Charlie Calvert's Community Blog : Utilities

Windows 7 Code Pack V. 1.0 Released

Charlie Calvert — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 02:26:27 GMT

The Windows® API Code Pack for Microsoft® .NET Framework provides support for various features of Windows 7 and previous releases of that operating system. The Code Pack has reached version 1.0 and has been published on Code Gallery:

Here are some of the features you can from managed code using the Code Pack:

Windows 7 Taskbar Jump Lists, Icon Overlay, Progress Bar, Tabbed Thumbnails, and Thumbnail Toolbars.
Windows 7 Libraries, Known Folders, non-file system containers.
Windows Shell Search API support, a hierarchy of Shell Namespace entities, and Drag and Drop functionality for Shell Objects.
Explorer Browser Control.
Shell property system.
Windows Vista and Windows 7 Common File Dialogs, including custom controls.
Windows Vista and Windows 7 Task Dialogs.
Direct3D 11.0, Direct3D 10.1/10.0, DXGI 1.0/1.1, Direct2D 1.0, DirectWrite, Windows Imaging Component (WIC) APIs. (DirectWrite and WIC have partial support)
Sensor Platform APIs
Extended Linguistic Services APIs
Power Management APIs
Application Restart and Recovery APIs
Network List Manager APIs
Command Link control and System defined Shell icons.

Short Windows 7 ‘How To’ Videos

Charlie Calvert — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 22:37:42 GMT

If you haven’t tracked them down already, you might be interested in this set of short videos showing off fun new features in Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 7 operating system. I didn’t know most of these features existed, and I found a number of them to be quite useful.

The features I liked the best involved simple techniques for handling multiple windows. My desktop is usually a crowded mess, and rather than pretending that we are all highly organized compulsive cleaners, the folks who built Windows 7 include lots of ways to help us clean up our chaos.

You can grab the task bar at the top of a window, shake it, and watch all the other windows on your desktop automatically minimize. There are several cool features of this type, including an explanation of that funny looking block down at the bottom right of the Windows task bar.

Most of these videos are about 1 minute in length, some as short as 30 seconds. I found watching them a useful way to pass a few minutes of my day.

The videos are kept here:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/products/videos

del.icio.us Tags: Windows

New Snippet Designer Add-in for Visual Studio

Charlie Calvert — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 01:41:05 GMT

Matthew Manela, an engineer on our Online Tools team, has created and released a free, community-based tool called the Snippet Designer. His tool is a Visual Studio add-in that allows you to create and edit snippets from inside the IDE.

Snippets are a feature in Visual Studio that allow you to quickly insert “snippets” of code in your program. A year or two ago I wrote a post on snippets which you can find here.

Included in the Snippet Designer are:

A tool for quickly creating snippets for C#, VB and XML development, including the ability to create snippet literals and a host of other features.
A Snippet Explorer that allows you to search by keyword and view the active code in a snippet.
The ability to select code in the editor, and convert it into a snippet

It took me only a few minutes to get up to speed using the Snippet Designer. The program installed quickly and easily, even on a 64 Bit copy of Windows Server 2008. The interface for the designer is easy to understand, and Matt provides an easy to follow set of instructions on the CodePlex site where he released the project and its source code.

Learn more about the Snippet Designer
Download the Snippet Designer.

Syntax Highlighted Code in Your Blog

Charlie Calvert — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 00:55:42 GMT

I sometimes get questions about how to paste syntax highlighted code from Visual Studio into your blog so that it looks purdy, even when using code from a beta product:

var pred = Expression.Lambda<Func<Customer, bool>>(
Expression.Equal(Expression.Property(c1, City),
Expression.Constant("Seattle")), c1);

You should first install Live Writer:

http://get.live.com/WL/config_all

Then go to the Live Gallery:

http://gallery.live.com/?mkt=en-us

Look at all the Live Writer Add ins:

http://gallery.live.com/results.aspx?bt=9&pl=8&st=3

Select the Paste from Visual Studio add in:

http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx?li=d8835a5e-28da-4242-82eb-e1a006b083b9&bt=9&pl=8

SpaceMonger and Treemaps

Charlie Calvert — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 12:48:12 GMT

A few days ago I had the classic "out of free space on drive C" error on my main computer. I wanted to find what was taking up space so I could cull the waste from my system. My friend Anson Horton pointed me to a tool on the web called SpaceMonger. Within a few minutes I had downloaded the application, installed it, and found the wasted space on my hard drive. Within five minutes I had freed up 33% of my drive.

SpaceMonger is based on a classic UI break through called treemaps. Back in school, we studied treemaps as part of an interface design class. SpaceMonger uses treemaps to give you a visual overview of the files on your hard drive.

Treemaps in SpaceMonger

Treemaps are a useful tool for visualizing statistics. It utilizes our ability to more quickly absorb statistics in a visual, rather than numeric form.

When dealing with he wetware in our head, the bottom line is that our visual tools can be more powerful than our more abstract grasp of symbols such as numbers. For instance, it is easy for us to look at 500 objects and see which one is largest. It takes us longer, however, to look at 500 numbers and pick out the ones that are largest.

In Figure 1, you can see SpaceMonger's view of my hard drive after I cleaned it up. Items colored pink are on the root of my drive. Those color light orange one level down from the root. Yellow colored items are two levels down from the root, and green items are three levels down from the root.

Figure 1: A treemap of the used space on my Inspiron 9400 running Vista.

After glancing at the image, it immediately becomes apparent that the largest file on my system is -- appropriately enough -- a video of Eric Lippert. For most people, it would take longer to garner the same information from an alphanumeric file listing that is several pages long.

Treemaps in Theory

Treemaps were created by Ben Schneiderman, a professor at the University of Maryland. He had his epiphany while trying to find a way to visualize a hard drive. The SpaceMonger program is therefore very much in the spirit of his work.

Schneiderman and other researchers have since used treemaps for a variety of tasks that involve the need to visualize large datasets. Examples include tracking sports teams and their players or tracking stock portfolios. In the latter example, size was used to show the value of a stock, and color to show whether it was increasing or decreasing in value. For instance, a bright shade of red might be appropriate for a bull stock that is growing quickly, while a dark blue color could represent a bear stock that was losing value.

More Detail

SpaceMonger is very configurable. In Figure 2 I've changed the setting so that I can see both the parts of my hard drive that are being used, and those parts that are unused.

Figure 2: In this image you can see the 32.7% of my hard drive that I freed up using SpaceMonger.

If you zoom in on a particular area, you can often see a surprising amount of detail. Looking up at Figure 1, near the bottom center left, you can see a small directory called "Music." Figure 3 shows what this same area looks like when you zoom in on it.

Figure 3: Zooming in on the Music directory. Click on the screenshot to see the original image.

You can expand the screen area of the image shown in Figure 3, or you can zoom in on a subdirectory within the image. For instance, clicking on a particular directory will zoom in on it until it occupies most of the available screen real estate found inside SpaceMonger.

Summary

SpaceMonger is interesting because it hints at how our ability to readily create and display visual images can supercede more established technologies such as the alphanumeric data found in text documents or spreadsheets. The spread of podcasts and videos hints at the possibility that the printed word may not be as important to future generations as it is to us. Will there come a time when only a small but very powerful priesthood of technological experts will understand abstract symbols such as numbers and letters?

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