Blue Onion Software

Desk Drive 1.4.7 Released

mike@blueonionsoftware.com — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 23:37:20 GMT

Desk Drive 1.4.7 includes two new features:

Simplified Chinese translation
Bring settings window to foreground

The Chinese translation looks cool.

Anyone up for doing traditional Chinese? It's easy. Just edit the DeskDrive.exe.xml file in the distribution. Change the "Default" tags to render in your language of choice. Run the program and see your new translation. Send me the file and I'll add the new translation to the distribution. Don't forget to tell me which language it is since I'll likely not recognize it.

Currently, Desk Drive is translated into the following languages:

German
Italian
Finnish
Japanese
Simplified Chinese
Slovenian

The "Settings" dialog pictured above also had a habit of hiding behind other windows which made it difficult to find. It now comes to the foreground when activated. It also displays in the task bar while visible.

NASCAR

mike@blueonionsoftware.com — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 14:04:52 GMT

My 9 year old son is nuts about NASCAR. Who knows where he gets it from. I certainly have (make that had) no interest in it. Still, it's what he likes so I do my "Dad-ly" duty and indulge his interest. Actually, as sports interests go, this one is OK by me. Racing is technical, requires skill and determination and most of the drivers are good role models. As a parent, I can't really find fault.

Fortunately for us, we live about 25 miles from one of the best racing facilities in the world -- Michigan International Speedway. MIS is a two mile oval with wide turns and fearsome straightaways. At 180 MPH, these bad boys are lapping the track every 41 seconds. I imagine it's quite a rush to fly around that oval at those speeds.

So this year as a gift for my son's birthday, we went to a NASCAR race. The CarFax 250 is a Saturday race leading up to the big Sunday event. Many of the big names don't race in it. Still, there were plenty of recognizable names in the field including, Tony Stewart, Carl Edwards and Mark Martin. Mark Martin is of particular interest to us since he hails from Batesville, AK, where we visit friends from time to time. Martin has a nice little car museum in his car dealership there that is worth the visit.

MIS is a huge place. You park literally miles from the track and take shuttles to the grandstands. Unlike many places I've been, MIS handles large crowds of people well. Everything is spread out so there's lots of room to walk around. There are very few pinch points. When you arrive, you are greeted with a huge array of vendors. It easily takes a couple of hours to walk around and take it all in. There are the usual car shows, sponsor booths and pretty women to ogle over.

The race itself was a bit of a let down by comparison. There were yellow flags in the first and last lap of the race. In fact, the race was actually won in the pits. With 10 laps to go a caution came out. The leaders all pitted at the same time. We could see the entire pit row where we were seated. The seconds mattered here. Stewart, who was 10 seconds up until the caution, pitted along with Edwards and Martin. By the time they came out, Stewart was 4th, Martin 3rd and Edwards 1st. The difference in pit times could not have been more than 2 seconds. Bummer, because Stewart was running the better race. It looked to be an exciting finish in the last lap when a caution came out in turn 2. Finishing under yellow takes the thrill out of the finish.

Not being a sports fan, I never understood the fascination some people have with identifying with their favorite sports hero. To my surprise, when the race ended, very few people left the stands. Instead, they stayed to watch the driver (Edwards) do a victory lap and customary burnout/spinout. People were actually jumping, shouting and celebrating with all the gusto they could muster. I imagine part of the fun of sports is living vicariously through others. It seemed to me that the victory meant almost as much to the fans as it did to the driver. I just don't have the "sports gene", which I suspect is my loss given the enthusiasm that was going on all around me.

Video: NASCAR - CarFax 250 - Michigan International Speedway

As sporting events go, it was a good day. Great weather, decent entertainment, a surprisingly polite and enthusiastic crowd, and some quality time with my boy. I could get use to this NASCAR thing

Friday Links #12

mike@blueonionsoftware.com — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 18:26:03 GMT

7 Beautiful Themes (Visual Styles) to Customize Windows Vista - Cools Vista themes for, get this, Vista. Who knew?

What's New in .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 - WindowsClient.net - Nice summary of new .NET 3.5 service pack features.

The Most Powerful Computer on Earth - IBM has broken its own record of computer processing speed by pushing its newest supercomputer past the petaflop barrier.

Sumatra PDF viewer by Krzysztof Kowalczyk - Sumatra has a minimalistic design. Simplicity has a higher priority than a lot of features. It's small and starts up very fast. I love it.

Twingly: Revised Blog Search + Awesome Screensaver - Spam free blog search engine. Screen saver is interesting.

Make Your Desktop Icons Smaller or Larger with the Mouse Wheel - Works on Vista but not XP.

Warplanes: The Rise Of The Droids - Air Force's first ever unmanned combat fighter wing.

Brad Abrams : Some Results from Visual Studio and .NET Framework Developer Documentation Survey - t seems that the the majority of developers in our community are using the latest (3.5) version of the .NET Framework.

Sara Ford's WebLog : Did you know… How to optimize your code for a build? - Interesting gotcha about code optimization settings.

Free Visual Studio File Explorer Add-in - VS 2008 add-in that provides a Windows Explorer style file system view.

Extra-Wide Contacts = Anime Look - Real-life Anime look. Creepy if you ask me...

Cool Tool: Ty-Rap Zip Ties - Super high-quality zip ties from the inventor himself.

Shoes, a Tiny Toolkit - Window toolkit for Ruby.

Set Browser Specific ASP.NET Server Control Properties and Taking an ASP.NET Site Offline - Neat feature for changing server control properties based on the target browser. Who knew?

Brad Abrams : .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 Allows managed code to be launched from a network share! - Finally!

Physicists Spooked By Faster Than Light Data Transfer - Can FTL drives be far behind? (probably)

BBC NEWS | Technology | 'Slow' light to speed up the net - A huge increase in the speed of the Internet could be produced by slowing parts of it down, say researchers.

Windows Live Writer Tip: Insert Pictures in your Blog via Zemanta - Live Writer plug-in helps you find content related to your post.

Use FTP Online Without a Installing A Client - Review of Web based FTP clients.

Newest Video Phones are Free - The latest video phones from ACN are simply awesome. And they're Free for a limited time. Access through our rep site at http//:mikejean.acnrep.com. This changes everything!

Desk Drive 1.4.5 Released

mike@blueonionsoftware.com — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 13:31:00 GMT

Desk Drive 1.4.5 includes two new languages, Japanese and Finnish. Keep those translations coming.

The installer now adds the correct icon to the start menu application shortcut. This was a simple fix but understanding the problem was more perplexing.

Some of you reported that the "icon was wrong". I kept thinking it was the icon that Desk Drive generates for the shortcuts that appear on the desktop. Finally, someone actually said it was the icon in the start menu (or maybe the application icon, I forget) and the light bulb went on. Sorry for being so dense but there's also an important lesson here. You can't put too much information in a bug report. Details matter!

Keep the comments and suggestions coming!

Deskview - Changes your desktop icons from large to small

mike@blueonionsoftware.com — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 13:08:14 GMT

When it comes to computer desktops, most people fall into two categories. Those who keep their desktops virtually clear of any icons, and those who throw icons on it like a toxic waste dump. I fall into the later category.

Deskview changes the desktop view to the equivalent of Windows explorer's list view. As a result, the icon density increases significantly allowing you to more stuff on your desktop. Here's a couple of before and after pictures from both XP and Vista.

(original source: http://jimcofer.com/personal/?p=208)

As Jim Cofer's article states:

I am not the author of deskview.exe, nor do I know how to contact the author of the software. I have no idea if this software is licensed, and if so, what terms are provided in said license. If you are the author of deskview and want me to remove it, or credit you with its authorship, please don’t hesitate to contact me!

Deskview is the perfect compliment (IMHO) to Desk Drive, my automatic media/drive shortcut for your desktop program. I'm hosting the download here as a mirror to Jim's site because it dovetails so well with Desk Drive. Deskview can be found on the Downloads page.

Launch product after setup finishes in MSI installers

mike@blueonionsoftware.com — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 15:26:17 GMT

Visual Studio 2008 includes a setup project that can build MSI installers for your products. The authoring interface is a bit clunky but it incorporates most of the features one would want in a robust installer. Furthermore, since it is a Windows MSI Installer, it provides enterprise level options like feature selection and rollback. All in all, its a powerful and useful package.

Many installers offer to launch the product after the installer finishes. I've always found this feature handy. MSI installers natively support this "Launch product after install finishes" feature. Unfortunately, the Visual Studio IDE UI does not expose this customization.

But not all is lost. With a bit of JavaScript and a custom build command, you can access the Windows Installer object model and perform this customization. Aaron Stebner's WebLog provides an excellent tutorial and script to enable the "Launch product after setup finishes" feature.

I added Aaron's script and custom build step to Desk Drive's installer. As you can see from the image below, it works quite nicely.

Don't forget to keep those translations coming for Desk Drive. I have English, German, Slovakian, Japanese and Finnish.

Desk Drive 1.4.4 Released

mike@blueonionsoftware.com — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 14:25:02 GMT

I was still receiving reports of Desk Drive crashing when "Minimize all windows" was active. I talked about this problem in an earlier post titled "Using C# to Interact with the Shell Gotcha". Well, I was wrong. If you develop on a system with a later version of the shell interface, it will bind to that version when using the VS 2008 interop code generator. Said another way, you can't just add a reference to the Shell and let VS do the COM interop.

Recall that the reason for the crash is that Windows XP only supports up to IShellDispatch4. Vista added a newer IShellDispatch5 interface to support the 3D Flip task switching feature. When you build under Vista and use Visual Studio's COM interop code generator, it always binds to IShellDispatch5. Even if you cast to IShellDispatch4 as suggested earlier, the generated code first binds to IShellDispatch5 and then to IShellDispatch4. Well, XP does not support IShellDispatch5 which is the cause of the crash when running on XP.

This is like a total bummer. All I really need is a way to tell the code generator which interface to bind too. Unfortunately, that behavior is not supported by the tools. There are two ways to work around the issue. Build on XP (yuck!) or write your own COM Interop. I opted for the later.

There's an excellent article on Code Guru about Writing your own COM Interop in C# that provides most of the code you'll need. It's really not all that different from using COM objects in C++ and in some ways easier. However, the interface itself (IShellDispatch in this case) is not defined anywhere in C#. Defining one by hand is tedious and error prone.

To get an interface definition in C# for IShellDispatch, I fired up Reflector and loaded the Interop.Shell32.dll assembly that Visual Studio generated earlier.

(Click to enlarge)

As you can see, Reflector disassembles the interface into C#. A simple copy and paste and you're there.

By doing my own COM interop, I can now control what interfaces I use from the shell, independent of what platform I'm developing on. By referencing IShellDispatch only, I avoid the casting error that generated the original crash. The work was a little tedious but Desk Drive users are worth the effort :).

Another advantage to doing your own COM Interop is that there is no longer an interop assembley (Interop.Shell32.dll) to deal with and deploy. Fewer assemblies means faster load times and fewer things to screw up.

So, finally, hopefully, I've put to bed the issue of Shell interop in Desk Drive. You can download the source code to Desk Drive to see the specifics of the solution.

Maintaining User Settings when Upgrading

mike@blueonionsoftware.com — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 13:16:01 GMT

A Desk Drive user sent me a bug report complaining that his settings were not maintained when he upgraded from one version to the next. After checking into it I discovered he was right. The Settings class in .Net maintains settings in a user.config style that is stored in a folder that corresponds to the program version.

Being a dutiful programmer, I always bump the assembly version when new fixes or features are released. As a result, the user settings from the previous version are "lost" in the sense that the program no longer accesses them due to the change in the settings folder name. This rather annoyed me at first. After all, what good is a settings class if it doesn't migrate settings from version to version?

I suspect there are good reasons why settings are not migrated automatically by the framework (side by side execution for instance?). Still, it's darn annoying for users.

But like so many things in .Net, if you look a little harder, there is almost always a solution when the problem is commonplace. In this case, the Settings class has a method called Upgrade(). Using it requires adding some additional code at program startup.

static void UpgradeSettings()
{
    var assembly = System.Reflection.Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly();
    var version = assembly.GetName().Version;

    if (version.ToString() != Properties.Settings.Default.ApplicationVersion)
    {
        Properties.Settings.Default.Upgrade();
        Properties.Settings.Default.ApplicationVersion = version.ToString();
        Properties.Settings.Default.Save();
    }
}

The trick here is to store an application version string in the settings (default value = 0) and compare it to the executing assemblies' version string. If they don't match, call Settings.Upgrade(). Don't forget to save the new version string.

Desk Drive 1.4.3 Released

mike@blueonionsoftware.com — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 12:49:31 GMT

Some minor updates and fixes.

Run after installation - The installer has an option to run the program after installation. I've always appreciated this option in other programs but until recently, I couldn't find a way to do this in a Visual Studio generated installer. I'll blog more about this particular technique in a future article.
Migrate settings - Again a minor annoyance. The settings class in the .Net framework does not automatically migrate settings from one version of the program to the next. There's a technique to do this I'll discuss in a future article.
Translations - German translation has been updated (Thanks Thomas!). Added Slovakian (Thanks Vito!). Currently, Desk Drive supports German, Italian and Slovakian. Come on folks, it's only twenty strings and a simple text file (look at DeskDrive.exe.xml in the distribution). I would really like to have Asian languages supported (Chinese and Japanese especially).
Changed "Show locus effect" to "Show positional effect" (Thanks again to Thomas for the more descriptive phrasing).

Do not hesitate to send comments and suggestions. I read them all and try to incorporate the ones that seem to matter most. For instance, the idea to exclude specific drives came from a user (Thanks Jeff!). I'll put up a survey later to discuss the most interesting ideas.

Friday Links #11

mike@blueonionsoftware.com — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 13:55:40 GMT

News I found interesting this week.

TextFixer: Text to Capitals, Remove Line Breaks & Whitespaces etc. - TextFixer gives you a bunch of useful web tools to work with text and html code. If you ever need to run some basic operations on text i.e convert text to capitals, remove or convert line breaks to p tags or br tags, remove line tabs and whitespaces, make all letters lowercase, sort text list in alphabetical order etc. then TextFixer is the Web site you need.

Toyota tinkers with baby Segways - Winglet “a personal transport assistance robot ridden in a standing position.”

SoundSnap: Search, Save and Share Sound Effects - Lots of high quality sound effects, music loops and samples.

New Tools for Framework Designers Published - You can download the three new tools Deps, Layering, and PotentialCallers here: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/fxarch

The Brightest, Sharpest, Fastest X-Ray Holograms Yet - The pinhole camera, a technique known since ancient times, has inspired a futuristic technology for lensless, three-dimensional imaging. Working at both the Advanced Light Source (ALS) at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and at FLASH, the free-electron laser in Hamburg, Germany, an international group of scientists has produced two of the brightest, sharpest x-ray holograms of microscopic objects ever made, thousands of times more efficiently than previous x-ray-holographic methods.

Issuu PDF Viewer Makes Your Presentations Look Beautiful - Issuu, a free web service that converts PDF presentations into good looking Flip magazines.

Observu: Get an eMail Alert When your Website Goes Down - Free and simple Web site monitoring service.

100+ PDC Sessions Posted - Brad Abrams discusses the up coming PDC. I'll be there. Will you?

Text Anim: Easily Create Animated Texts - Textanim is a tool to quickly and easily create animated texts. It has a simple interface and also offers many texture options.

JSON Serializers in .NET - not there yet - Excellent article by Rick Strahl (MVP) about the current state of JSON serializers.

Debunking Common Windows Performance Tweaking Myths - No nonsense guide about all those performance tweaks people claim make their computers faster. Good article.

My Top 10 Source Code Search Engines - Good list of search engines specializing in source code. Speaking of good code search engines, check out http://www.csharpsearch.com.

Pi to 1,000,000 places - It's just cool (even the URL is neat)!