Marc Gregoire’s Blog

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 »

I 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 »

Today 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 »

The following new features have been implemented in Wallpaper Cycler:

• New functionality added to the image preview window, the window that appears when you press the spacebar when an image is selected in the main window of Wallpaper Cycler:
  • The preview window now allows you to use the left and right keys to move through the images in that category or search folder.
  • A small (optional) help text is displayed in the preview window.
  • Information of the image being previewed can optionally be shown on the preview.
• The tray menu now contains a “Tools > Find Non-Existing Wallpapers…” item.
• When a new update has been downloaded, WPC will now ask you if you want to run it immediately.
• The “Check for updates” feature will now calculate a checksum of the downloaded file to see if it was downloaded correctly.
• Text objects in layouts can now be linked to a wallpaper object in your layout. This allows you to use the %wallpapername% and other commands to display information about the wallpaper being shown in the linked wallpaper object.

I also made the following bug fixes for Wallpaper Cycler:

• The tree on the left of the main window was recreated every time you changed/added/deleted a category resulting in quite anoying visual flickering. This has been fixed now and the tree almost never flickers anymore.
• When running the trial version, when starting a new WCL file and then exiting Wallpaper Cycler, no question was asked whether to save the file or not.
• Increased the contrast a little bit of the Wallpaper Cycler Vista gadget.
• The Wallpaper Cycler Vista gadget didn’t display correctly when Vista was running in high DPI mode.

The 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:

auto something = 123;

The compiler will automatically figure out that something is of type int. The above is a very simple example and in this case the developer can easily figure it out. However, with template types and template meta programming techniques it can become difficult for the developer to figure out what the type exactly is.
Consider the following loop:

for (vector<string>::const_reverse_iterator criter = vec.rbegin(); criter != vec.rend(); ++criter) {...}

With the auto feature this could be rewritten as follows:

for (auto criter = vec.rbegin(); criter != vec.rend(); ++criter) {...}

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.

The 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”.

In 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 »

I 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 They are putting interesting new things in upcoming versions of MFC which allow you to create modern user interfaces for your MFC applications. One such thing is the ribon bar which is part of the MFC Feature Pack for Visual Studio 2008. Below you can see some pictures taken during the summit. Read the rest of this entry »