There's a new Article out by Jack Davis on Common Criteria and the OPC. Common Criteria is an ISO standard used to asses the security of IT products. This article shows how Common Criteria relate to OPC. Check it out. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us...

Our PM just turned on the faucet on the team blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/opc/ This is the place to go for the latest on Microsoft efforts related to OPC. It's primarily run by the folks in Windows that work on OPC related tech, including myself...

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=6db1f17f-5f1e-4e54-a331-c32285cdde0c&displaylang=en For those of you following my blog for PrintTicket, there's not much in the way of PrintTicket news in the latest SDK. On the OPC side...

Watching me use WinDbg is probably a bit like watching a new programmer write hello world in Visual Studio. I know I'm sitting in front of a very awesome, powerful, tool, and yet, I'm happy and get what I want out of a vocabulary of just a few commands...

Just a quick note: we've opened up a new forum on MSDN for questions and discussion about OPC. http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/os_opc/threads Enjoy! Ben

My team has been heads down getting some great stuff together for all of you working on printing & beyond, so I haven't been writing as much lately. I haven't abandoned those of you who follow my blog for PrintTicket, though things in that space have...

My co-worker Aaron was quick to reply to my earlier post on templates in type-lists with this alternative: You instead add a non-templated function invoker object: struct factory_invoker { template < class a, class b> struct apply...

[Mohave] Microsoft's 'new' operating system is apparently doing well at wow-ing customers. This sounds fun, and I'm looking forward to seeing how this story develops. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-9998336-56.html?tag=nefd.lede [crash dumps] Ben...

Scenario: I have a template that takes a significant number of arguments, but in the most common use scenarios, there are some constraints that can be applied. I want to make it easier for clients to use the templates in the most common cases. template...

[edited 7-23-08: updated title, tags] I'm planning a talk on template use, and thought my blog might be a good way to gether my thoughts, and also to share some of the concepts that I've been working with. Over the next few days (or maybe weeks) I...

Ok, I said in an earlier post that I wasn't going to cover metaprogramming, but I have to post just this one.. it's a bit of a useful technique, and I haven't seen it described anywhere else. I've been playing around with template metaprogramming in my...

This is a bit older news now, but still, it's pretty awesome. The XPS Essentials Pack is now available for download from http://www.microsoft.com/xps/ . Among other things installing it on XP gets you an XPS viewer & the Microsoft XPS Document Writer...

We've released the final version of Print Schema, and it can be downloaded from here: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/xps/printschema.mspx Thanks everyone for the great feedback. Ben

When developing PrintTicket support in the configuration module of a filter-pipeline driver, you should be aware that your driver's PrintTicket code paths will be called within the SplWoW64.exe process when converting GDI content to XPS from 32-bit applications...

The Print Schema 0.95 specification is finally live & ready for review: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/xps/printschema.mspx As mentioned in my previous post, we're not trying to change anything with this version of the documentation, but we do...

I just wanted to give everyone a quick heads up: We've had a lot of feedback that it would be helpful to have a standalone document covering the Print Schema in a format comparable to what we've released for XPS. Well, we've been working hard at it...

It just came to my attention today that there's not really a good piece of text out there that answers this question, so here's a go at it: A PrintTicket is, in some sense, just a bag of settings. Acquiring a PrintTicket requires you to supply the...

So, in a break from my usual technical stuff, I thought I'd talk about something else (closely related) near & dear to me. Vista is getting very close to shipping. It's exciting. People are reall in ship mode around here. Sometimes it's intense, sometimes...

I'm covering this topic because I've seen a couple of drivers now that are calling CoUninitialize a few too many times and causing subsequent app failures, but the topic is probably useful for anyone doing anything related to COM. CoInitialize initializes...

If you're writing a plug-in driver for Unidrv or PScript, there's a design quirk that you should be aware of, and should code around it accordingly. UnidrvUI.DLL and PS5UI.dll implement IPrintTicketProvider. That interface has a ValidatePrintTicket...

[Update: I've set the email address back to my own account.] Well, it's summere here in Seattle, and that means its time to take some vacation. I've been 100% responsive to questiosn sent via the feedback form my blog so far, but I'm going to be in...

If you've been following the blog, and adding support to your drivers for PrintTicket, then you're probably looking for some applications to test your PrintTicket implementations with. The best place to start is the new photo print wizard (PPW) in...

If you've been following PrintTicket, you know that it's the way to store printer settings in an XS document. Anyway, XPS has been getting a lot of attention lately from Adobe, among others. Andy has the full scoop here: http://blogs.msdn.com/andy_simonds...

These changes will NOT appear in Beta 2. These changes will be included in the RC1 release of Vista. Please email xpsinfo@microsoft.com for any questions or comments or use the feedback form on this blog. Print Schema Keyword String Changes...

There's an easy mistake to make when writing XPath queries on PrintTickets, and I want to set the record straight on how to write this query correctly to save you some pain. Here's the set-up. I have a PrintTicket that looks like this, and I want to find...