One of the weird and annoying things about Excel is that it shows you an item on the Windows taskbar for each document that you have open, but it doesn't let them operate as separate windows.  If you're using dual or multiple monitors you'll notice that you can't place one document on each monitor to see them side by side because they share the same window.  The following steps will allow you to open Excel documents side by side, but they involve some tweaks to the file system settings in Windows.  If you don't fully understand the changes below I would recommend that you not make them as they will be a challenge to fix on your own and could mess up your system.  To get Excel to open documents in separate windows so you can place them independently you can do the following:

Excel 2007:

• Click the Office Orb in the upper left corner to bring up the menu.
• Select Excel Options from the bottom right corner of the menu.
• Click the Advanced tab.
• Check the "Ignore other applications that use Dynamic Data Exchange" box and save.

Excel Versions Prior to 2007

• Tools|options|General tab|Ignore other applications (check it).

Then in Windows Explorer

1. Go to Tools -> Folder Options.
2. Select the File Types tab.
3. Select the XLS file type and click "Advanced".
4. Uncheck the "Browse in same window" checkbox if it is checked.
5. Select the "Open" Action in the Actions listbox and click "Edit".
6. In the "Application used to perform action" textbox add "%1" to the end of the line and be sure to include the quotes around the %1.
7. Uncheck the "Use DDE" checkbox if it is checked.
8. Click "OK" and "OK" again.
9. Repeat steps 3-8 for the XLSX file type if you have Office 2007 installed.
10. Click "OK" to dismiss the Folder Options dialog.

I have been trying to do development on Vista since I went full time Vista at home during the release candidates.  Until recently it was nearly impossible to get any development done on this platform.  Due to some hard working people at Microsoft, developing on Vista is now a pleasure.  There are a couple of things you will need to do in addition to the normal Visual Studio 2005 install to be successful.

Install SP1 for Visual Studio 2005.  This download is quite large and took me over an hour to install.  Multi-tasking while installing this is not advised.  Also, be sure to uninstall the Web Applications Project add-on, otherwise you will get a half hour into the installation only to have it error out.

Install the Visual Studio 2005 SP1 Update for Windows Vista Beta.  This is the magic update that allows development on Vista to be a great experience.  Before installing this update, whenever I would do ASP.NET development on Vista, the controls that I added to the aspx pages would not automatically be declared in the designer.aspx file.  This made it so that I could not programmatically access any of the controls that I had declared in the aspx page.  Installing this update fixed the issue and it has not happened since.

Setup Visual Studio 2005 to always run as administrator.  Browse to your install dir (C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE) and open the properties for devenv.exe.  Switch to the compatibility tab and select "Run this program as an administrator". 

Read this post and setup the Debugging Assistant if you are on a development machine.  The post details some IIS configuration changes that need to be made as well as provides a link and instructions for setting up the debugging assistant. 

Before installing the debugging assistant I would get the following error message when trying to debug from Visual Studio...

Unable to start debugging on the web server. An authentication error occurred while communicating with the web server. Please see Help for assistance.

Mike's article talks about how this is most commonly due to event handlers in global.asax like BeginRequest; however, I did not have any event handlers in global.asax and I was still getting the error.  The most likely cause that I can think of is that I am using the ASP.NET AJAX Extensions (Atlas) RC1 and it is probably subscribing to pipeline notifications prior to AuthenticateRequest.  Setting up Mike's Debugging Assistant fixed the issue that I was having and I am now successfully able to debug.

For some other interesting articles on working with ASP.NET and Vista/IIS7 check out this post from Rick Strahl and this post from Scott Guthrie.

It has always bothered me that the makers of my Toshiba Satellite laptop thought it was a good idea to put the `~ key where the Windows key belongs on my keyboard. The Windows Key Shortcuts are some of my favorite shortcuts in Windows. Toshiba's placement of the Windows key in the upper right corner of the keyboard severely limited my access to the key. Enter RandyRants' SharpKeys. SharpKeys allows me to easily remap the Windows key to be where it should be. I simply remapped the `~ key to be the Windows key and the Windows key to be the `~ key. Now I have easy access to all of my Windows key shortcuts again. If you care to know, SharpKeys works by adding specific registry entries in Windows to indicate what keys need to be remapped.

UPDATE: I also want to add that SharpKeys is not specific to Toshiba laptops. It is able to remap keys for any Windows keyboard.

I have been having connection issues with Outlook where it can't connect to my university imap accounts to recieve mail. Then a strange thing happened today. I'm working on reformatting my wife's laptop for her (it's running slow and hasn't been reformatted since she got it 4 years ago) and I backed up her Outlook data file for her. To make sure that the exported data file contained everything it needed I copied it into my Outlook data file directory (C:\Documents and Settings\Eric\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook) and renamed my Outlook.pst to Outlook.pst.old and renamed hers to Outlook.pst. Then I start up Outlook and verify that her data is there and also realize that it has fixed my connection issues that I was having. So I closed down Outlook renamed my data file back to Outlook.pst, opened Outlook and the connection issues are still fixed . . . very strange.

For the past two days I've spent the majority of my time (when I'm not in class or at work) trying to get my 250 gig external hard drive set up just the way I want it.  My idea was to partition about 7 gigs of it to install OS X Tiger on, and partition the rest as a FAT32 cross-platform storage drive.  I now believe this to be impossible.  The problem is that Windows cannot read the Mac partition table, and the Mac cannot boot an OS from a Windows partition table, although the Mac can otherwise use a Windows partition table just fine.  So now I have a 7 gig Mac HFS+ partition that is useless on my drive.  The part that really sucks about the whole thing is that I spent about 8 hours working on getting the partitions set up the way they are now, only to find out that Tiger can't be installed on a drive using Windows partitioning.  If for some reason you ever needed to have an HFS+ and FAT32 partition on the same drive though, I know how to do that.  In a Mac terminal window use the command

diskutil partitionDisk /dev/disk2 2 MBRFormat MS-DOS fat32partitionName 225G "Journaled HFS+"  macPartitionName 7G

This command will create 2 partitions, 1 HFS+ and 1 FAT32.  Both partitions can be mounted in OS X and the FAT32 partition will show up in Windows.  In the above command 225G and 7G are the size of the partitions you want to create in gigabytes and /dev/disk2 is the name of the disk you are partitioning and formatting.  You can find out the disk name on your machine by using the command

diskutil list

Hopefully someone will have use for this information.  In the meantime I'll be formatting my drive with a single FAT32 partition for storage use only.