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- Movie List: Favorite Sci-FiDecember 21 2007
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Favorite Sci-Fi
- Adding new search "locations" to Windows Desktop Search...August 2 2005
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I’ve been hoping that someday I’d actually have a short post to make on my blog about something Windows Desktop Search (WDS) related… But today isn’t that day…
We’ve been hearing some requests that users would like to add new locations to the “All Locations” list in WDS. Maybe something like this:
So that when you type in a query and select this added location you get navigated to a set of web search results like this:
And to be honest the real request we heard was for info about adding new desktop search locations but
- Custom List: WDS ResourcesJuly 9 2005
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WDS Resources
- Updated API's released for Windows Desktop Search 2.5!July 8 2005
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I had actually wanted to blog a few weeks ago the fact we’ve released some new API’s for WDS as part of our 2.5 release. I chose to hold off on posting any comments here because I knew we had fairly significant update in the works. So now that we’ve posted an updated set of files let me tell you about them.
The 2.5 release was largely about internationalization for us but we were able to squeeze in some new API’s which we’ve been hearing requests for. The new API’s provide access to a SearchManager component to simplify setup & management of protocol handlers and a SearchDesktop component to provide programmatic access to our index. Both of these components are implemented as COM objects and require WDS 2.5 or later. The initial SDK we posted contained a single IDL file which required compilation via Visual Studios MIDL utility into a .tlb file before you could do anything useful with it. And if you wanted to use the SDK from within a .NET application you then needed to run the .tlb generated by MIDL through another utility called TLBIMP which generates an interop assembly that can then be added as a reference to your .NET project. Easy right? Well to simplify both your lives and ours (we have to explain this stuff to you) we decided to
- Customizing the Stock PreviewsJune 12 2005
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Ok so I thought I’d get the ball rolling by talking about how you can customize the item previews displayed in the large search results UI. This is a big topic which isn’t easily covered by a single post so I thought I’d first talk broadly about how the previews work and how to perform basic modifications. In future posts I can drill into more details if there’s interest. But before any of that I need to throw out a disclaimer:
Modifying the previews shipped with Windows Desktop Search is not a supported feature. Any new previews you build will not be guaranteed to work in future versions of the product. The documentation that follows should be considered “unofficial” at best.
Preview Selection
The first topic I should touch on is how the appropriate preview gets chosen when a user selects an item. When a new item is selected, the first thing the preview pane does is it identifies what type of previewer it’s going to display. It currently only has two choices, the folder previewer or the content previewer. The folder previewer is chosen if the item is a file system folder and is simply a shell view over the contents of the folder. All other items get mapped to the content previewer which is an embedded WebBrowser control. At this point we’re only interested in items mapped to the content previewer because they’re the only ones we can modify.
Once an item has been mapped to the co
