@ Head : Windows 7

Windows Virtual PC now on MSDN

bill — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 04:23:01 GMT

If you’ve got Windows 7 installed, the Windows Virtual PC for Windows 7 is now on MSDN subscriber downloads !!!

I had the Release Candidate (RC) installed, so had to uninstall that first and reboot before installing the RTM release. All worked perfectly, and my VPC’s from the RC also are working fine :)

If you need to uninstall the RC you’ll find it listed under the “Programs and Features” window from Control Panel. Click on “View installed updates” top left of window, and you’ll find it listed under “Microsoft Windows”

Windows crash recovery

bill — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 03:17:31 GMT

Last night I accidentally pulled out the wrong power plugs, crashing my computer. For some reason this meant it wouldn’t start properly. I don’t quite get why that would mean it wouldn’t start as the hard disc didn’t fail, but none the less it wouldn’t : the computer would seemingly just hang and the keyboard was no longer responsive and its lights went out. The good news is that start-up offered a recovery, and that recovery fixed it and life is good again. The thing to be aware of though is the recovery boot seemed to be hung for a long long time ; I’m talking like 20 minutes or half an hour.

If this happens to you, just be patient: it worked for me :)

Expression 3 is on MSDN

bill — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 08:01:58 GMT

With all the focus on Windows 7 RTM announcements, the availability of Expression 3 on the MSDN site last Thursday may have sneaked under folks radars. For MSND subscribers, grab your copy of Expression 3.

So what is a “Library” ?

bill — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 14:13:41 GMT

Earlier I posted what I hope wetted your appetite for some more info about Libraries in Windows 7. So what are libraries you ask//I ask ;) Well I hope the following provides some insight.

caveat emptor: this is still just my first impressions !

A Library is really a view of different “folders”. Each library is a file, which internally is an xml file. The default library files are stored in the user’s roaming profile, eg:

C:\Users\Bill\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Libraries

This is an example of

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<libraryDescription>
   <ownerSID>S-1-5-21-168223323-3520011370-4180941423-1000</ownerSID>
   <version>3</version>
   <isLibraryPinned>-1</isLibraryPinned>
   <templateInfo>
      <folderType>{5C4F28B5-F869-4E84-8E60-F11DB97C5CC7}</folderType>
   </templateInfo>
   <propertyStore>
      <property name="HasModifiedLocations" type="boolean"><![CDATA[-1]]></property>
   </propertyStore>
   <searchConnectorDescriptionList>
      <searchConnectorDescription>
         <isDefaultSaveLocation>-1</isDefaultSaveLocation>
         <simpleLocation>
            <url>C:\Users\Bill\Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Projects</url>
         <serialized>…</serialized>
         </simpleLocation>
      </searchConnectorDescription>
   </searchConnectorDescriptionList>
</libraryDescription>

I omitted the contents of the serialized element for brevity.

You can programmatically access libraries via the IShellLibrary interface and some shell helper functions.

You can add multiple “folders” to these library files. I say “folders” in quotes, because according to the IShellLibrary::AddFolder documentation, the object in psiLocation can be a folder or a Search Connector (*.searchconnector-ms) file.

What’s this mean. Well I don’t know for sure yet, but it looks to me like Libraries can be a way to aggregate search providers. At the simplest level they provide a view of directories, but they have the potential to provide a view over data from various sources, not just file based. This of course leads us towards the topic of “Federated Search” (more on that in next episode <g>).

So is it WinFS ? Not really. It is not reliant on managed frameworks like the entity framework… it is instead heavily reliant on XML. From the Library file, saved searches, right through to Federated Search which itself is based around RSS style of XML.

Thankfully VB9 rocks when it comes to working with XML !

OOXML is in wordpad !!

bill — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 06:45:08 GMT

I downloaded a .docx file to my Windows 7 VPC, and thought I would have to copy it over to where I had Word installed. But much to my delight, Wordpad in Windows 7 recognizes and opens .docx files. :)

You can open and safe files in OOXML format (that’s the .docx format), ODF format for those open office folks, and of course rtf and txt are still there.

I like this !! I can see a lot more uses for Vb’s xml literals and creating .docx files, as the prevalence of the .docx format expands. :)

WinFS …. It’s b-a-a-a-ck ??

bill — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 06:31:42 GMT

Some of you may recall the talk of a new file management system in the days leading up to Vista when Vista was called Longhorn. WinFS was an object model/database.. in fact much of that seemed like a spin off from object spaces, which of course many of us know has itself spun off into the Entity Framework. WinFS however never saw the light of day (and really neither did Object Spaces): it was cancelled prior to Vista being released. Cancelled, not killed. ;)

So today I was playing with Windows 7 (available now on MSDN for MSDN subscribers) and started reading the 7.0 Beta Platform SDK. I had noticed “Libraries” in explorer and didn’t give it much thought thinking it was just those folks renaming folders like they seem to do with each release. But as I waded through the compatibility documents I read this :

The Library is itself a file, and not a folder.

A what ? A file ??? Seems this new virtual folder is some sort of database/datastore.. perhaps even an object model ?

Answers to all this and more in the next amazing episode of first looks at the Windows 7 SDK ;)