Then I found buried in Outlook a way to archive even the archive folders with the ability to do so by date.

1. Open Microsoft Outlook 2010 if not already open.
2. Optional: Clean up archive folders to reduce size and decrease the time to process (see below).
3. Click on File.
4. Click on Cleanup Tools, then Archive….
5. Scroll down and select “Archive Folders”.
6. Set the date for which older items are moved into a new folder.
7. Set the location for the new archive PST file.
8. Click OK.

When complete, the archive PST is attached to your Outlook profile and will be indexed.

The optional step is clean up each folder before splitting your PST. I do this every month or so on my current folders as well before they are archived to reduce the active archive PST as well (too bad the Auto Archive settings don’t allow for this). While this is supposed to work on sub-folders, it has not seemed to work for me. So to clean up each folder,

1. Select the folder to open it.
2. Right click on that same folder and select Clean Up Folder.

Hopefully this tip helps you split PST files by date easily and freely.

But if you’ve already created a link and navigated away from the page, Bit.ly will not let you add a custom name. In fact, http://bit.ly/gQBJgW says you can’t edit a link once it’s created. While this makes sense for the generated permalink ID like “f4FrgD”, adding a custom name can work: add the same long URL in Bit.ly again gives you an error that the URL has already been shortened, but also gives you a chance to customize it – to get it a long name.

The custom name will persist, and you can then use links like http://bit.ly/vscollect even while http://bit.ly/f4FrgD continues to work.

A cool little customization I discovered was how to customize icons, verbs, and other shell extensions for different device types. A device URN describes the device type, and would look something like “urn:schemas-upnp-org:device:DimmableLight:1” (dimmable light). Using the device URN, you can add a registry key in Windows to customize for that device type.

• HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT
  • NetworkExplorerPlugins
    • urn:schemas-upnp-org:device:DimmableLight:1
      • DefaultIcon
        • @ = Path, index to icon
      • Shell
        • Verbs
      • ShellEx
        • Shell handlers

The types of shell extensions supported are at least context menu and property sheet extensions, as evident from Internet gateway devices (IGDs).

Caffeine is a small utility application written on top of the Windows Presentation Foundation that allows you to keep your monitor and/or system awake. It does not disable your screensaver, nor prevent your system from sleeping when you force it – like when you close the lid – so you’re in complete control. You do not need to change your power options – which you may forget to revert later. Just run the application and click whether you want to keep your display, system, or both awake. When you quit the application it remembers your settings and allows your system to sleep as configured again.

So give your system a shot of caffeine today and keep it working all night too!

This is a sample application I wrote and published as a helpful utility I’ve needed quite a few times. Baristas, obscure indie music, and free wi-fi not included.

But I’m on Verizon, and no CDMA Windows Phone 7s are available yet. Sprint has announced one or two already, and Verizon seems they will get an HTC sometime next year (after Sprint, since Verizon apparently takes longer to test devices).

So dear friends and colleagues, be happy with your device but when you show how cool it is to me, make sure you hold on tight!

It’s a good platform and I’m looking forward to playing around with it. Definitely an improvement, which I’m sure is one reason Microsoft chose to focus their efforts on other projects and leave WordPress handle what it does best.

Picking a name wasn’t easy. When I signed up for Spaces, it was still beta so I could get the name I wanted easily. However, WordPress has been around for a long time so a lot of ideas were taken. I considered a few like “heathing” which my old doctor, mentor, Scout master, and friend used to say I was doing when whatever I was doing was otherwise undefined. Like other ideas, it looked word as a URL. Sorry, Doc.

So in honor of Monty Python - which I my wife just loves (not really) – I chose “lifeofheath”. Unfortunately squatters took several more reasonable names, but what can one do?

So while I continue to post work-related posts about deployment, Visual Studio, .NET and other such topics to http://blogs.msdn.com/heaths; here I’ll post things about what’s going in life with my family and me. It’s not the most exciting life, but I’ve got a wonderful wife, sweet daughter, and joyful (and not always annoying) dog that make it fun.

I saw some posts where people were asking for the icon and Autorun.inf files that shipped with the following drives from Seagate.

• ST305004EXA101-RK – 500 GB
• ST310005EXA101-RK – 1 TB
• ST315005EXA101-RK – 1.5 TB
• ST320005EXA101-RK – 2 TB

If you formatted your drive or are otherwise missing these files, just extract the contents of the following ZIP archive to the root of your expansion drive. Changes may not appear right away. You may need to unplug and re-plug in your drive.

http://cid-9415f61cbb1a8030.skydrive.live.com/embedicon.aspx/Tools/ExternalDesktop.zip

I’ve been happily using various Windows 7 builds for a while now, including the recent release of Windows 7 RC (build 7100). There are many UI improvement that help me be productive – especially on a laptop when not connected to external monitors. The Shell has made significant performance improvements, and while I never found UAC prompts to be an issue I do like that there’s far fewer of them when I’m changing configuration settings while exploring the possibilities.

At home I decided to update our Vista SP1 Media Center to Win7 RC. Almost everything went smoothly except that on boot my machine couldn’t connect to the Internet. When I looked at the Network and Sharing Center, “Unidentified network” showed up. To check my network configuration I dropped into a command prompt and ran “ipconfig /all” only to find that I had a new default gateway address: 0.0.0.0”. Disabling and re-enabling the NIC fixed the issue until the next reboot.

Then I was pointed at KB970313. It seems there’s a race condition at startup – which also seems to have gained a boost with Win7 – where if the Apply Bonjour service starts before my NIC retrieves settings from my router, the default gateway 0.0.0.0 is added. And while their web page claims, “Thanks to Bonjour technology, getting computers and smart devices to work together is as easy as connecting them”, it had quite the opposite effect for me: no connectivity to the outside world.

If you’re having issues connecting and see “Unidentified network”, fixing the issue is fairly easy: disable the service, then disable and re-enable your NIC. Alternatively you can reboot your machine.

1. Click on Start.
2. Type services.msc and press Enter. On Vista you may need to confirm the UAC prompt.
3. Find the Bonjour service. This may be tricky since it’s open source and may not display the same. But you can check suspected services for the typical path “C:\Program Files\Bonjour\mdnsresponder.exe”.
4. Right click on the service and select Properties.
5. Change the Startup type to Disabled.
6. Click the Stop button. You can then close the Services window.
7. Reboot the machine.

But what installed it? A disabled service begs the question, why even have it installed?

While perhaps not as impressive as Process Monitor, I have my own set of tools I’ve been working on occasionally. The Windows Installer PowerShell Module exposes Windows Installer APIs to PowerShell. By combining a few cmdlets I can examine objects through a pipeline to find what product installed “C:\Program Files\Bonjour\mdnsresponder.exe”.

PS> get-wicomponentinfo | where { $_.path -ieq 'C:\Program Files\Bonjour\mDNSResponder.exe'} | get-wiproductinfo

ProductCode                            ProductVersion      ProductName
———–                            ————–      ———–
{D0DFF92A-492E-4C40-B862-A74A173C25C5} 3.0                 Adobe Version Cue CS3 Client

Unfortunately I can’t remove the product without breaking the Photoshop CS3, but having disabled the service I shouldn’t have to worry about not being able to connect to the Internet.

Yesterday I rented a dethatching machine for the front lawn. It looks as if it hasn’t been dethatched in so many years, and in our second year here I figured it was time to give the lawn some TLC.

I was able to kick up about 320 gallons of densely packed thatch! That’s a lot of thatch.

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I didn’t do the backyard because about 1/3 of it is entirely moss and we have a slight drainage problem anyway: much of the rain water collects under the south fence and is rotting the bottom away. I want to till it up and landscape it, giving me a chance to re-contour it and put a French drain under the fence.

Today I’ll be over-seeding and fertilizing the lawn and in the next week or two I’ll aerate.