Marc Gregoire’s Blog

On Thursday 27th of November I have given my first presentation for a Microsoft event. The presentation was given during a Microsoft Community Osijek (Croatia) event. You can find more information about that community on their site. The presentation was a 45 minute “Introduction to C++”. It gave a brief overview of C++ and about the advantages of C++. It also explained how to decide when to use C++ and how to fuse the C++ and C# worlds. At the end, I gave a demo on how to call a C++ DLL from C#. Comments after the presentation were quite positive

I’m pleased to announce that Beta 2 of NuonSoft Wallpaper Cycler 3.6 is currently in the hands of our beta testers.

The following new features have been implemented in Wallpaper Cycler

• Rendering now happens in a separate thread, not blocking the main GUI thread.
  • The rendering thread will be switched to low priority if the rendering was initiated by a timer.
  • The rendering thread will stay at normal priority when the user forced WPC to cycle the wallpaper.
  • On Windows Vista or later, the rendering thread will use low priority I/O in case the rendering was initiated by a timer.
• The fullscreen preview window now scales the image with the same high quality as when rendered to the desktop. This feature can be disabled to speed up the preview on slower systems. Can be enabled/disabled from the global WPC settings or by pressing Q in the fullscreen preview.
• The uninstaller will no longer remove the license information.
• A new toolbar button to quickly toggle between thumbnail view and details view.
• New option “Cycle once every day and exit at windows logon”.
• The info panel will now allow you to quickly check if a wallpaper is linked to a layout either directly or indirectly through one of its parent categories.
• New option to enable/disable the feature that WPC will automatically select the new wallpaper in the main window when cycling to the next or previous wallpaper.
• You can now rename a layout by slowly double clicking the layout or pressing F2 in the list in the main window of WPC

I made the following bug fixes for Wallpaper Cycler:

• The screensaver will now also either take a random wallpaper or cycle them sequentially depending on the cycling settings of Wallpaper Cycler.
• When you get an error regarding ChangeNotification or NextChangeNotification, it is explained in the messagebox what the result of that error is.
• In layout objects, the “Link Target On Single Click” would not always work properly.
• Handcursor over link target should be visible on Vista.
• When libexif.dll is not available, it doesn’t crash anymore.
• The libexif.dll is now only loaded once instead of loaded/unloaded on every use.
• When WPC is starting up, the tray icon now has gray arrows. Once the WCL has been loaded the arrows will become either red or blue depending on whether WPC is cycling or not.
• The IsHiddenSystemFolder check was only done when importing a new folder. Now it is also done during synchronization of folderlinks.
• Fixed a memory leak when loading JPEG2000 images.
• Some PCX files caused Wallpaper Cycler to crash.
• The HTML renderer for text objects in a layout has been changed. Hopefully this solves issues with rendering certain RSS feeds
• When the main window is opened and thumbnails are being loaded, they will now start loading from where the scrollbar is, instead of starting with thumbnail 1.
• The name of the month and days was wrongly capitalized on for example Croatian settings.
• The gadget was still displaying copyright 2007.
• The Info Panel will now remember whether it should display the full name or the short name.

I had to go to Nairobi in Kenya for a business meeting. It was only for 2 days, but luckily I was free for one day During that day I did a mini safari in the Nairobi National Park. This is a national park just 15 minutes from Nairobi center with wild life. I saw a wild giraffe, lots of zebras, ostrich and some other. There are also wild lions, tigers, elephants … but I didn’t see them this time. Some pictures of the safari: Read the rest of this entry »

The CTP build of Visual C++ 2010 includes a new library to help you write native parallel code. Writing parallel code is getting more and more important with the broad availability of quad-core CPU’s at this time and the many-core CPU’s that will appear in the coming years. I will only be talking about the new concurrency library for native code. Of course, writing parallel code was already possible for a long time. However, you had to create and manage all threads by yourself and this could often be a complex task. Because of this, it requires quite a bit of time to parallelize a simple loop over multiple threads. The new native concurrency library makes this much easier. Read the rest of this entry »