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September 2006 - Posts

Saturday, September 30, 2006 6:42 PM

How Windows Installer interacts with UAC in Windows Vista

Robert Flaming has been posting a series of articles describing how Windows Installer interacts with the User Account Control (UAC) feature that is being introduced in Windows Vista . These articles contain information not included in the Windows Installer
Posted by astebner | 0 Comments
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Thursday, September 28, 2006 6:01 PM

Algorithm for launching Windows Media Center and browsing to a specific experience

A while back, I posted an item on the Media Center Sandbox blog that described how to directly launch Windows Media Center and have it navigate to a specific experience using some command line parameters available within the Windows Media Center Shell
Posted by astebner | 4 Comments
Tuesday, September 26, 2006 4:49 PM

Visual Studio 2005 SP1 beta now available for download

I noticed a post on Soma's blog (vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft) earlier today indicating that a beta version of Visual Studio 2005 SP1 is now available for download on the Microsoft Connect site . I have had a few folks ask me
Posted by astebner | 2 Comments
Monday, September 25, 2006 8:55 PM

New Windows Media Center XBAP application now available: Big Screen Business

Niall Ginsbourg from Mobilewares (the same person who created the Flickr photo browser XBAP application for Windows Media Center for Windows Vista ) recently released a public beta version of a new XBAP application for Windows Vista. This application
Posted by astebner | 2 Comments
Thursday, September 21, 2006 6:27 PM

Important note about using RegisterMceApp and RegisterApplication

A couple of folks on the Windows Media Center team tried out the Veronica's Radio sample that Charlie Owen posted on the Media Center Sandbox site last week and ran into an issue that is worth mentioning to a wider audience. The installation batch file
Posted by astebner | 0 Comments
Wednesday, September 20, 2006 5:51 PM

Forum post for Windows Communication Foundation (Indigo) RC1 installation issues

A friend of mine sent me a link today to an MSDN Forum post with a list of known issues and suggested workarounds if you are having trouble installing the .NET Framework 3.0 (formerly WinFX Runtime Components) RC1 build. This post focuses specifically
Posted by astebner | 0 Comments
Tuesday, September 19, 2006 8:40 PM

Mailbag: Creating an installable layout for non-English Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions

Question: I found your blog article describing how to create an installable network layout for the Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions. I want to use these steps to create layouts for non-English versions of the Express Editions. I saw the section titled
Posted by astebner | 0 Comments
Sunday, September 17, 2006 7:39 PM

How to prevent Windows Media Center from launching multiple copies of your application

I posted an item on the Media Center Sandbox site today that I wanted to link here as well in case anyone is interested. Windows Media Center maintains separate process spaces for each application that is launched and stores up to 8 of them in a back-stack
Posted by astebner | 3 Comments
Friday, September 15, 2006 7:54 PM

Using the Q helix UI to create a custom streaming radio application

Charlie Owen posted an item on the Media Center Sandbox site today that I wanted to draw your attention to if you haven't seen it yet. He took the twisted helix UI from the Q sample application that is a part of the Windows Media Center SDK , created
Posted by astebner | 0 Comments
Wednesday, September 13, 2006 9:38 PM

How to directly launch a Windows Media Center application from Visual Studio 2005

I wrote this post on the Media Center Sandbox blog earlier tonight that I wanted to link to here as well in order to improve discoverability. In this post, I describe a set of steps that caon be used to modify the configuration for a Windows Media Center
Posted by astebner | 3 Comments
Tuesday, September 12, 2006 8:25 PM

Real world example of a Windows Media Center application setup built with WiX

I have previously posted an article and a follow-up blog post describing how to use WiX to build MSI packages for Windows Media Center applications. I decided it would also be helpful to show a more concrete example of a setup package for a real Windows
Posted by astebner | 8 Comments
Monday, September 11, 2006 8:50 PM

Windows Media Center SDK for Windows Vista RC1 is now available for public download

This afternoon, we posted the RC1 build of the Windows Media Center SDK for Windows Vista (build 5600.16384) on the Microsoft Download Center. That means that anyone can download it and try it out - it is not restricted to members of the Windows Vista
Posted by astebner | 2 Comments
Sunday, September 10, 2006 8:54 PM

New episode of the Media Center Show that covers WPF development

Ian Dixon posted a new edition of the Media Center Show this past week that I wanted to point out in case you haven't seen it yet. Ian had Jossef Goldberg (a program manager on the Windows Presentation Foundation team) and Unni Ravindranathan (a program
Posted by astebner | 0 Comments
Saturday, September 09, 2006 7:33 AM

What not to do when creating an MSI-based setup

A couple of days ago, I described a setup failure that I ran into and outlined how I approached solving it. While investigating that issue, I found a couple of problems with the design of the setup package that I was trying to help the customer install.
Posted by astebner | 5 Comments
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Friday, September 08, 2006 11:28 AM

New Windows Media Center add-in registration custom action DLL

Niall Ginsbourg from Mobilewares (the same person who is working on the Flickr photo browser for Windows Media Center for Windows Vista ) has posted an item on the Media Center Sandbox discussion forum that I wanted to link to here as well. He has created
Posted by astebner | 0 Comments
Thursday, September 07, 2006 10:23 PM

Case study: How I approach debugging and fixing a setup failure

I received a mail from a customer this week regarding an installation failure that proved to be fairly interesting. I wanted to describe the scenario and the steps I used to approach solving this issue in the hopes that it will help others who might need
Posted by astebner | 1 Comments
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Tuesday, September 05, 2006 7:10 PM

Updated drivers to fix AMD dual-core video playback glitching in Windows Media Center

A while back, Dave Fleischman posted a link to a processor update package published by AMD that has helped a lot of customers fix glitching video playback that has been seen in Windows Media Center on some dual-core AMD systems. We found out over this
Posted by astebner | 2 Comments
Tuesday, September 05, 2006 7:55 AM

Updated example for building a Windows Media Center add-in setup package using WiX

I heard from a customer this weekend who was trying to follow the instructions that I posted a while back to create a Windows Media Center add-in setup using WiX but was running into some problems getting the MSI to compile correctly. I took a look at
Posted by astebner | 1 Comments
Monday, September 04, 2006 10:17 AM

Solving setup errors by using the SubInACL tool to repair file and registry permissions

A while back, I wrote a blog post about a .NET Framework 2.0 beta 2 installation problem that was caused by incorrect access control list (ACL) permissions on some registry hives. In that post, I described how to use a tool in the Windows Resource Kit
Posted by astebner | 53 Comments
Sunday, September 03, 2006 3:49 PM

A couple of more random thoughts about Windows Vista

I posted an item a couple of days ago describing my experiences with using Windows Vista , and I wanted to post an update with a couple of additional items that I noticed this weekend, and also provide an update about one of the items that I previously
Posted by astebner | 1 Comments
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Friday, September 01, 2006 9:26 PM

My random thoughts about using Windows Vista

After several months of periodic nagging, my friend and co-worker David Fleischman has finally re-entered the world of blogging this week with a couple of posts. His most recent post describes a few features that have caught his eye while using Windows
Posted by astebner | 5 Comments
 
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