Hope you’re all enjoying the Windows 7 RC!
This week we published an update to the Federated Search Implementer’s Guide. This update includes some new information as well as some corrections to the original document. Most crucially, the original document erroneously indicated that the URL template contained an attribute called “format” – when it was referring to the “type” attribute. So if you followed the guide exactly, your OSDX file wouldn’t work properly with Windows 7 (or anybody else following the OpenSearch spec).
This update also includes additions such as information about providing “collection” templates to display results without the user entering a query, details about URL protocol support, and more.
Link: Windows 7 Federated Search Provider Implementer’s Guide
Just wanted to post a heads-up to interested parties, the stub page on MSDN for IOpenSearchSource and its one method have been replaced by the draft documentation.
The new page roughly sums up its use and purpose:
A client-side OpenSearch data source that sits in between the Microsoft Windows OpenSearch provider and the external data source. With a search connector (a .searchconnector-ms file), Windows Explorer calls your implementation with the query parameters. Your implementation returns results formatted in RSS or Atom format. That allows your implementation to provide custom authentication UI and connect to the data source using its proprietary API.
More details at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd378289(VS.85).aspx
Unfortunately we still don’t have any details on how you actually hook up an implementation of this. The doc / SDK folks are working on this but it’s part of a larger effort that’s taking a bit of time. In the meantime I’m going to see if I can post an example here or on CodePlex. Most likely I’ll be posting a detailed .NET example followed by a simpler C++ version.
If you have questions about whether this API may end up being useful to you, let me know, and hopefully I can help clarify what is or isn’t possible.
We just posted the first version of the Windows 7 Federated Search Implementer’s Guide! You can download it here.
This document covers subjects such as crafting the best OpenSearch Description File for your site, returning files and custom properties, customizing the results view, optimizing your source for performance, and more. If you’re interested in developing an OpenSearch source for Windows 7, check it out! And as always, please share your feedback!
Link: Windows 7 Federated Search Provider Implementer’s Guide
It’s been a whirlwind of a trip here in LA. When I arrived I thought I’d be blogging, posting photos, and keeping in touch with the outside world the whole time. Well, that didn’t quite work out. There was always so much going on and so much to do, that the little downtime I had when I arrived back at my hotel was spent squeezing some of that “sleep” stuff into my schedule.
In case you’re wondering which of the features unveiled at PDC is “my baby,” that would be the OpenSearch-based search federation feature in the Windows Explorer, detailed in the Find & Organize session which you can watch here.
We also have a Channel 9 video covering the new Libraries feature and other user experience improvements in Explorer for Windows 7. This video is part 1 of a two part series, the second of which covers the Search Federation feature (and yours truly).
For now, the best place to learn more about OpenSearch in Windows 7 is to watch the session video at the link below.
About a week ago we posted an entry to the Windows 7 Engineering Team Blog about Windows Desktop Search, describing the motivation behind indexing files and what investments we’re making in that area of the system. It’s a good read so check it out if you haven’t already.
This afternoon we made a follow-up post addressing some of the suggestions, comments, and concerns that showed up in the comments to the original entry.
If you have more feedback, please keep it coming. I and others will try to respond in the comments over there, or in future follow-ups.
I updated my Windows Search indexer gadget with a couple of fixes. If you run the gadget, you may want to update in order to fix issues with the play and fast-forward (“index now”) buttons not properly reflecting the state of the indexer back-off feature after clicking one of them.
Also, if you like the gadget, please go to the Gadget Gallery page and give it a good rating 
As you probably heard (if you’re reading this blog), Steven Sinofsky and Jon DeVaan recently launched the Windows 7 Engineering Team Blog.
This afternoon Steven made his second post on the blog, discussing the Windows 7 engineering organization. He describes the rough dimensions of the various feature teams, including a pretty complete list of the teams and an idea of their approximate size (ballpark estimate being 40 developers, 40 testers, and 20 PMs).
If you look at his list you can spot my team, which goes by the name Find and Organize. So who are we? Well, as you might guess and Steven describes, we own the end-to-end Search features of Windows (the “find”) as well as the browsing and data management experience (the “organize”). We often abbreviate this as “FnO” and many people pronounce it as “fff-no” (rhymes with “snow”), though I am not one of them.
Some examples of things we own:
Whew, I often forget just how much stuff we own. And my feature isn’t even on the list! :) Oh yeah, did I mention we also owned the entire Windows Search 4.0 release?
We also aren’t the only team that “owns” the Explorer. The Core User Experience team owns other pieces of Explorer like the taskbar and the rest of the Start menu. You’ll often hear people from both teams refer to themselves as the “shell team,” or others refer to both teams collectively by that name.
So who makes up the FnO team? Well, as I said, there are quite a few of us. I’m certainly not the only one of us who blogs or has an online presence:
Jonas Barklund has a blog, he’s a developer whose focus is generally on query parsing.
Thayn Moore has a blog and is also a developer, and works on a bunch of stuff including, among other things, mail indexing.
Ben Karas has a blog and is a lead developer for most of the explorer UI.
Paolo Marcucci is a PM who doesn’t seem to blog these days, but posts on Channel 9 a lot.
I’m sure there are others I don’t know about. So if you work on my team and have a blog, let me know.
As for me, well, you know where my blog is. As for what I do every day… we’ll talk more about that soon enough.
Update: I saw a comment on Channel 9 ask about how we function with 40 developers on one team. Well, the truth is these “feature teams” are actually divided into smaller teams that focus on closely related components. So no, there isn’t really one manager with 40 developers reporting directly to him or her.
When I first posted about the WS4 release on Neowin a few members had a response that I had never expected. Some examples:
Windam - I wonder why this would be released for Vista since search is already a well integrated feature to begin with.
Is it just because(optional)?
Maudit - Pardon my ignorance, but what the difference between Windows Search 4.0 and the one in Vista ultimate sp1, does it streamline into windows ?
A similar question was asked on Channel 9.
The answer is quite simple:
A good analogy here might be DirectX. Windows XP shipped with DirectX 8.1. When DirectX 9 was released for XP, it didn’t change the way anything looked or behaved, but it made your system better. You may apply a similar understanding to WS4.
Windows Search 4.0 was released this afternoon. This release focuses on performance and reliability improvements. Here are some highlights:
This release also adds the following Vista / Server 2008 features to Windows XP / Server 2003 systems:
Read the KB article here for more details and complete feature list.
Download Links
Vista users - don’t forget to grab the indexer status gadget!
Today we made available the WS 4.0 preview release for Windows XP, Vista, and Server 2003/2008. You can read details about WS 4.0 at the following sites:
Vista Team Blog - Announcing the Windows Search 4.0 Preview
KB Article describing Windows Search 4.0 (with download links)
This release is mainly an update to the Windows Search indexer, and provides countless performance improvements, bug fixes, and reliability / recoverability features.
The XP/2003 version has been updated with more features previously exclusive to Vista - such as the ability to search remote indexes for network shares, and the ability to host Vista-style preview handlers in the preview pane.
WS4 also provides some cool new query capabilities for developers, which I will describe and give some examples of in future posts.
The most noticeable difference is probably how fast it is. Those geniuses down the hallway in indexer land really pulled off some impressive feats with this release.
Since there are six different downloads depending on your OS, I’ll just refer you to the KB article for downloading the preview release.
Let us know what you think!
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Hi. I'm Brandon. I work on the Explorer for Windows 7 at Microsoft. This is my blog.
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The views expressed within my blog are my own - and are not in any way indicative of those of the company I work for, Microsoft, or it's employees. No warranties or other guarantees will be offered as to the quality of the opinions or anything else offered here.
