Kam VedBrat : Windows Vista

Windows Vista Ultimate (PRODUCT) RED

KamVedBrat — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 00:27:00 GMT

Microsoft, Dell and (RED) announced a partnership to help people living with HIV/AIDS in Africa. All the details are over on the Windows Vista blog. There's also some coverage of it over on Engadget.

Keeping the taskbar transparent when your deskband is enabled

KamVedBrat — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 02:51:05 GMT

If you have code that implements a deskband for the Windows Taskbar in Windows Vista, you may have noticed that it causes the taskbar to appear opaque when there is not a maximized window open, instead of being transparent, but darkly tinted which is the normal state of the taskbar.

You can get around this by implementing the IDeskBand2 interface and responding to the associated methods appropriately.

Camera RAW Codecs for Windows

KamVedBrat — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 10:43:00 GMT

One of the features we added in Windows Vista was a platform to support for decoding camera raw images in Windows Photo Gallery (and later Windows Live Gallery), Windows Explorer, and Win32 & WPF applications. The camera IHV community has done a great job supporting this effort by creating codecs that enable raw files for various cameras. The Microsoft Professional Photography website just posted a page where you can download Codecs for Windows for your camera.

Updated: a couple folks pointed out that the link I posted was broken. That is fixed now.

Vista Virtual Desktop Manager

KamVedBrat — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 08:49:28 GMT

I recently discovered this project over on codeplex. It's a virtual desktop manager for Windows Vista that uses the live thumbnail preview API's exposed by the Desktop Window Manager. It's still very beta, but a great example of some of the innovation that can be built on the platform that the DWM provides.

Mary Jo Foley says Leopard looks like Windows Vista

KamVedBrat — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 21:46:18 GMT

When we did the visuals for Vista, we worked really hard to get a to a look and feel that was streamlined, efficient, and modern. We knew people would compare what we're doing to what other companies do, but I never expected this.

Scott Hanselman looks at Vista task switching applications

KamVedBrat — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 21:42:16 GMT

Scott wrote a quick review of some different Task Switching applications that have been written for Windows Vista using the new window thumbnail preview API's that are part of Windows Vista's desktop composition system.

Why Intel 915 graphics don’t have a WDDM driver for Windows Vista

KamVedBrat — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 08:36:15 GMT

A common question among folks who are upgrading to Windows Vista on slightly older notebooks, tablet PC's, and UMPC's is why the Intel 915 graphics chipset doesn't have WDDM support, as WDDM support is a prerequisite for Desktop Composition. The folks over at the Intel software blog have posted a video with the answer to this question. Follow the link to get the answer straight from the proverbial horse's mouth.

Creating a High DPI application in Windows Vista

KamVedBrat — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 21:57:59 GMT

The folks over at RealWorld Graphics posted a nice write up on how developers working on native Win32 applications can create DPI aware applications for Windows Vista.

For new applications, using Windows Presentation Foundation is a strong solution in that it handles a great deal of the work for DPI Awareness automatically. But if you have an existing Win32 code base you are working with, this article has some good tips for you.

Ben Forta is hooked on Windows Vista

KamVedBrat — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 02:07:44 GMT

Ben Forta has a nice write-up about his experience using Windows Vista. Kind words from a senior guy at Adobe.

Visual Studio and Windows Vista

KamVedBrat — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 01:04:27 GMT

There is now an update available for Visual Studio that addresses many of the issues regarding using VS on Windows Vista. The details are on the download page.

iTunes & Quicktime and Aero

KamVedBrat — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 22:40:00 GMT

I made a post about a year ago regarding how some applications have a side effect of disabling Aero. While it is still possible to create applications that have this side-effect (due to the underlying problem of applications accessing the primary display buffer directly), many of the applications that exhibited this behavior during the Beta process of Windows Vista have since been updated by their respective ISV's to no longer cause this.

The folks at Apple have done a great job specifically with updating iTunes and Quicktime prevent this problem, as well as several other Vista-specific issues that customers were hitting. If you grab the latest versions of these applications form Apple, you'll have a much better experience.

Vista Wallpapers

KamVedBrat — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 10:27:29 GMT

The Windows Vista blog links to some great Vista wallpapers.

Finally! BillG comments on the “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” ads

KamVedBrat — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 08:17:00 GMT

I saw this yesterday. BillG was interviewed for Newsweek and the topic of Apple's advertising came up. The whole interview is a great read, but here's my favorite comment:

"I don't even get it. What are they trying to say? Does honesty matter in these things, or if you're really cool, that means you get to be a lying person whenever you feel like it? There's not even the slightest shred of truth to it."

WPF Application Portfolio

KamVedBrat — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 21:33:09 GMT

Tim Sneath has been maintaining a great list of new applications developed using WPF on his blog.

Windows Vista tips and tricks

KamVedBrat — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 03:26:31 GMT

The folks over at howtogeek.com have compiled a great list of tips and tricks for working with Windows Vista.