, this is the EphPod program which you can take for free from here. It actually does far more than simply copying your music - it can sync up your contacts, blogs, videos. And besides it is free, other cool thing is that it is working, which does not apply for some commercial software for the same purpose! :)

XML Notepad 2006

Check out this tool - really good one for manipulating XML files. Here is a great article, which shows what this tool can do for you - XML Notepad 2006 Design (link). You can download the tool from this link. One of the features that I most like is that integrated IntelliSense, using the current document schema - really cool one.

Visual Studio default shortcuts

I am using keyboard extensively while programming in Visual Studio. It is a great way to boost your productivity. Today I found this article on MSDN which shows all keyboard shortcuts, set on default with Visual Studio. Use them wisely :)

General Development Settings Default Shortcut Keys (link)