Weekend Vienna (Austria)
Last weekend I went to Vienna together with 2 friends from Belgium. Vienna is really a nice and clean city. Public transportation is pretty good and we used it all the time. Read the rest of this entry »
Weekend Vienna (Austria)Last weekend I went to Vienna together with 2 friends from Belgium. Vienna is really a nice and clean city. Public transportation is pretty good and we used it all the time. Read the rest of this entry » Trip to Berlin 2 (Germany)I’m back from a second business trip to Berlin. The weather was not good. It was cold and raining, but I managed to go see some things anyway. Some picture can be seen below. Read the rest of this entry » Development status…Due to some extended business trips and the fact that I will have my yearly holiday in August (finally Trip to Berlin (Germany)Last week I went to Berlin on a business trip, arrived on Thursday and left on Sunday. I basically only had Saturday to go see the city. So on Saturday I woke up, had breakfast (I was missing some American style breakfast with eggs, bacon …) and prepared to go out. I was expecting it to be a normal, quiet day doing some sightseeing. Nothing could be further from the truth however … Read the rest of this entry » Kulendayz 2008 {Microsoft Community Osijek - Croatia}On 21st of June I went to the Kulendayz 2008 which is the first regional community conference organized by the Microsoft Community Osijek together with Microsoft Croatia with support from INETA and Hupro. Since I’m living in Croatia at the moment and the Kulendayz location was only 30 minutes from my place, it was pretty easy for me to get there. In the morning I went to a scrum presentation and to a session about advanced debugging of ASP.NET applications using windbg. The last presentation I went to was about concurrent/parallel programming in C#. This was one of the most interesting presentations for me (by Bernard Katic). It explained how to optimize code for running on multicore processors, which is becoming more and more important with the release of Quad-Core processors and Octo-Core and even 80-core processors in the pipeline. The session was focussed on the Parallel FX Library and Parallel LINQ. The Parallel FX Library allows you to easily “parallelize” certain parts of your application like for loops. Parallel LINQ allows you to do the same with your LINQ queries. There is an interesting article on MSDN called “Optimize Managed Code For Multi-Core Machines” that expains the Parallel FX Library with clear and simple examples. It was interesting to find out that I was not the only belgian on the conference. Arlindo Alves from Microsoft Belgium was also there giving a presentation on Microsoft Hyper-V. Osijek ZooBelow are some pictures of the zoo in Osijek (Croatia). Read the rest of this entry » Trip to Plitvice (Croatia)I went to the Plitvice National Park in Croatia with some friends. It’s a pretty big park with lots and lots of beautiful waterfalls. You can find more information on their website. At the moment it’s not the high-season, so there were not too many people visiting the park at this time, so we could take some pretty nice pictures of which you can see some below. Read the rest of this entry » Microsoft MVP Letter of RecognitionI just received my generic “to whom it may concern” letter of recognition from Microsoft concerning my MVP 2008 award. I have attached it after the jump. Read the rest of this entry » Wallpaper Cycler 3.6 Beta 1Today I’m pleased to announce that Beta 1 of NuonSoft Wallpaper Cycler 3.6 is currently in the hands of our beta testers. This beta version contains the following changes. Read the rest of this entry » Wallpaper Cycler: Bug Fixes and New FeaturesThe following new features have been implemented in Wallpaper Cycler:
I also made the following bug fixes for Wallpaper Cycler:
Auto Type Determination in C++0xThe C++0x standard defines a feature called auto type determination. It is similar to the var keyword in C#. It allows you to let the compiler figure out the type of a variable. For example:
The compiler will automatically figure out that
With the auto feature this could be rewritten as follows:
which is much easier to type. This auto feature is also useful for variables that store a function pointer or lambda expressions because the compiler will figure out the exact type for us. Lambda expressions will be briefly described in another blog post. Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) ReleasedThe Windows XP Service Pack 3 was released a week ago, however it had a compatibility issue with Microsoft Dynamic RMS. Because of this, the service pack was brought offline again. Now Microsoft has fixed the issue and SP3 is again available for download. The Dynamic RMS issue is solved with a hotfix. The recommended way of installing SP3 is by using Windows Update, which will download only what you need, saving bandwidth. That way it’s typically around 70 MB. If you need to install SP3 on multiple machines, you can download an installation package which is around 316 MB. If you are running Microsoft Dynamic RMS, it is recommended to first install the Dynamic RMS hotfix from here. SP3 can be downloaded from here. SP3 contains more than 1000 hotfixes and patches. Some new features are also included but which according to Microsoft “do not significantly change customers’ experience with the operating system”. Trip to Seattle 2008In my previous blog entry I posted some pictures related to the MVP Summit. The event was 4 days but I stayed a few days longer in Seattle together with my brother. In this post I’ll post some pictures of those days. Read the rest of this entry » Microsoft MVP Global Summit 2008 PicturesI finally found some time to post a few pictures of the Microsoft MVP Global Summit 2008 in Seattle. The summit was great. There were 1753 MVPs from all over the world attending the summit. The sessions given by Microsoft product groups were very interesting. I went to all the Visual C++ sessions and it was great to hear the direction in which they are going with the product. One thing they made perfectly clear is that MFC is not dead Blog back onlineDuring my trip to the Microsoft MVP Global Summit my blog was hacked and I had to take it offline because it was trying to infect users with a virus. It took my quite some time to restore everything Personally I just cannot understand why people hack blogs or any other site for that matter Wallpaper Cycler: Bug Fixes and New FeaturesThe following new features have been implemented in Wallpaper Cycler:
I also made the following bug fixes for Wallpaper Cycler:
Microsoft MVP VC++ 2008 AwardYesterday April 1st (not an april fools On the same topic, I’m also looking forward to the Microsoft Global MVP Summit in Seattle. This is a 4 day gathering of MVPs from all over the world and starts on 14th of April. It will be a great time to get to know some fellow MVPs. Latest ScrnSave.Lib depends on ChangeWindowMessageFilterI was trying to port a screensaver from Visual Studio 2005 to Visual Studio 2008. After loading the project in VS2008, compilation went without any problems. However, when I tried to test the screensaver on a Windows XP box I got the error message that the function ChangeWindowMessageFilter could not be found in user32.dll. The first thing I did was to open the MSDN and search for this ChangeWindowMessageFilter function. According to the documentation ChangeWindowMessageFilter is only available on Windows Vista. I obviously didn’t use that function myself otherwise I would have known about it in the first place It is pretty strange that this ScrnSave.Lib is dependent on a Vista API call. This just annoys developers that try to create a screensaver that still works on Windows XP. It should be pretty easy for the developers of ScrnSave.Lib to dynamically load the user32.dll and see if ChangeWindowMessageFilter is available. Anyway, the easiest and quickest workaround that I’m using right now is to use the ScrnSave.Lib from the Visual Studio 2005 installation. After recompiling my screensaver with this older library it works again on Windows XP. Wallpaper Cycler: Bug Fixes and New FeaturesA new iteration of the Wallpaper Cycler development has started. The following new features have been implemented in Wallpaper Cycler:
I also made the following bug fixes for Wallpaper Cycler:
The .NET Language Integrated Query (LINQ) FrameworkLINQ (Language Integrated Query) is a recent powerful addition to the .NET framework and allows you to query your data sources in an elegant and simple way. In this post I’ll give a very brief introduction to LINQ and how it makes your code much more readable. Read the rest of this entry » |