Marc Gregoire’s Blog

Now that my book is finished, I finally have some time again to work on my development projects, and I re-started development on Wallpaper Cycler.
There are a couple of major issues that I have identified with the current released version of Wallpaper Cycler. Because of those issues, my first idea was to start designing a new version of Wallpaper Cycler from scratch. After thinking a bit about that, I changed my mind. It will be too much work. Instead, I will rewrite parts of the current version of Wallpaper Cycler from scratch to make it more robust.
Right now, I can think of the following major issues. Each item contains a solution that I’m thinking of implementing to fix the issue.

• The image loading code is not as robust as I would like it to be. It’s error prone, and crashes on certain files. To resolve this issue, I will throw away all current image loading code and rewrite it all. The result should be more robust, more resilient to corrupt image files, and more flexible. It will also support new image formats, but I don’t know yet exactly which formats. If you have image files that cause Wallpaper Cycler to crash, you can always send them to me.
• The current WCL file format often gives problems. These problems are especially noticable with big wallpaper lists (> 10.000 wallpapers). Because of the issues with the file format, Wallpaper Cycler sometimes corrupts the WCL. To resolve this issue, I will throw away all WCL saving and loading code and replace it with a completely new file format. Just as with the image loading rewrite, the result will be more robust, more flexible, and hopefully more performant.
• Too complex/confusing UI. Wallpaper Cycler has a lot of features. Unfortunately, the result is that the user interface is not always easy to use. Some people simply get lost in the user interface. To start resolving this issue, I’m thinking of replacing the toolbars with a modern, context-sensitive, ribbon bar. I’m also thinking of including an option to choose between a Basic UI and an Advanced UI. In the Basic UI, certain less used option are not shown or burried deeper away, as to prevent them from cluttering up the UI.
• The layout editor is often cause of frustration. The current layout editor has a number of usability issues. I don’t have any concrete solutions yet, but I need to find some solutions to try to make it much more user friendly, at least for basic layouts.

In my previous blog post I mentioned I would post some pictures taken during assembling my new PC. Here they are, hit the jump to see them. 🙂 Read the rest of this entry »

A couple of weeks ago I finally bought a new PC, and I love it 🙂
It’s a nice:

• Intel i7-2600k
• 16 GB Corsair Vengeance memory
• Intel 510 SSD (120GB)
• 2 x 2TB WD RE4 drives in mirroring RAID
• be quiet Dark Power Pro PSU (really quiet PSU)
• Antec Solo (a rather silent case, including some sound damping materials)
• triple monitors

I must say, it’s very very fast, especially thanks to the SSD. The 16GB RAM come in handy for running virtual machines 😀
Once you’ve worked on a system with an SSD as system drive, you simply don’t want to go back to using mechanical drives as system drive…

By now, virtually everyone on this planet heart about the Windows 8 Developer Preview that was launched a couple of days ago on the Microsoft BUILD conference.
Everyone can download this developer preview. This will give you the opportunity to play and experiment with the new Metro layout for Windows.

The developer preview also includes a preview of Microsoft Visual Studio 11 express edition, which makes it very easy to make Metro style applications in C++, C#, VB.Net, or JavaScript.

Any serious developer should download this preview and learn as much as possible about the new Windows platform.

Go to the BUILD website to download the preview and to download interesting video recordings of the sessions on the BUILD conference.

I just finished everything for my book “Professional C++, Second Edition” by Wiley/Wrox 🙂
I think it will go on sale maybe around October, I don’t know the exact date yet.
After a bit more than a year of work, it’s finished 😀
It was really a huge amount of work, but it was definitely worth it, and a very interesting experience.

Here is the official link.

Yesterday, I wrote a post about the fact that C++0x was unanimously approved.
Today, we got confirmation from Geneva that they will officially publish the new C++ standard in a matter of weeks with the name “ISO/IEC 14882:2011(E) Programming Languages — C++, Third Edition“, which means we can start calling it C++11

See also Herb Sutter’s update on his blog.

Now I can finalize the last pieces for my “Professional C++, Second Edition” book (Wiley/Wrox).

This is a great day for the C++ world! 🙂

The new C++ standard has been unanimously approved and is now an international standard.
It can still take a few months before it’s officially published, so the question still remains whether it will be called C++11 or C++12. I for sure hope it will be C++11 🙂
Here is Herb Sutter’s blog post about it.

Just a small post to let you all know about the All In One Code Framework from Mircosoft. Description from Microsoft:

The Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework is a free, centralized code sample library driven by developers’ needs. The goal of the All-In-One Code Framework is to provide typical code samples for all Microsoft development technologies, and reduce developers’ efforts in solving typical programming tasks.

Our team listens to developers’ pains in the MSDN forums, social media and various developer communities. We write code samples based on developers’ frequently asked programming tasks, and allow developers to download them with a short code sample publishing cycle. Additionally, our team offers a free code sample request service. This service is a proactive way for our developer community to obtain code samples for certain programming tasks directly from Microsoft.

For more information on the Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework, visit our YouTube channel or download at http://1code.codeplex.com/.

I got the confirmation email from Microsoft that my MVP (Most Valuable Professional) award for Visual C++ is extended for 2011 🙂

See my MVP profile.

Get your copy here.
You can also browse the above site to learn all the new features of IE9, especially its focus on speed and standard compliancy 🙂

Microsoft has released Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1.
MSDN subscribers can download it right now.
It will be publicly available on 10th of March.
See Soma Segar’s blog for details on what is included/changed with SP1.

Microsoft has released the release candidate of Internet Explorer 9.
Get it here.

Stephan T. Lavavej (aka STL 🙂 ) from Microsoft has created a series of Channel 9 video presentations discussing several aspects of the STL. They serve as a very good introduction to using the Standard Template Library.

• Part 1: sequence containers
• Part 2: associative containers
• Part 3: smart pointers
• Part 4: Nurikabe solver
• Part 5: Nurikabe solver, continued
• Part 6: algorithms and functors
• Part 7: algorithms and functors, continued
• Part 8: regular expressions
• Part 9: rvalue references
• Part 10: type traits

I found them very interesting 🙂

Windows Vista and later versions of Windows have a so called Kernel Transaction Manager (KTM). This makes it easy for application to use transactions. There are two big components built on top of the KTM: Transactional NTFS (TxF) and Transactional Registry (TxR). With TxF you can combine several file system operations into a transaction and either commit or rollback the transaction as a whole. TxR allows you to do the same thing with registry manipulations. File system transactions and registry transactions can be grouped into a single transaction. That way we can ensure that all file system modifications and all registry modifications are fully executed or none at all.

I wrote an article that gives a very brief overview of TxF and TxR to give you an idea of what you can accomplish with it. Creating your own transaction manager other than TxF or TxR is also possible but requires you to create a Win32 transaction aware service (= resource manager) which is outside the scope of this introductory article. You can read the full article on codeguru.com.

On the VC++ MVP mailing list an interesting discussion took place on using exceptions in C++. Now, Diego Dagum, the VC++ Community PM, has written an interesting blog post summarizing that discussion. It’s definitely an interesting read if you work with C++.
Read it here.

Gelukkig Nieuwjaar

Happy New Year

Sretna Nova Godina

Bonne Année

Introduction

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 includes a number of enhancements and new features for MFC developers. One of those changes is an animation API to make it easy for you to create animations in MFC applications. This article will briefly introduce this animation API.
This articles was also posted on Codeguru.com.
Read the rest of this entry »

Microsoft has released Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta. It’s available right now for MSDN subscribers and will be available to everyone on Thursday.

It includes a new help viewer that I mentioned in my previous blog entry and “Win7-specific MFC APIs to support use of Direct2D, DirectWrite, and Windows Animation Technologies”. I can’t wait to try those out 🙂

Get more details here.

Microsoft is planning to include a new help viewer with Visual Studio 2010 SP1, which is long overdue 🙂

You can see a presentation here.

Here is a list of free eBooks related to Microsoft technologies.

• Moving to Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 (10 chapters by Patrice Pelland, Pascal Paré, and Ken Haines)
• Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 (10 chapters by Ross Mistry and Stacia Misner)
• Petzold’s Programming Windows Phone 7 (1000 pages by Charles Petzold)
• Own Your Future: Update Your Skills with Resources and Career Ideas from Microsoft (8 chapters by Katherine Murray)
• Understanding Microsoft Virtualization Solutions (Second Edition) (6 chapters by Mitch Tulloch)
• First Look Microsoft Office 2010 (14 chapters by Katherine Murray)
• Windows 7 troubleshooting tips (short eBook by Mitch Tulloch)
• Introducing Windows Server 2008 R2 (9 chapters by Charlie Russel and Craig Zacker)
• Deploying Windows 7, Essential Guidance (10 chapters from the Windows 7 Resource Kit and 6 TechNet articles)

Enjoy 🙂