Tim Sneath of Microsoft has written up a great list of Windows 7 Secrets and Tips. Now, that the Windows 7 Beta is out for public to download, a great listing of some of the new hidden features in Windows 7 was needed. Tim did not disappoint with his long list.

 Here are some of my favorite secrets from his list:

• Windows Management - By now, you’ve probably seen that Windows 7 does a lot to make window management easier: you can “dock” a window to the left or right half of the screen by simply dragging it to the edge; similarly, you can drag the window to the top of the screen to maximize it, and double-click the window top / bottom border to maximize it vertically with the same horizontal width. What you might not know is that all these actions are also available with keyboard shortcuts:
   
  
  • Win+Left Arrow and Win+Right Arrow dock.
    
  • Win+Up Arrow and Win+Down Arrow maximizes and restores / minimizes.
    
  • Win+Shift+Up Arrow and Win+Shift+Down Arrow maximizes and restores the vertical size.
    
  This side-by-side docking feature is particularly invaluable on widescreen monitors – it makes the old Windows way of shift-clicking on two items in the taskbar and then using the context menu to arrange them feel really painful.
   
  
• Standards Support - Every review of Windows 7 that I’ve seen has noted the revamped WordPad and Paint applets that add an Office-like ribbon to expose their functionality. Few, however, have noticed one small but hopefully appreciated feature: WordPad can now read and write both the Word 2007-compatible Office Open XML file format but also the OpenDocument specification that IBM and Sun have been advocating.
   
• ISO Burning - Easy to miss if you’re not looking for it: you can double-click on any DVD or CD .ISO image and you’ll see a helpful little applet that will enable you to burn the image to a blank disc. No more grappling for shareware utilities of questionable parentage!
   

These are only few of the many great secrets and tip that Tim has listed. Be sure to check out his post. Let me know in the comments what your favorite hidden Windows 7 secret is for you.

I have become a big fan of using Twitter. You can follow my tweets by choosing to follow @joswalt on Twitter. For those that may not know what Twitter is, Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing? There are numerous applications out that will allow you to create your Tweets (posts).

There are desktop applications such as Twhirl, TweetDeck, Twitterrific (Mac) to perform your tweeting. Browser addons such as TwitterFox connect you from the browser. You can even keep up to date with your friends on your mobile device through apps such as Tiny Twitter and GPS Twit.

After using Twitter for quite a while, I found myself searching for old tweets from my friends that contained links or information that I was interested in but didn't write down at the time that I read the tweet. I found that Twitter has a search site - search.twitter.com where you can search through tweets. I thought that it would be useful to create a Search Provider for Internet Explorer so that I could perform these searches directly from the Internet Explorer Search Bar.

Here are the steps to add a Twitter Search Provider to Internet Explorer:

1. From within Internet Explorer 7, click on the dropdown arrow in the Search section of the toolbar and choose "Find More Providers..."
    
2. After the Add Search Providers page loads, you are going to fill in the Create Your Own Search Provider section. In the URL textbox, enter "http://search.twitter.com/search?q=TEST" (without quotes). You then need to specify a name for your search provider. I chose to enter "Twitter".
   
3. Click on the Install button to add the Twitter Search Provider to your list in Internet Explorer. You are then able to select "Twitter" in your Search section before performing a search.
   
4. Now, just enter the term that you want to search on in Twitter such as searching for a person (joswalt) or a subject (Microsoft), and you will get sent to the Twitter search site with all of your search results provided for you.
   

You have now successfully added a Twitter Search Provider to Internet Explorer. Hopefully, you have found this post useful and start using Twitter to keep up to date with what your friends and family are doing.

I am still relatively new to blogging, so I am still trying to find my voice on how and what I want to blog about. I have had some troubles trying to decide what and how I want to make posts to my blog. This blog is intended to be for subscribers and myself to have posts that deal with the .NET language and other aspects in technology that interest me. Sometimes this means that I am posting links and overviews of interesting sites and articles that I find in my daily work and searching of the net. These posts serve as good repository for myself and hopefully for others to find these sites that they might not have been aware of or forgotten where the site is located.

I have been reading posts on how to become a better blogger in hopes that more people will find this blog useful and more interesting. I recently read a post by Darren Rowse that discussed this topic. He mentions that your blog posts should try to start conversations with your readers to help drive your community and more readers to your site. Darren gave a list of steps to help bloggers start conversations on their blogs.

I thought that I would share the list with you:

1. what did they say well? - rather than just reporting what someone else has said - pick out something that they said especially well or that is the crux of the news.
2. what did they miss? - conversely, one way to add to a conversation is to find a gap in the conversation or a point that might have been missed. Blog from this angle and you add something of real value to readers.
3. answer questions - this one’s pretty obvious really - but if another blogger asks a question - why not answer it - it’s the perfect lead in to a post of your own that takes some of their ideas and extends them.
4. what are others saying? - who else is talking about this story? What are they saying? One useful type of post is the compilation post that pulls together lots of ideas on the one topic and attempts to make sense of them. Look for the patterns in what people are saying - look for the gaps in the collective arguments.
5. how does it apply to you? - take a news story and tell your readers how it applies to you personally. Hearing news as it impacts people can help others interpret what it might mean for them. Tell your story, share your experiences and bring it home on a personal level.
6. look forward - one interesting exercise to do when a story breaks is to ask yourself ‘where might this end up?’ Intstead of just reporting news - hypothesize and predict which might happen as a result of this news.
7. look backward - the past informs and shapes our present. Look back at similar stories or news and see how they played out. Can we learn something from these stories? How do they intersect with and inform our present?
8. extend ideas - I often get to the end of reading posts that others have written and want to add points. You can do this by leaving a comment - or by continuing the conversation on your own blog (with a link back). So turn the next ‘top 10′ article you read on someone else’s blog into a top 20 article on your own.
9. take the ‘opposite’ tack - I love doing this one with my own posts. For example why should you join a blog network and why shouldn’t you join a blog network. You can do the same sort of things with others posts - not just when you disagree with them, but to expand the topic out.
10. ask what if? - one of the best ways of coming up with creative and useful ideas is to take an existing idea and asking ‘what if…’ about it. Sometimes the what if questions will see out of ‘left field’ - but ‘left field’ is where geniuses often live!
11. play devil’s advocate - you might not disagree with what another blogger has written - but taking the opposing argument to see where it leads can be an illuminating journey. For example - I’ve asked readers a couple of times to answer the question ‘What’s wrong with blogging?‘ - the results were illuminating and I know that a number of new blog tools were written to overcome some of the submitted problems with blogging.