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 🙂
Wallpaper Cycler 3.6 Release Candidate 1 has been released to our testers. When no show stoppers are discovered during testing, this will become the final build for 3.6. 🙂
The following new features have been implemented in Wallpaper Cycler:
I made the following bug fixes for Wallpaper Cycler:
A bit late, I know, but you can find some pictures of our (my brother and me) trip to Seattle in 2008 at the following link.
Pictures Seattle 2008
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:
Yesterday I got an email that I was re-awarded the Microsoft Visual C++ MVP (Most Valuable Professional) award for 2009 🙂
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:
Get the workaround from the Visual C++ Team Blog.
At the beginning of March I went with my brother to Miami on holiday for one week. When leaving the plane, obviously we immediately liked the weather, since we were both flying in from a place where it was still around 0°C 🙂
We were staying in the Holiday Inn Miami Beach-Oceanfront. The hotel was fine and breakfast was good. Only problem we had was that the hotel is located in Mid Beach and it is quite a distance to go to South Beach. We misinterpreted some maps when booking the hotel and thought that we could easily walk down to South Beach. It was a bit too far, so we took a 7 day visitors pass that allowed us to take the bus as many time as we wanted. However, the location was not all bad though, as it was next door to the Gotham Steak restaurant which we might otherwise never have known 😉
Below are quite a few pictures from our trip 🙂
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
Beginning of March I went to New York for a few days with some friends. We were very lucky with the weather. It was cold though, only 0°C or 32°F but we had no rain and it was blue sky almost all the time 🙂 Since it was low season for New York at this time there were not too many tourists. This was very noticable on a few places where we saw long ‘snake-lines’ for tourists to wait in line, but when we went there we almost never had to wait in any ‘snake-line’ 🙂
Below are some pictures of my trip to New York.
(Note: all pictures are copyrighted by me, Marc Gregoire. Please contact me if you want to use one.)
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I’m back from my holidays to New York, Seattle and Miami. When I find the time I will be writing some other posts with pictures.
This post however is about a nice restaurant we discovered in Miami. It is called “Gotham Steak” and is located in the Fontainebleau Miami Beach Resort. The first thing that you will notice when you enter the restaurant is the 2 story glass room full of wine bottles (see picture below). Apparently there are over 17.000 bottles and over 500 different kinds of wine in this marvelous “wine cellar”.
While browsing the menu, my eye fell on the foie gras starter. I love foie gras, so I ordered it. It was no mistake. The foie gras was delicious and melts in your mouth.
As main dish, we took the Wagyu Steak. At around $70 per portion, it’s not cheap, but after just one bite, we knew it was worth the money. The steak is so tender and tasteful. I would definitely take it again.
After dinner we went to the bar and saw a very nice collection of whiskeys. I tried the Glenmorangie Signet (see picture below) and this is one of the best whiskeys I ever tried, though at $45 per glass, it’s not the cheapest one.
We enjoyed our dinner at the Gotham Steak so much that we went again a few days later 🙂
Below are a few pictures taken at the Gotham Steak restaurant.
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 🙂
A console application should always be designed to do whatever it is supposed to do and then exit without asking the user to press any key. The reason for this is that console applications are often used within scripts to automate several tasks. Obviously, you don’t want one console application launched by the script to wait until the user presses any key because that would be against the whole purpose of writing that script in the first place. However, sometimes it might be useful to pause the console application right before exiting. I wrote a small article that explains a way to add this support to your application elegantly without breaking support for scripting.
The article also shows how to detect that a new console was spawned on Windows. When you have a console application on Windows and you launch it by double-clicking its icon in Windows Explorer, a new console will be created but will disappear at the end of the execution and you probably won’t be able to read anything from the console. However, when you run your console application by typing the command in an existing console, your application will write all its output to that console and, when finished, you will be returned to the console prompt without the console being closed. There is a trick that can be used on Windows to automatically detect whether a new console window was opened or if your application was started from inside an existing console. The trick is to find out the cursor position in your console at the very beginning of your program. If the cursor position is (0,0), it is highly likely that a new console window was spawned. The article contains some source code to demonstrate this trick.
Windows Vista comes with a built-in buffered animation API. This API makes it easy to make animations without flickering(*). I wrote a new article on CodeGuru that explains how to use this Buffered Animation API with C++.
The article comes with an example application to illustrate the Windows Vista buffered animation technique. The example will draw a new colored random rectangle in the window each time you press the spacebar. The new rectangle will smoothly fade onto the window. The buffered animation is used for this fading effect.
(*) Note: While writing the article, I found an issue with the DWM in Windows Vista. After discussing with someone from Microsoft, it seems the buffered animation API is relying on some buffering from the DWM; however, on Windows Vista this is causing some flickering. They also told me that the buffered animation was not designed for big or full-screen animations but rather for small animations like fading buttons. To reduce the flickering as much as possible, only use the buffered animation on small rectangles and use a short animation interval, for example 500 milliseconds, which is more than enough for GUI related animations anyway.
The good news is that I tested the application on Windows 7 Beta and it works without any flickering. So, it seems that the DWM issue has been fixed on Windows 7.
The solution to fixing flickering issues when drawing graphics is to use double buffering. Double buffering basically means that an off-screen buffer is created. Everything is rendered to this off-screen buffer and, when drawing is completed, this off-screen buffer is copied to the screen. The end result is that you do not see any flickering and you do not see the drawing being created part by part. A little unknown fact is that Windows Vista has built-in support for double buffering, so managing off-screen buffers, copying data, and so forth are all managed by Windows for you. I wrote an article including an example on how to use this built-in support for double buffering with C++. This article has been published on CodeGuru.
The following new features have been implemented in Wallpaper Cycler:
I made the following bug fixes for Wallpaper Cycler:
Marc Gregoire
marc.gregoire@nuonsoft.com
Software Project Manager
Software Architect
Scrum Master
Microsoft MVP VC++
Founder of the Belgian C++ Users Group (BeCPP).
