Rob Farley

Rob Rob Farley has been consulting in IT since completing a Computer Science degree with first class honours in 1997. Before moving to Adelaide, he worked in consultancies in Melbourne and London. He runs the development department in one of Australia's leading IT firms, as well as doing database application consultancy and training. He heads up the Adelaide SQL Server User Group, and holds several Microsoft certifications.

Rob has been involved with Microsoft technologies for most of his career, but has also done significant work with Oracle and Unix systems. His preferred database is SQL Server and his preferred language is C#. Recently he has been involved with Microsoft Learning in the US, creating and reviewing new content for the next generation of Microsoft exams.

Over the years, Rob's clients have included BP Oil, OneLink Transit, Accenture, Avanade, Australian Electorial Commission, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, the Royal Borough of Kingston, Help The Aged, Unisys, Department of Treasury and Finance (Vic), National Mutual, the Bible Society and others.

Did you mean to come here? My blog is now at http://msmvps.com/blogs/robfarley



09 January 2006

Msgr 8

This morning I tried using Windows Live Messenger 8 (beta). Mark Baartse sent me an invite. I'd link to it, but being beta, it seems hard to find the right place. How about this one: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22windows+live+messenger%22

Dave Glover will probably tell me off for putting a Google link for a Microsoft product. Oh well. :)

Anyway, Live Msgr seems not too bad. It's a scary orange colour when you first run it, but you can easily change that. When you mouse-over your contacts and groups, it enlarges the contact, which I don't really like. But I can live with that. I don't like the fact that if you rename the contact (giving it a nickname), you can no longer see the user's DisplayName. But I figure that if someone wants to say something, they can put it in their 'personal message' instead. So I can live with that.

I don't like the fact that it grabs all my Hotmail contacts and puts them in a group either. But I know that this is the way things are going to be, so I can live with that too.

On the whole, it seems really nice. And yet I've switched back to 7.5. Why? For the simple reason that I can't use MsgPlus with it yet. I like MsgPlus. It gives me encryption on my log files. It gives me tabbed chatting (really nice in my book, since I don't tend to maximise windows). It lets me put a shortcut to my wife's contact icon on my desktop (and 'Always On Top'), so that I can notice more easily if she's online. There are all kinds of things about it that I have just come to consider part of Msgr. And I don't think I can bring myself to use Msgr 8 until MsgPlus is supported.

Kudos to Microsoft though. Uninstalling Msgr 8 and re-installing Msgr 7.5 was REALLY simple. No hassles at all.

Posted by Rob Farley at 12:58 pm