Marc Gregoire’s Blog

The following new features have been implemented in Wallpaper Cycler:

• The folder synchronization feature now will detect new sub folders and will create the appropriate categories for those new folders. System subfolders like the “recycle bin” and “System Volume Information” will be skipped automatically.
• The wallpaper will now automatically be rerendered when resuming from standy or hibernation.
• Nicer selection of items in the image list on the main window on Windows Vista.
• When you click on the My Wallpapers category, the wallpapers are only shown after double clicking a message. This is done to prevent performance issues with large wallpaper lists. An option has been added to disable this behaviour and to show the wallpapers immediately when clicking the My Wallpapers category.
• On a clean installation, the folder synchronization feature will by default skip *.db, *.ini, *.avi and *.lnk files. This behaviour can always be changed by adding/removing extensions in Tools > Program Settings > Global > Folder Synchronization > Skip Extensions
• Option to hide the message that says “Failed to install ChangeNotification on…” when the folder synchronization function could not be installed (for example: remote drives)
• A new Info Panel has been implemented that removes the Information Frame on the right of the main window.
• Every layout object now has an option called “visible” that can be used to hide an object from the desktop.
• You can now also pick a color from the selected wallpaper to use as text color, just as you were able to pick a color for the background.
• Hicolor toolbar and menu bitmaps.
• Two new options “Align Horizontal” and “Align Vertical” for a wallpaper object in a layout. These allow you to change the alignment of the wallpaper in that wallpaper object, so you can for example stretch to height + align to right or other combinations

I also made the following bug fixes for Wallpaper Cycler

• The new 3.6 installer will check if a previous version is installed and will ask to uninstall it. This is needed because quite a few new DLLs are being used and we want to get rid of the old ones.
• After uninstalling the previous version, the new 3.6 installer will automatically remove any oleacc.dl_ and/or dwmapi.dl_ files in the folder of the previous installation. These files were created by a Wallpaper Cycler Windows Vista patch and don’t get uninstalled by the uninstaller.
• The new 3.6 installer will save your registration username and serial number before running the uninstaller and will restore your username and serial number after installing the new version.
• Readme and license txt files are now fixed width, which reads easier on wide screen monitors and which is according to the RFC2822 regarding text documents.
• You could often not use the arrow keys and the spacebar key to check/uncheck items in the list on the right in Program Settings > Global > Miscellaneous.
• On a clean install, the main window will be bigger by default if you have a bigger monitor.
• Enlarged minimum window height due to new Info Panel.
• In new layout wizard, when you click the calendar template button, the Wallpaper Cycler calendar template folder will be opened by default.
• The zlib library has been updated to the latest version.
• When the folder synchronization kicks in in the background, no progressbar is shown anymore.
• F3 (Find Next) would not always work.

The following new features have been implemented in Wallpaper Cycler:

• JPEG files will now automatically be rotated and mirrored according to the orientation stored in the EXIF data.
• You can now enable an option called “Only generate sensible aspect ratios” for the “Automatically assign “Aspect Ratio x:y” tag” feature. This will prevent generation of tags like “Aspect Ratio 123:36”. It will now only generate aspect ratio tags with components <= 16 for example “Aspect Ratio 16:9”, “Aspect Ratio 5:3”.
• When using the “Quick Move” and “Give Tags” hotkey for the current wallpaper on the desktop, the OSD will now show a small preview of the image that will be manipulated.
• You can now choose between recursive/non-recursive selection of a wallpaper in a wallpaper layout object when that object is set to RandomFromSameCategory or RandomFromFixedCategory.
• When using the left/right keys in the fullscreen preview to preview the previous/next wallpaper, this is immediately reflected in the main window so that the feature “Give Tags” hotkey works correctly when browsing images in the fullscreen preview.
• Fullscreen preview: enter will now render the previewed wallpaper to the desktop.
• When closing the layout editor, WPC will now ask to save the changes or discard them. At the moment however, this is asked everytime the layout editor is closed even if nothing has changed in the layout.

I also made the following bug fixes for Wallpaper Cycler:

• When the screensaver was configured to use all available layouts, it would even select layouts in disabled categories. Disabled layout categories are now properly skipped unless you force the screensaver module to use a disabled layout category.
• Drag & drop of multiple wallpapers to a different category wasn’t working.
• When hitting the cancel button in the “select layout template” dialog, the creation of the layout is cancelled and the layout editor is closed.
• “highlight current wallpaper” didn’t work anymore. This also caused problems that WPC would rerender the wrong wallpaper when you hit Rerender wallpaper.
• Sometimes when adding a folder recursively to an existing category it would add all current child categories twice, closing the main window and reopening fixed this issue. This is now fixed, they shouldn’t appear twice anymore.

NuonSoft has released a patch to fix a stability issue with Wallpaper Cycler 3.5.0.97 on Windows Vista.
The patch is 176 KB.
More information can be found at:
http://www.nuonsoft.com/wallpapercycler/vista_patch.php

If you encounter any problems, don’t hesitate to contact NuonSoft Support

I’m back from my 3 week holiday to West-USA. It was a great holiday. We were traveling in a group of 8 people and it was a perfect group 🙂

The trip started in Los Angeles and continued to San Diego, Grand Canyon, Antilope Canyon, Bryce Canyon, Zion, Las Vegas, Death Valley, Lone Pine, Bishop, Mono Lake, Bodie, Yosemite, San Francisco, Montarra, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara and back to Los Angeles.

(Note: all pictures are copyrighted by me, Marc Gregoire. Please contact me if you want to use one.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Quite a few people are experiencing issues with running Wallpaper Cycler under Vista. I’ve tracked it down to the bar on the right of the main window resembling a Windows XP taskpane. Because of all the reported issues, I decided to get rid of that taskpane completely and replace it by an Info Panel at the bottom of the window. The following image is a concept drawing of what I have in mind.

Hopefully this move will make Wallpaper Cycler stable on Windows Vista.

Last weekend I went to Vienna together with 2 friends from Belgium. Vienna is really a nice and clean city. Public transportation is pretty good and we used it all the time. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m back from a second business trip to Berlin. The weather was not good. It was cold and raining, but I managed to go see some things anyway. Some picture can be seen below. Read the rest of this entry »

Due to some extended business trips and the fact that I will have my yearly holiday in August (finally 😉 ), my development on NuonSoft products has been temporarily suspended until September. In September or October, I hope to finalize the new build of Wallpaper Cycler.

Last week I went to Berlin on a business trip, arrived on Thursday and left on Sunday. I basically only had Saturday to go see the city. So on Saturday I woke up, had breakfast (I was missing some American style breakfast with eggs, bacon …) and prepared to go out. I was expecting it to be a normal, quiet day doing some sightseeing. Nothing could be further from the truth however … Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Below are some pictures of the zoo in Osijek (Croatia). Read the rest of this entry »

I went to the Plitvice National Park in Croatia with some friends. It’s a pretty big park with lots and lots of beautiful waterfalls. You can find more information on their website. At the moment it’s not the high-season, so there were not too many people visiting the park at this time, so we could take some pretty nice pictures of which you can see some below. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

Today I’m pleased to announce that Beta 1 of NuonSoft Wallpaper Cycler 3.6 is currently in the hands of our beta testers.

This beta version contains the following changes. Read the rest of this entry »

The following new features have been implemented in Wallpaper Cycler:

• New functionality added to the image preview window, the window that appears when you press the spacebar when an image is selected in the main window of Wallpaper Cycler:
  • The preview window now allows you to use the left and right keys to move through the images in that category or search folder.
  • A small (optional) help text is displayed in the preview window.
  • Information of the image being previewed can optionally be shown on the preview.
• The tray menu now contains a “Tools > Find Non-Existing Wallpapers…” item.
• When a new update has been downloaded, WPC will now ask you if you want to run it immediately.
• The “Check for updates” feature will now calculate a checksum of the downloaded file to see if it was downloaded correctly.
• Text objects in layouts can now be linked to a wallpaper object in your layout. This allows you to use the %wallpapername% and other commands to display information about the wallpaper being shown in the linked wallpaper object.

I also made the following bug fixes for Wallpaper Cycler:

• The tree on the left of the main window was recreated every time you changed/added/deleted a category resulting in quite anoying visual flickering. This has been fixed now and the tree almost never flickers anymore.
• When running the trial version, when starting a new WCL file and then exiting Wallpaper Cycler, no question was asked whether to save the file or not.
• Increased the contrast a little bit of the Wallpaper Cycler Vista gadget.
• The Wallpaper Cycler Vista gadget didn’t display correctly when Vista was running in high DPI mode.

The C++0x standard defines a feature called auto type determination. It is similar to the var keyword in C#. It allows you to let the compiler figure out the type of a variable. For example:

auto something = 123;

The compiler will automatically figure out that something is of type int. The above is a very simple example and in this case the developer can easily figure it out. However, with template types and template meta programming techniques it can become difficult for the developer to figure out what the type exactly is.
Consider the following loop:

for (vector<string>::const_reverse_iterator criter = vec.rbegin(); criter != vec.rend(); ++criter) {...}

With the auto feature this could be rewritten as follows:

for (auto criter = vec.rbegin(); criter != vec.rend(); ++criter) {...}

which is much easier to type.

This auto feature is also useful for variables that store a function pointer or lambda expressions because the compiler will figure out the exact type for us. Lambda expressions will be briefly described in another blog post.

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”.

In my previous blog entry I posted some pictures related to the MVP Summit. The event was 4 days but I stayed a few days longer in Seattle together with my brother. In this post I’ll post some pictures of those days. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

During my trip to the Microsoft MVP Global Summit my blog was hacked and I had to take it offline because it was trying to infect users with a virus. It took my quite some time to restore everything 🙁

Personally I just cannot understand why people hack blogs or any other site for that matter 😡 Anyway, everything should be working again now…