For the last two years, the majority of my time has been spent on this project, and now it's out the door. 'Nuff said.

If you do business applications and you haven't seen it, go have a look immediately. If you've seen it before, have another look - it's changed a lot recently, especially from the usability point of view.

Here's the announcement, Ray's blog post about the new Universial SKU of DXperience, here's lots more information and here's a trial download.

Merry Christmas!

Here's something I could use some help with... I haven't spent a lot of time looking into things, but there doesn't seem to be an easy solution.

The problem is about switching keyboard layouts in Windows Vista (older versions of Windows weren't significantly different, AFAIK, but that's what I'm using). Now I hear a lot of people go "hehe, he's not aware of all the nifty shortcuts you can configure to switch layouts"... no, I am aware of them, but they don't do what I want.

What I want is really very simple. I use the Dvorak keyboard layout on my laptop. When I'm using the built-in keyboard, I have the driver in Windows configured to "United States - Dvorak" to support this. I also have a United Kingdom layout configured as well as a Russian layout - I switch between those only rarely, when I need some special characters, and I just use the mouse to do it temporarily. No problem there.

Now I also have an external keyboard that has Dvorak built in. I plug it into my laptop and want to start using it. No chance! What I need to do is switch the laptop to a US layout without Dvorak to make it compatible with the keyboard, but it doesn't appear to be possible to do this in exactly the right way. I can use the mouse/keyboard shortcut way that the keyboard toolbar supports, but that applies only to the current application. It's possible to switch the default layout as well, but that's cumbersome to do (need to enter a dialog, set a default, hit okay - I haven't found a way to replace this with a command line command so I could easily run it from Slickrun) and even worse, it still doesn't apply to any of the apps that are already running! So I find myself switching to the US layout for each app separately. Usually there are some that rarely require keyboard input, so even after working for quite a while, there's still a combination of apps running that are configured for Dvorak in software and that are not. So when I unplug the external keyboard at some point, it's chaos again - this is really a PITA to deal with.

Does anybody know how I can reconfigure my keyboard layout for my current Windows session? It sounds like an extremely simple request... nice to have a per-app setting, but isn't a per-session setting a much more natural thing? Is there really no solution?

I had the weirdest problem a moment ago and I found a solution that I thought I'd document for myself and anybody else who sees that issue. I was trying to use Abode Lightroom to import a bunch of pictures from my camera. I was going to have the pictures copied to a folder on a network drive. Lightroom uses a folder selection dialog to browse for the right folder. When I clicked on the entry "Computer" in the hierarchy, this dialog popped up (actually it took a little while to come up, for some reason):

At the same time, Lightroom hung and I wasn't able to get it to do anything at all, so I had to kill it. Anyway, of course I wouldn't have wanted to enter a Live ID for the purpose of storing a few pictures to my server. Weird.

I looked into the issue and also found some hints in German language here. The problem is the folder "My Web Sites on MSN" - an entirely useless thing (or at least one whose purpose I'm not aware of <g&gt, which can be seen in an Explorer window:

I'm not aware of the reason why Lightroom has such special problems with that virtual folder - it's been around forever, I think, but I've never had the same Live ID login problem. Anyway, thankfully it's easy to get rid of that folder once you find where it's actually stored. In Vista, the path is C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Network Shortcuts, in older Windows versions you'd have to look for a folder called "Nethood" in your user profile (the name will be translated if your version of Windows is not an English language one). In that folder I found the link for the MSN sites:

I deleted that link and immediately Lightroom behaved properly, showing me the drives and other entries underneath "Computer" correctly in the folder browse dialog.

The German language page I linked above mentioned that there might also be registry keys in the path HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Web Service Providers, which might also have to do with the issue. I found a few keys in there that didn't seem obviously connected, so I left them. If I ever see the problem again, I might still look here for some more stuff to get rid of.