It seems Microsoft listened to all the complains about the long name for the new Windows phone. The Microsoft Windows Phone twitter page just had the following message:
“Tis the season for Series finales. We’ve got one too – dropping the ‘Series’ and keeping the ‘Windows Phone 7.’ Done.”
Excellent, “Windows Phone 7” sounds much better without the strange “Series” behind it 🙂
I got the confirmation email from Microsoft that my MVP (Most Valuable Professional) award for Visual C++ is extended for 2010 🙂
The Windows Phone Application Platform was revealed at MIX 2010. If you couldn’t make it to Las Vegas to attend MIX, you can find the keynotes and sessions here. They explain in great details the Windows Phone 7 Series and how to develop applications for it.
The WP7S developer platform contains 2 frameworks:
Code is written in C#.
Everyone can start writing applications for the new phone platform. You only need to download 1 free package. This packages contains:
Download the package to get started. Only Windows Vista and Windows 7 are officially supported to run the tools. Note that the tools are currently in CTP state so they are not yet final. If you want to use Expression Blend you have to download it separately.
More information can be found on the Windows Phone 7 Series Developer Site, where you can also find developer guides, more detailed information, Windows Marketplace submission guidelines, forums, a few code samples etc…
Microsoft has a WebBrowser control that is actually an Internet Explorer control that you can use to display HTML in your own applications. More information about this WebBrowser control can be found on MSDN. By using this control it’s very easy to display online or offline webpages. However, it’s not immediately obvious how to make it display HTML that you might have in a memory buffer. Of course, one solution is to write the HTML to a temporary file and then load that file using the WebBrowser control, but obviously there is a better way for doing this which I will explain below.
The first thing you have to do is to add the WebBrowser control to your dialog. So, in Visual Studio, open the resource editor and then open the dialog onto which you want to put the WebBrowser control. Once the dialog is opened in the resource editor, right click on an empty space on the dialog and select “Insert ActiveX Control…”. This will open a new window in which you can select “Microsoft Web Browser” and then click OK. Visual Studio will automatically create a wrapper class for this ActiveX control which will probably be called explorer.h and explorer.cpp while the wrapper class will most likely be called CExplorer.
Now, right click the WebBrowser control on your dialog and select “Add Variable”. Make a variable with category set to “Control” and with the variable type set to the wrapper class “CExplorer” and hit OK.
Now we can start writing code. The first thing required is to load up some basic document; I use about:blank. Do this in your OnInitDialog handler as follows.
COleVariant loc(L"about:blank"); m_explorer.Navigate2(loc, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL);
The above is very important. If you don’t load an initial document, the WebBrowser control will not render any HTML that you try to push to it. This also means that before you can start writing HTML from memory in the WebBrowser control, you have to wait until the initial document has been fully loaded. This can be done with the “DocumentComplete” event. In the dialog editor, right the WebBrowser control and click on “Add Event Handler…”. Select “DocumentComplete” as message type, select the appropriate class and click “Add and Edit”. You can use that handler to change a boolean variable in your code to mark whether the document has been fully loaded. When it is fully loaded you can start writing HTML from memory to it.
Once that is finished, you can add the following helper function:
#include <MsHTML.h>
void CMyDlg::WriteHTML(const wchar_t* html)
{
IDispatch* pHtmlDoc = m_explorer.get_Document();
if (!pHtmlDoc)
return;
CComPtr<IHTMLDocument2> doc2;
doc2.Attach((IHTMLDocument2*)pHtmlDoc);
if (!doc2)
return;
// Creates a new one-dimensional array
SAFEARRAY* psaStrings = SafeArrayCreateVector(VT_VARIANT, 0, 1);
if (!psaStrings)
return;
BSTR bstr = SysAllocString(html);
if (bstr)
{
VARIANT* param;
HRESULT hr = SafeArrayAccessData(psaStrings, (LPVOID*)¶m);
if (SUCCEEDED(hr))
{
param->vt = VT_BSTR;
param->bstrVal = bstr;
hr = SafeArrayUnaccessData(psaStrings);
if (SUCCEEDED(hr))
{
doc2->write(psaStrings);
doc2->close();
}
}
}
// SafeArrayDestroy calls SysFreeString for each BSTR!
if (psaStrings)
SafeArrayDestroy(psaStrings);
}
With the above function, it’s very easy to dynamically create and display HTML from memory. For example:
WriteHTML(L"<html><body><h1>My Header</h1><p>Some text below the header</p></body></html>");
Note that the above code is expecting a Unicode build. If you don’t use Unicode, you need to change the wchar_t types and you need to change the way how you allocate the BSTR variable.
That’s it. Pretty easy if you know how to do it, but it took me some time to figure it out.
[ Update: Fixed some typos and added mshtml.h reference. ]
[ Update 2: Added a call to “doc2->close();” after “doc2->write()” and added code to check the result of the doc2.Attach() call. ]
This is a message to everyone who is running an older version of Windows. There are a few End of Life Support dates coming up, so it’s important to keep that in mind to avoid running unsupported versions of Windows.
Windows 2000 Professional and Windows 2000 Server are approaching 10 years since their launch and both products will go out of support on July 13, 2010.
Windows XP was launched back in 2001. While support for the product will continue, Service Pack 2 will go out of support on July 13, 2010. From that date onwards, Microsoft will no longer support or provide free security updates for Windows XP SP2. Please install the free Service Pack 3 for Windows XP to have the most secure and supported Windows XP platform.
Finally, Windows Vista with no Service Packs installed will end support on April 13 2010. Please install the free Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista to have the most secure and supported Windows Vista platform.
The Release Candidate of Visual Studio 2010 has changed the behaviour of RValue references slightly compared to the implementation in the Visual Studio 2010 beta versions. This is because the C++0x standard commitee has changed the RValue reference feature a bit and Visual Studio 2010 RC has incorporated those standard changes. Unfortunately, this might lead to compiler errors when you try to build code that is following the old standard. Let me give an example. Previously using a beta version of Visual Studio 2010 that was using the old C++0x standard, the following code would compile without any problems.
#include <iostream> using namespace std;// Increment value by 1 using RValue reference parameter. int increment(int&& value) { cout << "value = " << value << endl; value++; return value; }int main() { int a = 10; int b = 20;// Increment a int result = increment(a); cout << " a=" << a << ", b=" << b << ", result=" << result << endl; // Increment b result = increment(b); cout << " a=" << a << ", b=" << b << ", result=" << result << endl; // Increment an expression result = increment(a + b); cout << " a=" << a << ", b=" << b << ", result=" << result << endl; // Increment a literal result = increment(3); cout << " a=" << a << ", b=" << b << ", result=" << result << endl;return 0; }
However, when trying to compile this using the latest release candidate of Visual Studio 2010, you will get the following errors:
rvalue_test.cpp(18): error C2664: 'increment' : cannot convert parameter 1 from 'int' to 'int &&' You cannot bind an lvalue to an rvalue reference rvalue_test.cpp(21): error C2664: 'increment' : cannot convert parameter 1 from 'int' to 'int &&' You cannot bind an lvalue to an rvalue reference
These are related to the lines that are trying to increment a and b. Incrementing an expression or a literal still works as before. To get rid of those errors, you need to convert the lvalue to an rvalue. You can use the std::move function for this as shown in red below.
#include <iostream> using namespace std;// Increment value by 1 using RValue reference parameter. int increment(int&& value) { cout << "value = " << value << endl; value++; return value; }int main() { int a = 10; int b = 20;// Increment a int result = increment(std::move(a)); cout << " a=" << a << ", b=" << b << ", result=" << result << endl; // Increment b result = increment(std::move(b)); cout << " a=" << a << ", b=" << b << ", result=" << result << endl; // Increment an expression result = increment(a + b); cout << " a=" << a << ", b=" << b << ", result=" << result << endl; // Increment a literal result = increment(3); cout << " a=" << a << ", b=" << b << ", result=" << result << endl;return 0; }
This now compiles without any errors and produces the following output:
value = 10 a=11, b=20, result=11 value = 20 a=11, b=21, result=21 value = 32 a=11, b=21, result=33 value = 3 a=11, b=21, result=4
Now, it again works as expected 🙂
Microsoft has released a white paper for Visual Studio 2010 licensing which provides an overview of the complete Visual Studio 2010 product line. The paper also gives a number of example deployment scenarios and the licensing requirements for those.
Client editions in the Visual Studio 2010 product line include:
(Visual Studio 2010 products can be purchased without an MSDN subscription in certain channels.)
Server products in the Visual Studio 2010 product line include:
Volume licensing customers who need a definitive guide to licensing terms and conditions should reference the Microsoft Licensing Product Use Rights (PUR) and applicable licensing agreements. For retail customers, the license terms are specified in the End User Licensing Agreement (EULA) included with the product.
Microsoft has released the Release Candidate version of Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.
See Scott Guthrie blog post about it.
Right now it’s available for MSDN subscribers.
On Wednesday 10th of February everyone will be able to get their hands on it 🙂
Two important things to know (from Scott Guthrie blog post):
Microsoft has just released a beta version of Office 2010.
The following programs are available in this beta version:
Separately available beta programs are:
I’m just back from another small trip to Budapest, just 2 days.
I have uploaded some pictures of the trip. See them here. Enjoy 
2010
Happy New Year
Sretna Nova Godina
Gelukkig Nieuwjaar
🙂
I’m a big fan of Axialis IconWorkshop. A while ago I wrote a small review of it which you can find here.
It seems Axialis is having a special promotion this weekend. From Black Friday until Cyber Monday you get 50% discount on all products. Find out more.
Last week I was in Warsaw (Poland) on a business trip. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much time to go see things because it was already dark after work. However, I did try to take some pictures. You can see them here.
In October 2009 I went to Tokyo with some friends for a week.
Some pictures of the trip can be seen in a new photo album. 🙂
In August 2009 I went to Budapest for a short city trip with some friends.
I have uploaded some pictures to a photo album. See them here. Enjoy 🙂
In June 2009 I went to Prague for a city trip with a few friends. I already posted a few pictures on my blog in this post.
I finally uploaded a few more pictures to a photo album. See them here. Enjoy 🙂
Apparently the pre-order of Windows 7 went extremely well. According to Amazon UK, they sold more Windows 7 pre-orders in the first 8 hours of its release than Vista did during it’s entire pre-order period.
According to Brian McBride, Amazon UK MD:
“The launch of Windows 7 has superseded everyone’s expectations, storming ahead of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows as the biggest grossing pre-order product of all-time at Amazon.co.uk, and demand is still going strong. Over the past three months, only Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol has sold more copies than Windows 7, which is an incredible achievement for a software product.”.
Tomorrow is the official launch date of Windows 7 🙂
Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta 2 are now available. The final version is scheduled for 22nd of March 2010. I’m looking forward to it 🙂
For Visual C++ developers there are lots of new things to look forward to, like parallel programming, MFC ribbon resource editor, easy application local deployment model etc etc…
When you use the .NET Framework you will apparently be able to have deployments with up to 81% reduction in the framework size by using the Client Profile.
According to the press release:
“The company also outlined a simplified product lineup and pricing options for Visual Studio 2010 as well as new benefits for MSDN subscribers, including the Ultimate Offer, available to all active MSDN Premium subscribers at the official product launch on March 22, 2010.”
The product lineup is simplified with the following versions:
Read the full Microsoft press release.
I just came across an interesting blog post.
Apparently, Windows 7 comes with several regional themes which include wallpapers from Canada, Australia, South Africa, and Great Britain. You can easily activate those themes following the procedure in the following blog post.
Access Hidden Regional Themes in Windows 7
Marc Gregoire
marc.gregoire@nuonsoft.com
Software Project Manager
Software Architect
Scrum Master
Microsoft MVP VC++
Founder of the Belgian C++ Users Group (BeCPP).
