Marc Gregoire’s Blog

It seems that Microsoft Windows 7 is on track to be released in time for the holiday season of 2009. At the TechEd North America 2009 in Los Angeles, Bill Veghte said:

Microsoft is committed to ensuring that IT professionals and developers continue to have the platform and technologies to drive maximum value and business results. Getting the most out of IT investments is even more important in today’s economy.

and

With early RC testing and extensive partner feedback we’ve received, Windows 7 is tracking well for holiday availability.

Read the full press release.

A friend of mine pointed me to EasyBCD to easily make changes to the Windows Vista Bootloader. This is expecially useful if you have installed Windows 7 in a VHD for example. If you want to remove your VHD installation, simply delete the VHD file and then use EasyBCD to remove the Windows 7 boot entry from the Bootloader.

I downloaded the freshly released Windows 7 Release Candidate from MSDN and was thinking on how to test it. First I thought to install it in a virtual machine, however, that means I would not be able to test with Aero enabled. A friend of mine suggested to use a new feature in the Windows 7 bootloader that allows you to boot an operating system installed inside a VHD (Virtual Hard Disk Image). On his blog he explains the steps involved in getting this to work. I followed his steps and everything went without a hitch and Windows 7 was up and running in no time, including Aero 🙂

The benefit of using a VHD is that you don’t need to repartition your drives. The VHD is just 1 big file but when booting from the VHD, everything looks and feels as if the operating system was installed on its own physical drive/partition.

I did encounter one anomaly while using Windows 7 booting from VHD. The Windows Experience Index cannot be computed. When asking Windows 7 RC to compute the WEI score, it gives an error saying that it cannot properly assess hard drive speed, but other than that, everything seems to be working smoothly. 🙂

Over the coming days I will keep testing Windows 7 RC. One thing I stumbled upon today is that Windows 7 RC seems to have built-in support for playing XVID movies. It even shows thumbnails for XVID movies in the Windows Explorer.

The Windows 7 Release Candidate has been made available to MSDN and Technet subscribers. It will be available to the general public on May 5th. This RC will expire on June 1 2010. There is also a dedicated forum for Windows 7 at http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/category/w7itpro

A few days ago, my Windows Vista on my notebook started to have the KSOD (blacK Screen Of Death) syndrome. This syndrome is that after typing your username and password on the login screen, you are presented with a black screen and a mouse, nothing else. When searching on the internet for solutions I found out that quite a few people experienced the same issue with all kinds of different solutions. I tried some suggestions like System Restore, file system check, registry changes etc etc, but nothing was working for me.

When you are presented with a KSOD, you can try to press the left SHIFT button a few times to trigger the sticky keys feature of windows. This will popup a window that contains a link. You can then click this link and from there you are able to launch different applications. Of course, if you disabled sticky keys, you are out of luck…

After wasting almost a whole day on trying everything I could think of, I stumbled upon a blog where they said that it might be related to the eventlog. To test this, I wanted to disable the eventlog. Unfortunately you cannot disable the eventlog from a running Windows because some other services are relying on it. I booted into “safe mode with command prompt”, because normal safe mode would also give me the KSOD. I disabled the eventlog and rebooted the machine and to my surprise everything worked 🙂

The next step was to delete all eventlog files from C:\Windows\System32\Winevt\logs, switch on the eventlog again, reboot and everything was again working 🙂

I’m currently in the process of implementing high DPI support in one of my applications. High DPI support is getting more and more important, especially with the resolution of todays laptop screens. Most people will switch to 120 DPI or even 144 DPI instead of the default 96 DPI to make text easier to read. However, when your application is not High DPI aware, Windows Vista and Windows 7 will in certain situations scale everything for you but this will result in a blurry user interface.

Microsoft has released an interesting document describing the steps involved in developing High DPI aware applications. You can find them at the following links:

• PDF version
• XPS version

Yesterday I got an email that I was re-awarded the Microsoft Visual C++ MVP (Most Valuable Professional) award for 2009 🙂

See my MVP profile.

After installation of Internet Explorer 8, some wizard in Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 might give a script error. The following wizards might be affected:

• Add Function
• Add Variable
• Smart Device – New Project Creation
• Smart Device – Add Class

Get the workaround from the Visual C++ Team Blog.

The intro that was played on the Microsoft 2009 MVP Global Summit is available online. Click the link below to see it 🙂

The Microsoft 2009 MVP Global Summit Intro

On wednesday my holidays are starting 🙂

I’m flying to New York and will stay a few days in New York. After that I’m flying to Seattle to attend the Microsoft Global MVP Summit 2009. After the summit, I’m flying to Miami and will stay around 1 week there. I’m looking forward to my trip 🙂

When the beta of Windows 7 was released, I obviously had to install it to test Wallpaper Cycler on it. Wallpaper Cycler started fine, so that was a good start 🙂 However, when I wanted to cycle the wallpaper on the desktop, it changed the tiling setting on the desktop properly, but the wallpaper itself was not changed, bummer 🙁

Since Windows 7 comes by default with a very basic wallpaper cycler built-in, I thought that Microsoft had maybe changed the programming interface to change the wallpaper. I started to search on the internet for information regarding this, but didn’t find anything. So, I started debugging… Read the rest of this entry »

With the release of the first beta of Windows 7, obviously I had to download it and try it out. I tested it on an older P4 2GHz with only 512MB of memory. I normally run Vista on that machine and 512MB of memory is a little bit on the low side for Vista. When Windows 7 first started I immediately noticed how much smoother and how much more responsive everything feels compared to Vista on the same box. I was really impressed.

In this post I want to explain a new maximizing feature that is currently in the Windows 7 beta. Suppose you start with a Wordpad window in the middle of your screen. On a side note, you can also see that Wordpad finally received a GUI update and now includes a ribbon.

Now, grab the Wordpad window and move it to the far left of your screen. Windows 7 will draw a translucent rectangle with the size of half your screen.

When you now release your mouse button, Windows 7 will maximize the window to half your screen as in the following screenshot.

This feature is a pretty useful one in my opinion, especially on widescreen monitors that are getting more and more common.

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 🙂

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.

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.
In the afternoon I went to a unified communications presentation, explaining the Office Communications Server.

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.

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 »

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”.

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 »