WDS 3.0 Beta 2 32-bit and 64-bit
That’s right, WDS 3.0 Beta 2 is here.
What’s new?
-The first true beta of WDS 3.0 with the new service-based indexing engine and fully-functional UI.
-The first version of WDS available for x64 machines! 64-bit engine and UI!
-Truly a countless number of fixes from the WDS 3.0 Engine Preview released a few months ago.
Windows Desktop Search 3.0 Beta 2 download links:
Updated 10/4 – UNC / FAT indexing add-in (for indexing network shares, removeable FAT media, etc)
Let us know what you think!
77 Comments
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Comments are closed.
How stable is Beta 2?
Do I need to uninstall any existing version of WDS before I install this?
You should be able to upgrade from previously released versions.
Overall it’s a stable release and pretty close to final. That’s why we want your feedback if you do run into any trouble =)
How close is this to WDS 3.0 in current Vista builds, particularly the indexing engine and API as opposed to the search UI?
Will there be updated API docs for WDS 3.0 soon?
Cheers
Sean – The engine and API are essentially the same as what’s in Vista RC1 (most of the binaries are in fact identical) and the builds are very close.
I’ll make another post as soon as I find out about the API docs, I believe there should be an update soon.
Hi Brandon,
Great stuff X64 support!
Can WDS 3.0 be used within a Terminal Server environment (well Citrix Presentation Server 4.0) now that its service based rather than per user? Has testing been done for this scenario? I’m involved in a project later this year to deploy X64 Windows Terminal Servers, this may just be a ‘killer app’ :o)
Cheers
Janson – Yes it should work great in a TS environment. The service-based indexing model is extremely compelling in that scenario.
Please do share your experiences!
Brandon – cheers for the comment. I sure will report what I find! Is it possible to add a network location to the search locations? If not… why not??
Thanks
Unfortunately this release cannot index network shares (or FAT32 volumes for that matter). Both of those should be supported either in an upcoming release.
Thats a real shame… in a corporate environment where users files are held on network locations (folder redirection) this really loses its usefulness (for exmaple I don’t know of anyone who would save users data to the Terminal Servers in a Terminal Server environment). I’m hoping the ‘upcoming release’ will be 3.0 RTM and not say 3.1 🙁
Hi Brandon, how will we approach indexing network shares.
I had the problem described here:
http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Channel9.DesktopSearchBugReports
See “Multiple WDS Indexers pointing at a network share causes file sharing violations”
I’ve had people email me personally asking if I found a solution. My answer is no and in addition I’ve never had any feedback from a Microsoft representative that they’re even aware of the problem. Is this something that will be doable without problems 3.0?
Also, where’s the best place to send feedback/feature requests for 3.0 beta 2? Thanks.
P.S. – WDS kicks some desktop search ass. Thanks for the great product.
You can post feedback to the forum here:
http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/showforum.aspx?forumid=127&siteid=1
WDS 3.0 and Vista have undergone huge amounts of testing around file locking. I’ll check with them, but I’m certain that the team testing the UNC/FAT protocol handler are considering the scenario you mentioned.
FAT32 indexing is working fine here.
please please please add RSS searching and *.eml searching (Live Mail Desktop EML files). I cannot search my RSS feeds and emails from WLMD in this version. 🙂
RSS (Outlook Feed) is indexed, just tested. I don’t use Live Mail / ELM Files but I can see in the options menue, that the filetype is also included.
I have redirected “My Documents” folder to the other computer in my 2-computer peer-to-peer network. In Desktop Search 2.x it worked perfectly. In Desktop Search 3, I cannot even find a way to add the mapped network drive to the index. My pst-file is also on the other computer, and that gets indexed just fine. So what’s up with that? I have to store my documents inside my local computer to get them indexed, but e-mail I can store on another computer?!! So please could somebody help me out, how do I get Indexer to index My Documents.
I intall WDS 3.0 and restart. When i go to
Windows Desktop Search Options… | Advanced | File Types, then a dialog appear with that message:
An exception occured while trying to run “shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL “srchadmin.dll—
FindMyStuff dead? I don’t see any mention of this on the FindMyStuff page. Did the death of WINFS kill FindMyStuff?
@Jonne:
From Brandon’s reply in comment 8 above:
“Unfortunately this release cannot index network shares (or FAT32 volumes for that matter). Both of those should be supported either in an upcoming release.”
FindMyStuff is not dead and has nothing to do with WinFS. We should be talking about it more soon.
At the moment we’re focused on being able to *show* something before we do more talking =)
@Jeremy
Ok, I missed that.
I guess I have to go back to Desktop Search 2 or Google desktop then. Wonder what “both of those should be supported either in an upcoming release” exactly means; will it be supported in Desktop Search 3.0 Final or Desktop Search 4 in two years… I would call this a major feature cut, though… Unless is it just cut from Beta 2, but then there would have to be a Beta 3 or similar to test it out, I assume. I find it rather ridiculous though that the main search indexer of Vista cannot search and index anything but local hard drives, it sounds like a bad joke…
Hi Brandon,
Was having separate installers for XP and 2003 necessary? The sad consequence is that as a Windows 2003 Server SP2 beta tester I cannot install WDS 3 beta 2. This is the log file:
[KB914783.log]
1.031: ================================================================================
1.031: 2006/08/23 22:29:06.437 (local)
1.031: d:\32c418bdd8d10fcfcc0115\update\update.exe (version 6.2.29.0)
1.031: Hotfix started with following command line: /quiet /norestart
1.031: CheckSystem: ServicePack version Mismatch
1.031: DoInstallation: CheckSystem Failed: 0xf06b
1.031: Setup has detected that the Service Pack version of this system
is newer than the update you are applying.
There is no need to install this update.
1.031: Update.exe extended error code = 0xf06b
1.031: Update.exe return code was masked to 0x643 for MSI custom action compliance.
Diego – that’s a known issue that’s being worked on (supporting 2003 SP2). I believe the seperate installer is necessary because of a dependency on other system updates that are different between the two versions.
Jonne – WDS 3.0 on XP and Vista can search more than just local hard drives. It supports the same Protocol Handler interface that has been used in the past to index all kinds of data stores including Outlook, Lotus Notes, Mozilla Thunderbird, and others.
However, due to the change to a service-based indexer (instead of per-user) there are additional complications with indexing networks shares. The default File System handler runs in the context of the service, and thus doesn’t have the permissions necessary to index remote shares. Our goal is to offer this support at or around the time WDS 3.0 is released. It is a key feature not only for corporate scenarios, but also for a lot of us on the team (including myself!).
It’s also worth noting that on Vista you can already index redirected folders or network shares that have “Offline Files” enabled. This is because there’s already support for indexing the Client-Side Cache of this data. However I’m not sure if that works on XP/2003, I’ll have to ask around.
Brandon,
Is there any log or debug file that we could lookup in order to determine why a particular file failed to be indexed?
I was really hoping that the registry key permissions problem that crashed installation in Beta 1 would get resolved for this release. Unfortunately, it’s pretty much exactly the same, but instead of “Access Denied”, the error message is now more generic-the installation failed, check the log. When I check the log, I see that its failing when trying to install registry keys.
There’s already a KB article about the registry key problem, advising going one by one to change perms on the keys. That’s not possible-there are tons. I’ve probably adjusted 20 & there’s always another one causing the crash.
Any chance this issue will be resolved before release or any advice to get around the problem now? It’s really constraining my satisfaction with Office 2007, an otherwise fantastic upgrade.
In the final version of v3, will WDS be able to…
1) Search the contents of Windows Live Desktop Mail emails?
2) Search through our Window Live Contacts information?
Does the production version of WDS really support Lotus Notes indexing via that add-in or is it all FUD? I have not been able to get it to work nor have I seen anyone else get it working. It doesn’t appear to have any integration with the Notes UI and it doesn’t prompt for the password. (The way Google Desktop Search does this is by having you allow the action from the Notes client itself.)
Any guidance?
Does v3.0 index more files than v2.6.5? – My situation: wds doesn’t index more than 165,000 of my 1,500,000 local files.
2nd: Will WDS support classifying other file types as photo or music. I’d like to see .flac files supported.
Brandon, I’m looking for information about the WDS administrative APIs. More exactly I what to add programatically a specified folder to the WDS.
Any guidance?. Thanks. Please contact me if you want.
How should problems be reported? After upgrading, when I preview a found Outlook document, I get a popup that says
“A Runtime Error has occurred. Do you wish to Debug? Line: 22 Error: Syntax Error” The line of JavaScript shows: if ( == 1)
To Matt re Lotus Notes add-in: I had it working with 2.6.5. I don’t know if it works with 3.0. For 2.6.5, I followed
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windows/search/dtstshoot.mspx#EPH and also installed WindowsDesktopSearch-KB917979-x86-ENU.exe
You had shown example to use APIs of WDSQuery.dll. This dll was part of SDK for WDS 2.X release. How can I achieve same with WDS3.0 as there is no SDK avilable for 3.0 version?. Please let me know if there is any other method? Basically I want to create my own search index for my own documents and wants to get the result progrmatically.
How to query WDS programmatically(VB.NET) so that the results can be displayed by .NET application. Since WDS 3.0 does not contain SDK, how to query existing index from .NET application.
Regarding the SDK –
The WDS 2.x “BETA” SDK is no longer supported in WDS 3.0. However, the new APIs are no longer BETA (or won’t be when WDS 3.0 and Windows Vista ship) and are part of the Windows SDK (formerly “Platform SDK” for Vista).
Uriel – Sounds like you want the Crawl Scope Manager APIs. Try here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/shellcc/platform/shell/reference/ifaces/isearchcrawlscopemanager/isearchcrawlscopemanager.asp
Are you planning to implement proximity searches (a NEAR b; a WITHIN/n b; a AFTER b). This is a must for serious searches.
Brandon, can you suggest any approach to integrate WDS 3.0 in VB.NET . From my program(VB.NET) I want to query for a given string. I had no issue with WDS 2.6.5 since it had SDK.
Hi,
I installed the wds 3 beta 2 and cannot make it work with pdf. It acts as if it s indexing pdfs but actually cannot get from ifilter v 6.0 the content of the file. I also tried ifilter pdf+. Nothing. (I did enable searching the content of pdfs).
Do you know how to make it work? I did not see any one complaining about this.
I have windows XP and office 2007 B2TR.
Thanks
Hi Brandon, I got the news that SDK for WDS3.0 is avilable and it is integrated in Windows vista SDK (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=117ECFD3-98AD-4D67-87D2-E95A8407FA86&displaylang=en). Cit it really true? If so how can I identify WDS3.0 related dlls and query interfaces?
This product is useless without it working with folder redirection. The fact that other services from Microsoft require/install this makes it doublely so. when is this feature slated to become reality?
Pressorv – I’m not sure what you mean. WDS should work fine with Folder Redirection.
If you’re talking about redirecting to a UNC, then you should install the UNC FAT protocol handler:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=f7e981d9-5a3b-4872-a07e-220761e27283&DisplayLang=en
Or on Vista, you can enable Offline Files and the client-side cache will be indexed automatically.
Hi Brandon,
Updated Office 2007 to B2TR.
Decided to get the new version of WDS reqiured by B2TR.
Tried installing. It fails. Reading through the log file below denotes a partial install.
It causes Explorer to crash every time I run search.
Please see my post here for more details: http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=787321&SiteID=1
Thanks,
/e
Brandon,
As this seems the best place to get to SOMEONE who can answer non-dev questions about WDS 3 I thought I’d run this one by you.
I use https://www.foldershare.com to sync files between my work and home computers. It was also great to be able to search for any file on either machine (even the ones not in a shared folder) from the website UI. However, it seems the foldershare devs haven’t picked up the changes to the 3.0 sdk making 3.0 unusable for the foldershare search functionality.
So here’s my question. Is there anyone actually working on foldershare since it’s purchase by MS? If so do they plan to enhance the site/feature set to utilize 3.0? Maybe they don’t know about the changes to the SDK yet? Someone should let them know. 😉
As I was originally a paid subscriber to the foldershare service, before it was purchased and made a free product by MS, I hope it survives and isn’t left to simply be a feature of feature of Windows Live Messenger.
Thanks for any feedback you can provide.
-Jeremy
Hi Jeremey,
Unfortunately I can’t comment on unannounced/unreleased products and services =/
Hi Bradon,
Windows Desktop Search: Add-in for UNC/FAT http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=f7e981d9-5a3b-4872-a07e-220761e27283&DisplayLang=en
is only for “Windows Server 2003; Windows XP Service Pack 2”
Do you know when will a version for Win 2k3 x64 be published?
Thanks
Does it not install on x64?
I don’t know anything about x64 support with that add-in off-hand, but I’ll try to follow-up with someone who does.
You might also want to ask about it on the forum here:
http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/showforum.aspx?forumid=127&siteid=1
Actually, from the post there it sounds like it installs but that the control panel applet doesn’t work because it’s 32-bit. I’ll see what more I can find out.
Any chance we will see soon a new beta for this product?
When is the final launch date?
Thx,
John
Hi John, we aren’t planning any more public releases before the final WDS 3.0 release. I don’t know an exact date for that but it shouldn’t be far off.