Kam VedBrat : Work

Report on the performance impact of Desktop Composition

KamVedBrat — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 10:26:47 GMT

Ars Technica picked up a report on a study on Windows Vista performance that was conducted at Principled Technologies, a technology assessment company in North Carolina. There's lots of good data in the study about the performance of Windows Vista on a handful of different hardware platforms. One of the highlights for me was reading that they observed very little impact on responsiveness with Aero enabled.

They indicate in their report that of the 192 measurements conducted, only 4 were a tenth of a second slower w/ Aero enabled, only 2 were slower than half a second, and handful of tests yielded greater responsiveness with Aero enabled.

A new job and a new look!

KamVedBrat — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 08:51:16 GMT

Several weeks ago, I started a in a new role at Microsoft as a program manager on the Expression Web team! With Windows Vista out the door I decided it was time for me to do something new. To celebrate the new role, I took the opportunity to make-over my blog using some of the great new CSS editing functionality in Expression Web. I'll still be blogging about Windows Vista and Aero over the next few months, but I'll also be shifting focus to more of Microsoft's web technologies, including Expression Web, ASP.NET, and WPF/E.

Heuristics for enabling Aero

KamVedBrat — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 22:27:22 GMT

If you're a system builder or just building a pc for yourself, and you want to make sure that your PC can run Aero, you'll be interested in this document. It describes the heuristics the operating system uses to enable Aero, and outlines some troubleshooting steps for getting Aero up and running if it doesn't work for you as expected.

DPI Scaling in Windows Vista

KamVedBrat — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 04:30:39 GMT

Someone posted a question via the blog recently asking about how Windows Vista supports high DPI displays. Here's a quick summary of how it all works:

You can find the DPI settings in Windows Vista by right click'ing on the desktop and selecting "Personalize", and the clicking "Adjust Font Size (DPI)" in the task list in the green column on the left. This will bring up the "DPI Scaling" control panel.

When you select 120DPI, the system DPI setting changes. At this point, all the UI in the OS itself should scale up as you'd expect - so a character in 8pt font on a 120DPI display with system DPI set to 120 would take up the same amount of physical space as the same character on a 96DPI display with system DPI set to 96. (This form of scaling actually exists in Windows XP SP2 as well, although the UI entry point is more buried, you have to find the control panel for the monitor, and adjust it from there.)

Using this DPI setting works well for all applications that are actually authored in a DPI aware fashion. Nearly all the UI in Windows itself is DPI aware, as is Microsoft Office, but mileage varies with 3rd party applications.

If you happen to be running an application that doesn't work well like this, there is an additional layer of high DPI support in Windows Vista, enabled by desktop composition that you can take advantage of. If you look in the bottom-right corner of the DPI Scaling dialog, there's a button labeled "Custom DPI". Clicking this button opens another dialog where there is a checkbox labeled "Use Windows XP style DPI scaling", and it is checked by default for sizes <=120 DPI and unchecked by default for sizes >120DPI.

Un-checking this checkbox causes Windows to use the desktop composition engine to perform DPI scaling for all applications that don't explicitly mark themselves as DPI aware via manifest. In this case, the composition engine will use your graphics hardware to scale the bitmap output of the window to a larger size, and apply an input transform to any mouse-clicks on the window to route them back to the right place in "real coordinates" for the application. The OS will also virtualize the system DPI for that application, so that it thinks it is running at 96DPI. This applies to most traditional Win32, GDI based applications.

Newer applications that are built using Windows Presentation Foundation are DPI aware by default, as WPF doesn't give the developer access to actual device pixels in the vast majority of normal cases. So new applications designed for Windows Vista will scale up using WPF's vector engine rather than simple bitmap scaling.

I hope this clears up any latent questions folks may have about this.

Shipped!

KamVedBrat — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 00:51:29 GMT

It's done! Windows Vista has released to manufacturing! The Windows Vista page on Microsoft.com has the scoop on when it will be broadly available.

colorization improvements for maximized windows

KamVedBrat — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 07:04:00 GMT

One question (complaint really) we've gotten for quite some time with Windows Vista has been that customers who select a custom color for their windows lose that color when the window is maximized.

Well - we fixed that - the next RC build of Windows Vista will maintain your color in the darkened maximized windows!

Dave has posted some screenshots and background behind this decision over on the shell blog.

Dissecting my WinHEC talk

KamVedBrat — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 21:35:00 GMT

I got an email recently about a post on a third-party discussion board regarding my talk at WinHEC.

This made me chuckle. I assume it’s the zoom-in on the caption buttons that’s being questioned there.

I’m pretty sure if you look up my slide deck from WinHEC 2005 you’ll find the same image in there as well (but bigger). That picture was created to help communicate the difference between the transparent and opaque glass looks that we had planned. There was a matching opaque picture that didn’t get used this year because it wasn’t really relevant.

In any case – that picture was done as an illustration to communicate what it would look like, it’s not a screenshot of anything.

I love hearing all the excitement about the vector graphics capabilities in Windows Presentation Foundation and the pieces of it we used to build Aero.

For Windows Vista, we elected not to use vectors in how the rendering of the window frames works, for a number of reasons. We had a pre-existing designer workflow using bitmaps which we didn’t want to mess with, considering we needed it for other areas of the product. The WPF vector tools (the Expression stuff) were still in development, and even if they were ready, since we weren’t using WPF directly there would have been an additional layer of work to accommodate those that we didn’t want to take on.

update- 12/20/2006: cleaned up some wierd color tags in this post.

Hope this clears up the discussion.

Take Windows Vista and Office 2007 for a test drive!

KamVedBrat — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 01:11:00 GMT

The Windows Vista site on Microsoft.com has all the details on getting signed up for the Windows Vista Customer Preview Program, and you can get the Office 2007 Beta from the 2007 Microsoft Office System preview site.

How to get “glass” into your application using WPF or WinForms

KamVedBrat — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 05:39:00 GMT

The great thing about working at a company the size of Microsoft is that sometimes people get things done that you wanted to do before you get around to it. In this case – some folks on our evangelism and SDK teams have written some really slick samples for how to get “glass” into your application, in a similar fashion to what you see in Internet Explorer 7+, Office 12, and Windows Media Player 11 on Windows Vista.

Tim Sneath’s walk-through of adding glass to a Windows Forms application

Adam Nathan’s example of Aero Glass inside a WPF Window

Happy coding!

iTunes and QuickTime updated to be compatible with Aero

KamVedBrat — Sun, 04 Jun 2006 06:29:00 GMT

Back in February, I posted about some compatibility issues various applications may have with Aero, and in that post, I referenced iTunes and QuickTime as examples of applications that have these sorts of problems.

Well, the very nice folks at Apple have recently posted an update to QuickTime and iTunes that no longer has this issue. So if you’re using these applications on Windows Vista, you’ll want to make sure to get the latest versions of these software packages because now they work just fine with Aero.

Plays For Sure hat-trick: WMP11+URGE+Clix

KamVedBrat — Sun, 04 Jun 2006 06:22:00 GMT

Windows Media Devices have been getting a whole lot of really positive press lately. CNet stacked the Clix above the iPod on their must have list, and in a recent review of the new Toshiba Gigabeat device, Cnet said: any advantage that the iPod/iTunes ecosystem had over its WMA competitors has been wiped out by the Gigabeat S and WMP 11. Big words. I’m told the the Creative Zen Vision M provides a similar experience to the Clix only with a hard-drive based device.

I’ve spent the past few days playing with an iRiver Clix device along with Windows Media Player 11 on Windows Vista Beta 2, and I have say I’m really impressed. I’ve blogged about my woes with another PFS device, the Rio Carbon on several occasions in the past, so as you may have guessed – I went into this experience with some healthy skepticism.

That said – Sean’s excitement about the work going on with the Clix, WMP 11, and URGE made me want to give it a try, and after a few days of using it, I think there might be some hope for Windows Media devices in the long term.

Here are some of the highlights…

Packaging – I realize for some, this is kind of a superfluous thing, since you will likely see the device in a display case or as a floor model, but I think it still matters. The package was a clean white box, with no stickers and relatively little random print, and no excessive feature-lists or tables. Sean has posted a great video of the out-of-box experience with the Clix. A welcome departure from somewhat cynical (and a little bit true) pattern that Microsoft products have set in the past. Y’all have probably already seen the Microsoft/iPod parody on YouTube which illustrates this pretty well. Inside the box was the player itself, along with a neoprene case, an installation CD, and of course the requisite white earbuds.
The device itself is very clean – from the front it’s just a simple screen with a black bezel around it – the entire surface is a flat clear plastic material, so there are no bumps or ridges around the edges of the screen. The sides and back of the device are smooth, glossy, white material. There’s a headphone jack on one side, and requisite volume and power buttons on the other sides. The back is devoid of the logo & serial number fever that many other devices have, just the name of the device, and a couple tiny logos at the bottom. The device is really light (I didn’t weigh it), and small enough to put in your pocket – about the size of a mini-DV cassette.
Syncing the device was a breeze. After having an iPod for almost a year now, you hope to be able to take this for granted, but anyone who’s used MTP devices with WMP10 in the past knows that most of the time this is far from a simple experience. With the Clix, all those troubles are gone. I made a playlist, dragged it over to my sync list clicked start sync and it just worked. Unbelievable. The best thing was that I was able to do this with songs that I downloaded from URGE (there’s a free trial available that I’ve been using). This was really great – being able to just pick any song I wanted, download it, and put it on my device legally was really nice. The library of available songs on URGE was really rich. It even had my two litmus-test bands, Too Much Joy, and Johnny Socko.
The user interface of the device is really slick. It looked and felt a lot like some of the early Aero concepts we did when we looked at design directions for Windows Vista. The UI is super easy to use – it really didn’t take any thinking or guess-work to navigate around. The navigation mechanism on the Clix is really very clever- the screen is essentially a four-way rocker switch, so you just push on the side of the screen that has what you want, and it takes you there. Really nice. Another nice touch is that the volume buttons work even when the key-lock is enabled – I’m constantly fumbling with the key lock on my iPod just to turn it up or down when I’m running. The one nit I have is that when you’re playing the device, the screen turns off to save battery (which is good), but then when you click to wake up the display, it process the click as if you knew what you were doing. Not a huge issue, but a little frustrating at first.
In terms of feature set- the device is really great – apart from simple music playback, it also stores and plays photos, 15FPS video, and has some interesting flash games installed as well.

The one glaring thing missing from the Clix+WMP+URGE trifecta is a nice end-to-end story around podcasting. You can get a podcast subscription up and running using the RSS + Auto Playlist support in Windows Vista, but it’s not nearly as simple as it could be.

Engadget has a great review round-up of other peoples opinion’s of the Clix if you want to read more about it. So is this good enough to replace my iPod Nano? It’s very close - I just need to find a belt-clip or armband accessory for it when I go running and then it’s pretty much a done deal. I had this thing before the iPod, I never would have switched away from it the way I left the Rio Carbon. If you’re looking for a media player, and want to use a subscription media service – this is definitely the only way to go.

Responding to comments on podcasting

KamVedBrat — Sun, 04 Jun 2006 04:28:00 GMT

No question that this whole process is way more difficult than what's available with iTunes (I'm actually an avid iTunes user for podcasting).

The point of the post was just to demonstrate what's possible with the platform - you could easily build an application on Windows that takes the pieces that exist in IE and WMP to make a really smooth experience for customers out of the plumbing that's there already.

How To: Podcasting with Windows Vista

KamVedBrat — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 15:08:00 GMT

One of the neat things about an operating system is how different parts of the system can come together to make a richer experience by virtue of being on the same platform. In this case, you can use the RSS enclosure functionality in IE7 along with WMP11’s Auto Playlists and device synchronization to subscribe to podcasts, aggregate them into your media library, and sync them to your portable device.

Here’s how you do it:

Find a feed you want to subscribe to. For this example, lets use BBC’s “Digital Planet” podcast. Start by going to the Digital Planet page on the BBC’s website using IE7.
Click the XML icon for the podcast’s feed, which will open the feed in IE7’s integrated RSS viewer.
In the RSS Viewer, you’ll see a yellow box at the top of the page, at the bottom of that box, there’s a link labeled Subscribe to this feed. Click on it.
This will pop up another dialog box to confirm some properties of the subscription. Check the checkbox in this dialog box that reads Automatically download attached files, and click the Subscribe button.

At this point, you’ve got IE set up to get the feeds automatically. Next you need to get WMP11 to find them and put them in the media library.

Open the Favorites Center in IE7 (the star button on the left of the toolbar).
Find the feed you just subscribed to, right-click on it, and select Properties… from the context menu. This will open the Feed properties dialog.
About halfway down the dialog, there’s a button that reads View files. Click on this button to open the folder where IE7 is keeping the feeds attachments.
Once the folder is opened in Windows Explorer, right click on the navigation bar at the top of the window and select Copy address.
Open WMP11 and open your media library by clicking the Library button in the big black toolbar across the top of the Window.
At the bottom of the button, there’s a strip you can click on that will open a menu, open the menu, and select Add to Library…
This will bring up the Add to Library dialog. Click the Add… button partway down the dialog box to open the Add Folder dialog
The Add Folder dialog has a textbox near the bottom that is labeled Folder. Delete the text that’s in there, and paste the address you copied from step 8 into this box, and click OK. WMP11 will start scanning the folder for files. Once the scan is complete, close the file-scanning progress dialog that opens.

We’re almost done. Your feed is now set up to download automatically, and WMP11 has the audio files in the library. The only things left are making a playlist to find them easily and sync them to a portable device.

In the media library, there’s an item at the top of the tree control on the left that reads Playlists. Right click on it and select Create Auto Playlist.
In the New Auto Playlist dialog that opens, enter the name of the feed (in this example Digital Planet), and set the fliter to the following: - Music In My Library - Album Title Is Digital Planet…and click OK
Now click on the newly created playlist and verify that it has found the file that was downloaded by IE7!
Finally, if you have an MTP capable portable media device (like the new iRiver Clix that Sean has been raving about), you can add your newly created Auto Playlist to the Sync List in WMP11 to sync the feeds to your device.

There are definitely some gotcha’s with this scheme… if the meta-data of any of the files in the feeds you’re isn’t set up correctly (or usefully) you’ll have a tough time setting up your playlists, but for the majority of feeds I’ve tested, it appears to work quite well!

3D Tools Workspace Updated to WinFX December CTP bits

KamVedBrat — Tue, 03 Jan 2006 07:18:00 GMT

Daniel Lehenbauer has updated his 3D Tools Workspace to work with the December CTP bits.

CTP Madness

KamVedBrat — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 18:50:00 GMT

If you aren't exactly sure what versions of Avalon, winfx, windows vista, and visual studio work with the system you're trying to put together, or are compatible with one another, this web page is for you. http://channel9.msdn.com/ctpmadness

The good people at Channel 9 have built a great interactive web page where you can choose a version of a technology and the page will tell you what versions are comptible with it.