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Microsoft Garage releases Mouse Without Borders

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Re: Microsoft Garage releases Mouse Without Borders

#61

Post by nhebb »

StavrosK wrote: post #34
nhebb wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In addition to the file movement features, Mouse Without Borders also allows the user to log onto all the PCs linked together by the program via just one PC. That's the big one. I use a commercial tool (MaxiVista) right now, and I've used Synergy in the past (buggy). The drawback of both is that you need a separate keyboard for each system to log in, and then you can use the software as a KVM. If Mouse Without Bord…

No you don't. I have a separate PC next to my desktop, and it doesn't have anything connected to it but the screen. I run synergy as a service so it's ready to connect as soon as it boots up. It's not single sign on, but it's very handy.

I never got that to work on a pair of Vista / XP systems. The target system had several password protected user profiles. I needed to have a keyboard on the target system to do the login, and then Synergy would launch after the user logged in.

Re: Microsoft Garage releases Mouse Without Borders

#62

Post by StavrosK »

nhebb wrote: post #61
StavrosK wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No you don't. I have a separate PC next to my desktop, and it doesn't have anything connected to it but the screen. I run synergy as a service so it's ready to connect as soon as it boots up. It's not single sign on, but it's very handy.

I never got that to work on a pair of Vista / XP systems. The target system had several password protected user profiles. I needed to have a keyboard on the target system to do the login, and then Synergy would launch after the user logged in.

I had problems too, but it somehow worked in the end. I think I used synergy+.

Re: Microsoft Garage releases Mouse Without Borders

#64

Post by fabjan »

Michiel wrote: post #37
hamidpalo wrote: post #28

This is an internal tool that has been apparently been made public. All employees at MSFT get more than one machine connected to many screens. Mouse Without Borders was developed by a group of employees in their free time to make it easier to deal with multiple Windows desktops. IMHO it is much nicer and more secure than Synergy for managing Windows machines. It's not a clone of anything. The Garage is MSFTs version…

From the video it doesn't sound like 20% time ("nights and weekends")

Isn't it the same at Google? But there they do their regular work in nights and weekends instead.

That's just what I've gathered from reading articles about Google workers. Maybe I'm wrong and they really do work no more than 40 hours per week, including the 20%. But that is not the impression I've gotten from reading.

Re: Microsoft Garage releases Mouse Without Borders

#65

Post by ryanmolden »

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #33
xpaulbettsx wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also the MSDN forums which are surprisingly good, despite their absolutely awful forum software

Again, it's purely anecdotal, but I've had more than one topic go without any reply, and one result in a Microsoft employee asking me to email logs. One of which was over 600MB in size, just from loading VS and after sending the email, I never heard back. I eventually gave up on that particular issue and took the only remaining option which was reimaging my machine. (A Microsoft produced and supported VS addon was ca…

>Again, it's purely anecdotal, but I've had more than one topic go without any reply, and one result in a Microsoft employee asking me to email logs. One of which was over 600MB in size, just from loading VS

Yes, sometimes to trace down a problem dump files are necessary, and with full heap info they can be big. If you expect psychic debugging based on (often times) vague descriptions of your problems or a problem that they can't repro on their side, then you will be disappointed, then again with expectations like that I imagine you will be disappointed a lot in life from pretty much every software company you ever deal with.

>A Microsoft produced and supported VS addon was causing errors in the .NET runtime that were uncaught and untraceable.

This sounds...unlikely. Not because Microsoft produced AddOns can't possibly have bugs (of course they can), but saying something is 'uncaught and untraceable' is like saying there is a evil demon in your machine, it just doesn't stand to reason. Exceptions are exceptions are exceptions. Debuggers can and do catch them rather handily, if they didn't / couldn't they would be pretty much useless. I think a more accurate explanation would be 'I couldn't figure out how to diagnose the problem myself'. Without sources that is understandable as often times it is necessary to get to the root of the issue.

>Reinstallation of VS, SP1, and all installed version of the .NET runtime were futile

So you never solved the issue and continue to see it to this day? Or you just stopped using VS or this particular add-in all together?

Re: Microsoft Garage releases Mouse Without Borders

#66

Post by tallanvor »

evanlong wrote: post #39
ck2 wrote: post #19

Input Director - used it with my netbook for years now. It also does shared copy/paste which is really handy. http://www.inputdirector.com/ And it can encrypt the communications, I wonder if MS bothers?

When I was at MSFT there was an internal tool call Magic Mouse that did what Mouse without Borders does. Magic Mouse had encryption so I would venture a guess that Mouse without Borders does as well.

Mouse Without Borders is Magic Mouse - they just renamed it a few months ago is all.

Re: Microsoft Garage releases Mouse Without Borders

#67

Post by ryanmolden »

rbanffy wrote: post #55
PyErr_SetString wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"All employees at MSFT get more than one machine connected to many screens" Just out of curiosity, why does everyone need more than one machine?

When I worked in a big Windows-centric company developing hardware and software for Windows CE (mid-2002), I had two desktops, one associated with the corporate domain, where I could print and read e-mails off their Exchange server, and another, where I had administrative privileges (VS required them to attach debuggers to processes) that didn't connect to the corporate network at all. If you develop pieces of the OS…

>VS required them to attach debuggers to processes

I don't believe this is entirely true. VS will sometimes claim you need to be an admin and offer to restart as an admin, but you can click ignore in that dialog and debugging will work just fine. The one exception is if you are running as non-admin trying to attach to a higher privilege process, in which case you would need to be able to attain the same privileges as the thing you are trying to attach to, for obvious reasons.

Re: Microsoft Garage releases Mouse Without Borders

#68

Post by rbanffy »

rkwz wrote: post #41
spiralganglion wrote: post #38

An observation. There's a bizarre inconsistency in the videos coming out of Microsoft. The video for this (pretty bleeding cool) evening-and-weekend side-project couldn't sell anything, but that's not the point. The Mango video[1] looks and sounds pretty good, like it was made by professionals. But their Windows 8 videos[2][3] are unbelievably slipshod. This is so counterintuitive. Obviously, the Mango video is inten…

Different audience.

Which is really interesting. Who are they trying to sell each product to?

Re: Microsoft Garage releases Mouse Without Borders

#69

Post by joelhaasnoot »

StavrosK wrote: post #62
nhebb wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never got that to work on a pair of Vista / XP systems. The target system had several password protected user profiles. I needed to have a keyboard on the target system to do the login, and then Synergy would launch after the user logged in.

I had problems too, but it somehow worked in the end. I think I used synergy+.

Synergy+ is still awfull and hasn't been updated in years. The only benefit? It works well cross platform. I've succesfully had Linux/Mac/Windows sharing keyboard/mouse.

Re: Microsoft Garage releases Mouse Without Borders

#70

Post by StavrosK »

joelhaasnoot wrote: post #69
StavrosK wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had problems too, but it somehow worked in the end. I think I used synergy+.

Synergy+ is still awfull and hasn't been updated in years. The only benefit? It works well cross platform. I've succesfully had Linux/Mac/Windows sharing keyboard/mouse.

I agree, but I need to share my mouse between my Ubuntu and Windows PCs, so that's the only solution I know of.
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