Marc Gregoire’s Blog

Yesterday April 1st (not an april fools 😉 ), I got an email from Microsoft saying that I got the Microsoft MVP Visual C++ Award for 2008. MVP stands for Most Valuable Professional.

 See my MVP profile.

On the same topic, I’m also looking forward to the Microsoft Global MVP Summit in Seattle. This is a 4 day gathering of MVPs from all over the world and starts on 14th of April. It will be a great time to get to know some fellow MVPs. 🙂

I was trying to port a screensaver from Visual Studio 2005 to Visual Studio 2008.

After loading the project in VS2008, compilation went without any problems. However, when I tried to test the screensaver on a Windows XP box I got the error message that the function ChangeWindowMessageFilter could not be found in user32.dll. The first thing I did was to open the MSDN and search for this ChangeWindowMessageFilter function. According to the documentation ChangeWindowMessageFilter is only available on Windows Vista. I obviously didn’t use that function myself otherwise I would have known about it in the first place 😉 So I checked the libraries that I was linking to. The most obvious candidate would be the ScrnSave.lib library. I searched for it and it was linking to the version that was installed by Visual Studio 2008 in C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\Lib. To make sure I did a “dumpbin /symbols ScrnSave.Lib” on it and it was indeed using the ChangeWindowMessageFilter function.

It is pretty strange that this ScrnSave.Lib is dependent on a Vista API call. This just annoys developers that try to create a screensaver that still works on Windows XP. It should be pretty easy for the developers of ScrnSave.Lib to dynamically load the user32.dll and see if ChangeWindowMessageFilter is available.

Anyway, the easiest and quickest workaround that I’m using right now is to use the ScrnSave.Lib from the Visual Studio 2005 installation. After recompiling my screensaver with this older library it works again on Windows XP.

A new iteration of the Wallpaper Cycler development has started.

The following new features have been implemented in Wallpaper Cycler:

• When a layout doesn’t contain a wallpaper object with the “Which Wallpaper” property set to “Auto” a warning will be shown. This is done because in that case certain aspects of WPC will not work as expected. Double clicking a wallpaper in the main window for example will actually NOT show that wallpaper on your desktop because that’s the “Auto” wallpaper.
• A new option in Tools > Program Settings > Global > Startup called “Delay load last WCL at startup”. This allows you to specify a delay in seconds before Wallpaper Cycler will reload the last WCL file at startup.
• You can now make a printout of your calendar notes.
• %wallpaperfullname% can be used in text objects on layouts to display the full pathname + extension of a wallpaper and not only the filename part like %wallpapername% does.

I also made the following bug fixes for Wallpaper Cycler:

• When using “Random from fixed category” for a wallpaper object in a layout, WPC will now recursively select a wallpaper from the selected fixed category.
• Some configurations of wallpaper objects in layouts didn’t take disabled tags into account.
• The “Quick Disable” feature now properly checks all wallpapers currently on the desktop to determine if it needs to cycle when disabling a category or tag.
• WPC would crash with truncated BMP files. Most photo editing programs are also unable to load those, however, now WPC loads them without a problem, at least when they are not too damaged.
• The Vista gadget didn’t install on Vista 64 bit in the correct folder.
• You were unable to specify “-1” for the “Days After Current Day” in layouts > Calendar Notes Object > Edit Calendar Notes > General

LINQ (Language Integrated Query) is a recent powerful addition to the .NET framework and allows you to query your data sources in an elegant and simple way. In this post I’ll give a very brief introduction to LINQ and how it makes your code much more readable. Read the rest of this entry »

Microsoft released Windows Vista Service Pack 1 on March 18 in English, French, Spanish, German, and Japanese. You can get it from Windows Update or the Microsoft Download Center. In April, Windows Update will begin to download SP1 automatically but will only install it after explicit agreement of the user. In April, SP1 will also be available in the remaining 31 languages.

On some systems Windows Vista Service Pack 1 might not be available for installation from Windows Update and might not be offered by Automatic Updates. This can have several causes. If this is happening for you, check KB948343.

A list of all changes/fixes in SP1 can be found here.

The Microsoft Visual Studio Ecosystem team has officially launched the new Visual Studio Gallery site at http://visualstudiogallery.com/. This new web site is a resource center for all Visual Studio extensions and includes everything from free VS PowerToys like tools to VSIP products. Any developer can post information and a link for their Visual Studio extensions. The goal for this website is to give developers an easy way to find extensions for Visual Studio. Visual Studio extensions might include products and free applications in the form of macros, add-ins, packages, project templates, or other types of extensions to Visual Studio that are packaged up and ready to use by the developer to improve their development experience.

See also the announcement on the VSX Team Blog.

Last weekend I went to Belgrade (Serbia) with some friends. We went by car and the first thing we noticed when driving in Serbia is that almost all streetnames on the streets are written using the cyrillic alphabet, however, all the streetnames on streetmaps are written using the latin alphabet. So, even when you are standing in front of a plate with a streetname on, it’s sometimes difficult to find that streetname on our streetmap 🙄 … But, we found our hotel after driving around in Belgrade for a while 😉

Someone from Belgrade has shown us around a bit and also told us that we should come back in the summer because it’s much nicer then … obviously 😉

I didn’t take a lot of pictures, basically only from the Belgrade Fortress which is pretty nice. Below is a view of the Danub (Donau) taken from the Belgrade Fortress.

A view of the wall surrounding the fortress:

When entering the fortress, you can see several tanks on display…

Maybe a bit late, but for those who missed the announcement, Microsoft has released a beta of the Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack.

The Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack extends the VC++ Libraries shipped with Visual Studio 2008.New MFC features include:

• Office Ribbon style interface
• Office 2007, Office 2003 and Office XP look and feel
• Modern Visual Studio-style docking toolbars and panes
• Fully customizable toolbars and menus
• A rich set of advanced GUI controls
• Advanced MDI tabs and groups
• And much more!

This feature pack also includes an implementation of TR1. Portions of TR1 are scheduled for adoption in the upcoming C++0x standard as the first major addition to the ISO 2003 standard C++ library. The following feature are currently supported:

• Smart pointers
• Regular expression parsing
• New containers (tuple, array, unordered set, etc)
• Sophisticated random number generators
• Polymorphic function wrappers
• Type traits
• And more!

Note: This feature pack does not include C99 compatibility or support for special math functions.

Download the beta.

Microsoft TechDays are the new Microsoft Developer & IT Pro Days. TechDays 2008 will be held in Ghent (Belgium) on March 12 and 13. March 11 is the official launch of brand new versions of Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008 in Belgium & Luxembourg.

The following speakers will be on the TechDays 2008:

• Scott Schnoll, Microsoft Corporation
• Ward Ralston, Microsoft Corporation
• Tony Krijnen, Microsoft Netherlands
• Dandy Weyn, Microsoft Corporation
• Kurt Roggen, Guidance
• Jan De Clercq, HP
• and more…

If you are interested in this event or want more information, just click the banner below.

My new car, ordered in October, finally arrived 😎 It’s a metallic black Volvo S40 2.0. I already drove it from Belgium to Croatia and it drives very very good. The High Performance audio pack is definitely worth its money, it simply sounds great and with the MP3 support I don’t have to insert new CD’s every hour anymore. 🙂

Here are some pictures of it. Please note that these are not so great, since the car was already a bit dirty and wet. I will take some new pictures when I have cleaned it completely and when it’s sunny, somewhere in the summer probably. 🙂
Read the rest of this entry »

I’m back from my skiing trip to Zell Am Ziller in Austria. The weather was great. Almost always blue sky and sunny on the skiing slopes since we often went above the clouds. Only one day it was foggy but then we got fresh snow that day, so good after all 😉 The highest we went was around 2500 meters. All in all it was great 🙂

I never skied before so I took some lessons with some friends. The following is a picture taken from the skiing slope where we had our skiing lessons.

The following is a picture of me during our training.

After 4 days of lessons we were able to go down some red ski slopes which was pretty good according to our skiing monitor 😎

Just a quick post to say that tomorrow I’m going to Austria for some skiing and will be back somewhere in the week of the 23rd of January 🙂

I wish you all a Happy New Year and a good health for 2008 😀

“Gelukkig Nieuwjaar”

“Sretna Nova Godina”

Cyberlink PowerDVD was one of the first DVD players on the market and is still considered by many to be one of the best. The latest version is version 7 which I’m reviewing today. Installation went smooth on both Windows XP and Windows Vista.

Most people cannot be bothered to spend money on a DVD player because most of them are happy with the DVD player software that they got when they bought their PC. However, once you have used PowerDVD 7 you simply do not want to go back anymore. PowerDVD offers so much more. The deinterlacing quality of PowerDVD is much better than you get with most of those pre-installed DVD players. On top of that, the latest version adds support for high definition formats like MPEG-4 H.264 and WMV-HD and supports a wide range of audio formats like DTS 5.1, Dolby Pro Logic IIx, DTS-ES Discrete and more. Unfortunatly if you want to experience DTS-ES Discrete, DTS Neo:6 or SRS TruSurround XT you will need to buy the advanced audio pack. However, even though version 7 supports the high definition video formats, it does not support playing movies directly from Blu-ray or HD-DVD discs. For this you need PowerDVD 7 Ultra.

The Say-It-Again option allows you to quickly jump back a few seconds in case you missed something. The Read-It-Clearly feature allows you to change the position of subtitles. For notebook users, an interesting feature is the See-It-All feature. This monitors the battery level of your notbook and will automatically speed up the movie to make sure you can see the entire movie before your battery runs out. Any speed increase between 1% and 20% is actually not bothering anything.

The default interface of PowerDVD 7 looks pretty clean and modern as can be seen on the screenshot. In my opinion the new GUI is better than the previous versions.

The price might seem a bit high but you get a very good and complete DVD playback solution supporting the latest in video and audio formats.

I finally found some time to post some pictures of my holiday to Brasil 8) Click a picture to get a larger version. Move your mouse over a picture to get a very brief description-balloon. (Note: all pictures are copyrighted by me, Marc Gregoire. Please contact me if you want to use one.) Read the rest of this entry »

After a long development cycle and 2 beta phases, today I can proudly announce that Wallpaper Cycler 3.5.0.97 has gone gold. 8)

Wallpaper Cycler 3.5.0.97 has a lot of new features and bug-fixes. Some of the major new features include:

• Tag support: assign tags to wallpapers, layouts and/or categories.
• Search Folders to get a different view on your wallpapers.
• Smart Orientation for portrait/landscape monitors.
• Faster thumbnail generation.
• Installation possible without being administrator.
• Wizard to guide you with certain actions.
• Windows Vista Gadget to control Wallpaper Cycler.
• “Quick Disable” hotkeys to quickly disable categories/tags.
• Slideshow Mode.
• Statistics.
• …

Learn more about Wallpaper Cycler 3.5.0.97.

I made the following bug fixes for Wallpaper Cycler in response to the Beta testers:

• The thumbnail file is not kept open all the time anymore, so backup software shouldn’t have problems with it.
• Sometimes the folder synchronization feature kicked in while rebuilding the thumbs database with the thumbnail manager.
• Folder synchronization doesn’t get stuck anymore in a loop when the WCL was saved in one of the folders that was being monitored for changes.

I’m also finalizing the Help File and the new Online Help Site and preparing for a release very soon now… 8)

I made the following bug fixes for Wallpaper Cycler in response to the Beta testers:

• Black dot appearing in corners sometimes when using small corner rounding values for wallpaper objects with a border of a few pixels.

Also, Beta 2 of Wallpaper Cycler 3.5 is finished and is currently being beta tested by a closed group of beta-testers.

The following new features have been implemented in Wallpaper Cycler in response to the Beta testers:

• Updated AGG to 2.4.
• You can now configure the CPU monitoring threshold between 0% and 100%.

I also made the following bug fixes for Wallpaper Cycler in response to the Beta testers:

• A message is shown when cpu monitoring/time synchronization was enabled and is being disabled because you are not an administrator anymore.
• The “Day With Note Cell” configuration in the layout calendar settings now properly inherits the values from the “cells” configuration.
• In the calendar notes editor, when you edit something, close it and save & close the layout editor, the calendar notes object on the desktop is not clickable anymore. Double-clicking doesn’t do anything until the next cycle.
• Time Synchronization requires administrative privileges. Now Wallpaper Cycler will check if it has administrative privileges and if not will automatically disable all time synchronization settings. Works also with Vista UAC. + added extra note in help file to describe this.
• CPU Monitoring requires administrative privileges. Now Wallpaper Cycler will check if it has administrative privileges and if not will automatically disable all CPU Monitoring settings. Works also with Vista UAC. + added extra note in help file to describe this.
• Wallpaper Cycler would lose all its “Skip Extensions” and “Most Recent Used” items during a crash report generation.

The following new features have been implemented in Wallpaper Cycler in response to the Beta testers:

• The help is now available offline AND online. An option called “Use the online web-based help” is added to “Tools > Program Settings > Miscellaneous” that you can use to switch between online and offline help. With this, users can always consult the online help when there are compatibility issues with the offline help file, which some users experienced when running the offline help on Vista.
• New option in the layout editor to vertically and horizontally center 1 object to another object.
• You can now choose whether a “Move To Hotkeys” or a “Give Tags Hotkeys” is executed on the selected wallpapers in the main window of Wallpaper Cycler OR on the current wallpaper on the desktop.
• Cycle once a day and do not exit at windows logon

I also made the following bug fixes for Wallpaper Cycler in response to the Beta testers:

• The “Find Non-Existing Wallpapers” now also properly checks for the existence of URL wallpapers instead of skipping them.
• In the effects editor you could enter values outside the allowed range. For example, for transparency you could type 900.
• In the layout editor, editing things in the Effects dialog gave some unexpected behaviour. Suppose a wallpaper object had a transparency and you clicked the percentage box and set it to e.g. 0 and press enter to confirm. Next, when you clicked this text box again, it didn’t become editable. But despite it not being editable, if you’d enter e.g. 60 and do something else, like clicking the Merge mode box or resizing the column width, the percentage will change to show 60.
• In the righthand properties (e.g. in the layout editor), you couldn’t tab through all properties: you got stuck whenever a value (text, number) can be typed in the property because the value becomes selected when you tabbed to its attribute.
• Help file, page about Layout Editor: Calendar Notes Object contains a few “typos”, %m is displayed as %<linebreak>m. Same for %w and %W when Help window is too small.