Marc Gregoire’s Blog

Every version of Visual Studio comes with certain versions of Microsoft libraries, like the C runtime library, the MFC library and so on. For example, Visual Studio 2008 comes with version 9.0.21022.8 of the Microsoft C runtime library and version 9.0.21022.8 of the MFC library. Read the rest of this entry »

The Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 CTP (Community Technology Preview) has been released.

Note that this is an early preview look. A number of walkthroughs are included. Features outside these walkthroughs might still not be finished.

C++ is not being forgotten The CTP contains a preview of a new concurrency library for C++ to make it easier to write native parallel code. I definitely will be taking a closer look on that.

Find out more here.

On Saturday 18th of October I went to the Microsoft Community event called CodeCamp in Zagreb (Croatia). It was a one day event with presentations all with coding demos, so not just some slides

The day started with a presentation by Tomislav Bronzin about Exchange server and how to use the Microsoft Unified Communications platform to easily integrate support for contacts, emails, presence information … in your own applications. It looks like an interesting platform. However, using it requires quite a few lines of code.

The second presentation was about using the Windows Mobile 6 SDK to develop applications for mobile devices and was given by Andrej Radinger. Demonstrations included how to use the different emulators that are available. This also includes FakeGPS to fake a real GPS device and a tool (cellular emulator) to simulate sending/receiving of SMS messages, dailing phone numbers, receiving incoming calls, faking busy signals and so on.

Next it was a presentation about SQL Server 2008 by Dean Vitner, explaining and demonstrating things like support for encryption, compression and auditing.

The next presentation was about BizTalk by Josip Šaban, but I skipped that one since I had to leave for half an hour.

After that, Marko Čulo gave us a presentation called “Dirtiest SQL Tips & Tricks” with examples which showed important things to remember like the behavior of nested transactions.

The last presentation was about MS StyleCop by Bernard Katić. MS StyleCop is yet another tool to force coding standards. It will also check your code documentation so that it matches certain standards.

All in all, the presentations were interesting.

The following new features have been implemented in Wallpaper Cycler:

• The folder synchronization feature now will detect new sub folders and will create the appropriate categories for those new folders. System subfolders like the “recycle bin” and “System Volume Information” will be skipped automatically.
• The wallpaper will now automatically be rerendered when resuming from standy or hibernation.
• Nicer selection of items in the image list on the main window on Windows Vista.
• When you click on the My Wallpapers category, the wallpapers are only shown after double clicking a message. This is done to prevent performance issues with large wallpaper lists. An option has been added to disable this behaviour and to show the wallpapers immediately when clicking the My Wallpapers category.
• On a clean installation, the folder synchronization feature will by default skip *.db, *.ini, *.avi and *.lnk files. This behaviour can always be changed by adding/removing extensions in Tools > Program Settings > Global > Folder Synchronization > Skip Extensions
• Option to hide the message that says “Failed to install ChangeNotification on…” when the folder synchronization function could not be installed (for example: remote drives)
• A new Info Panel has been implemented that removes the Information Frame on the right of the main window.
• Every layout object now has an option called “visible” that can be used to hide an object from the desktop.
• You can now also pick a color from the selected wallpaper to use as text color, just as you were able to pick a color for the background.
• Hicolor toolbar and menu bitmaps.
• Two new options “Align Horizontal” and “Align Vertical” for a wallpaper object in a layout. These allow you to change the alignment of the wallpaper in that wallpaper object, so you can for example stretch to height + align to right or other combinations

I also made the following bug fixes for Wallpaper Cycler

• The new 3.6 installer will check if a previous version is installed and will ask to uninstall it. This is needed because quite a few new DLLs are being used and we want to get rid of the old ones.
• After uninstalling the previous version, the new 3.6 installer will automatically remove any oleacc.dl_ and/or dwmapi.dl_ files in the folder of the previous installation. These files were created by a Wallpaper Cycler Windows Vista patch and don’t get uninstalled by the uninstaller.
• The new 3.6 installer will save your registration username and serial number before running the uninstaller and will restore your username and serial number after installing the new version.
• Readme and license txt files are now fixed width, which reads easier on wide screen monitors and which is according to the RFC2822 regarding text documents.
• You could often not use the arrow keys and the spacebar key to check/uncheck items in the list on the right in Program Settings > Global > Miscellaneous.
• On a clean install, the main window will be bigger by default if you have a bigger monitor.
• Enlarged minimum window height due to new Info Panel.
• In new layout wizard, when you click the calendar template button, the Wallpaper Cycler calendar template folder will be opened by default.
• The zlib library has been updated to the latest version.
• When the folder synchronization kicks in in the background, no progressbar is shown anymore.
• F3 (Find Next) would not always work.

The following new features have been implemented in Wallpaper Cycler:

• JPEG files will now automatically be rotated and mirrored according to the orientation stored in the EXIF data.
• You can now enable an option called “Only generate sensible aspect ratios” for the “Automatically assign “Aspect Ratio x:y” tag” feature. This will prevent generation of tags like “Aspect Ratio 123:36″. It will now only generate aspect ratio tags with components <= 16 for example “Aspect Ratio 16:9″, “Aspect Ratio 5:3″.
• When using the “Quick Move” and “Give Tags” hotkey for the current wallpaper on the desktop, the OSD will now show a small preview of the image that will be manipulated.
• You can now choose between recursive/non-recursive selection of a wallpaper in a wallpaper layout object when that object is set to RandomFromSameCategory or RandomFromFixedCategory.
• When using the left/right keys in the fullscreen preview to preview the previous/next wallpaper, this is immediately reflected in the main window so that the feature “Give Tags” hotkey works correctly when browsing images in the fullscreen preview.
• Fullscreen preview: enter will now render the previewed wallpaper to the desktop.
• When closing the layout editor, WPC will now ask to save the changes or discard them. At the moment however, this is asked everytime the layout editor is closed even if nothing has changed in the layout.

I also made the following bug fixes for Wallpaper Cycler:

• When the screensaver was configured to use all available layouts, it would even select layouts in disabled categories. Disabled layout categories are now properly skipped unless you force the screensaver module to use a disabled layout category.
• Drag & drop of multiple wallpapers to a different category wasn’t working.
• When hitting the cancel button in the “select layout template” dialog, the creation of the layout is cancelled and the layout editor is closed.
• “highlight current wallpaper” didn’t work anymore. This also caused problems that WPC would rerender the wrong wallpaper when you hit Rerender wallpaper.
• Sometimes when adding a folder recursively to an existing category it would add all current child categories twice, closing the main window and reopening fixed this issue. This is now fixed, they shouldn’t appear twice anymore.