DID YOU KNOW

DID YOU KNOW : Advanced Search in Microsoft Explorer

I was trying to search for some files on my laptop today and wanted to filter the search for filed modified in the last few weeks. Like, show me all files that contain the word “American” and modified in the last 2 weeks. Doing this on a Linux machine would have been a simple filter using find. But this is Microsoft :).

Thanks to some Googling, I ran across something called “Advanced Query Syntax” that is a core part of Microsoft’ ecosystem (OS, Office etc).

So the same search ended up being

American datemodified:this month

There are a lot of cool ways you can filter your queries using the other keywords in AQS.

DID YOU KNOW : Windows mobile and wildcard certs don't work together

Wildcard SSL certificates allow you to use one certificate for all sub domains (up to one level) of a host. Say I got a wildcard SSL certificate for *.kudithipudi.org, I would be able to use it to provide SSL on blah.kudithipudi.org, ssltest.kudithipudi.org, youcannotbeserious.kudithipudi.org and the clients won’t complaint about it.

For some reason though, Windows Mobile phones don’t like wildcard certs. So if you are ever scratching your head, why every other client works, but windows mobile devices don’t..stop scratching and get a regular SSL certificate for your website/application.

Apparently, this is the case with

  • Windows CE
  • Windows Mobile 5.0
  • Windows Mobile 6.0
  • Windows Mobile 7.0

Don’t you get the feeling that someone keeps using the same library and never bothered to check/fix it? And searching on MSDN or any other Microsoft resource won’t provide you this information. This is my own deduction after beating my head against the wall for more than 3 days :).