knom's developer corner : Windows Vista

Custom Search Providers for Internet Explorer

knom — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 16:12:00 GMT

I’m sure all of you know the search box in Internet Explorer!

You can search ANY searchable site there via pluggable search providers.

Per default some of them are installed, but you can add your own!

Here’s how to do it:

Go to the page you want to search through.
Search for “TEST”.
Copy the URL of the search result page (where TEST should be in somewhere)
Now go to the Internet Explorer Search Page and paste the URL in the rst textbox.
Choose a name and select install.
Now you have a new search provider in the search box, which will search the wanted page (and substitute TEST with your search text).

Note.. the search providers are standardized and will work in any browser, which supports the open search specification.

Note 2: Some sites are clever enough to include a search provider already!

Read here how you can solve equations, get the current weather or other thing directly in the search box.

Vista Search for Developers

knom — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 10:30:00 GMT

As for Vista the Windows Desktop search is now fully integrated into the OS, there are several ways to take advantage of it:

a) Plugin your data sources into the searchindex

Vista search is capable of searching all kinds of file formats and storage locations. This is done via some sort of adapter concept: You need to implement a ProtocolHandler to plugun your custom store (like mapi, ftp, filesystem) into the search.

Moreover a class implementing IFilter defines the logic, how to search data within your file (e.g. the file format of an outlook .PST file). Those classes should be written in C++ (without .NET) - see the explaination here.

Links: Introduction to IFilter, IFilter Blog, Overview of Protocol Handlers

b) Consuming the searchindex

Out of your managed application you can consume the search - meaning you can search items in the index.

The search is done via an OleDbConnection with standard ADO.NET. You need to specify a special connection string:

"Provider=Search.CollatorDSO;Extended Properties='Application=Windows'"

Then you can do SELECT queries, where you always need to explicitely specify the columns/properties to be selected. A nice option is searching remote indices (as long as they are running on Vista or Windows 2008 Server) by simply specifying a remote host:

SELECT <properties>
FROM [machineName.]SYSTEMINDEX..SCOPE()
[WHERE <predicates>]

SELECT "System.ItemNameDisplay", "System.Kind" FROM SYSTEMINDEX WHERE "System.Kind" like 'Music'

Column names are written in double quotes, whereas string values in single quotes. The WHERE clause may contain the simple predicates LIKE,=,<,>, IS [NOT] NULL as well as the fulltext predicates CONTAINS and FREETEXT.

They both have a similar syntax:

CONTAINS | FREETEXT ('<searchString>') searches within the contents of items

CONTAINS | FREETEXT ("<column>", '<searchString>') searches within a given property

CONTAINS | FREETEXT (* , '<searchString>') searches contents and all properties

Samples are

CONTAINS("System.FromName", '"Max Knor"')

Use double quotes for column names, single quotes for search string, in the search string use double quotes to mark coherent words

CONTAINS("System.FromAdress", '*microsoft.com')

Use FREETEXT if you care about relevancy– it’s the only predicate that returns a meaningful rank value. (All other predicates return 0 or 1000, depending on the whether there was a match or not). (Hint: to get the rank value, include System.Search.Rank in the select list).

When querying some properties, you get back string-arrays (e.g. for System.Kind), even if they only have one value. You need to convert them to a string, to display them correctly.

NOTE: See the demos on this topic here.

UAC with .NET in Visual Studio 2008

knom — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 10:00:00 GMT

Last time I showed you how to integrate an application manifest in to your project for UAC purposes via post-build actions.

As this doesn't seem like the straightest way to do this (not just to me), Visual Studio 2008 will come with new support for application manifest files!

Here are some screenshots:

VISTA User Account Control with .NET

knom — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 10:00:00 GMT

Before moving over to Silverlight I'll spend one last time to post some additional experiences I've had with Windows Vista Development.

In this "mini-series" I'm gonna start with clearly the most well-known, most prominent and most feared features: User Account Control (UAC).

NOTE: You can find demos to all topics covered here!

As I'm sure you already know, UAC starts every application with standard user privileges, also if your current user account has administrative rights assigned. This is done for security reasons: As we developer often work as administrator (yeah! this is for real men! ;-)) it's easy for malware and spyware apps to install themselves into registry auto-startup keys and do other *very bad* things! So now with Vista, those Apps don't get administrative permissions, unless they explicitely request so. *BANG* - then UAC gets active and display a so called "elevation prompt". The user is asked for permission to grant administrative priviliges to an application.

What is the impact of this UAC to "old" .NET applications ?! Let me visualize this to you in a small chart:

If an application doesn't do anything requiring administrative permissions (things like writing to %PROGRAMFILES%, Windows folder, or registry require so) it works the same way as it did with XP.

To allow compatibility for legacy apps, there is a redirection functionality, which redirects access for "old" apps, which are NOT aware of UAC (no UAC manifest):

Folders: %ProgramFiles%; %Windir%; %Windir%\system32 --> to %HOMEPATH%\AppData\Local\VirtualStore
Registry: HKLM\Software --> to HKCU\Software\Classes\VirtualStore\MACHINE\SOFTWARE

So if a pre-Vista application wants to write to one of these locations it is redirected to the corresponding virtual store.

When reading a file, first the virtual store is looked for it, afterwards the real location!

To establish UAC compliancy for your application, you need to do the following:

Add a new file called AssemblyName.exe.manifest (the so called application manifest) to your project
Insert this XML fragment into the manifest:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<assembly xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asmv.v1"
          manifestVersion="1.0">
  <assemblyIdentity version="1.0.0.0" 
    processorArchitecture="X86"
    name="AppName"
    type="win32" />
  <description>App Description</description>
  <trustInfo xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft.com:asm.v2">
    <security>
      <requestedPrivileges>
        <requestedExecutionLevel level="asInvoker" uiAccess="false"/>
      </requestedPrivileges>
    </security>
  </trustInfo>
</assembly>

Modify the sections marked:

uiAccess: Your ap needs acces to OTHER UIs (see MSDN on this, should normally be false)
requestedExecutionLevel:
- requireAdministrator: App requires administrative privileges --> elevation prompt will be displayed at startup
- highestAvailable: If user is in admin group, start with elevated privileges, else with default privileges
- asInvoker: Always run with default privileges

4. Either copy the application manifest into the executable's directory or
embed it into the executable this way:

Go to the project properties - Build
Add this line to post build actions:

"$(DevEnvDir)..\..\SDK\v2.0\bin\mt.exe" -manifest "$(ProjectDir)$(TargetName).exe.manifest" –outputresource:"$(TargetDir)$(TargetFileName)";#1

Now your application is UAC aware, redirection is disabled! That way, if you start the application without administrative privileges, you'll get an UnauthorizedException if you write to one of the administrative locations mentioned above.

Note: You cannot elevate an already running process. Thus you should refactor your app to be seperated into admin & non-admin operations - running the default application wiht normale privileges and starting another elevated process for each administrative operation! Another option is using an elevated COM object (see UAC-Blog for details).

Transparent Silverlight Sidebar Gadget

knom — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 11:43:00 GMT

To prove the use of Silverlight in Vista Sidebar Gadgets, I recently created a really simple, but good looking ;-) Sidebar Gadget with a Silverlight App embedded!

Here is what it looks like:

Don't bother about the pink animal watch ;-) The gadget basically consists of three circles which are moving around in a weird way!

To build the Silverlight App I used Expression Blend 2 May preview and Silverlight animations (took me about 2 minutes).

The most trickiest part was implementing transparency:

First I wanted to create a gadget with semi-transparent ellipses (to do some kind of color-overlay/mix). This worked well, as long as it happened within Silverlight. Problems occurred with transparency outside of Silverlight, meaning the sidebar/desktop shining through.

Finally I found the trick, how to do it (thanks to Karsten Januszewsky):

What you need to do is insert a <g:background..> tag into your gadget HTML file. This special tag is supported by the Sidebar and allows you to specify a background image for the gadget.

So what I did is set the background image to an entirely transparent PNG file the same size as the gadget.

<g:background src="bg.png" id="Bg" style="position:absolute;width:130px;height:130px;z-index:-1"/>

This way, if you set the background brush of the root-canvas to transparent you'll see the background of the sidebar/desktop shine through!

One problem still left is caused by Anti-Aliasing. This technique smoothes the borders of graphical elements like here the ellipses. So the borders don't get purely yellow or red, but a mixture of both.

Unfortunately because of the hack to host silverlight in a webpage and that page in the gadget, it seems to use Magenta as transparency mask color in this case. So some pixels, mixed with yellow or red are not removed.

Right now, this can only be solved by designing a non-anti-aliased UI or using some background color!

[Update] Also read the updated versions for Silverlight 1.1 here (updated sample is attached there)!

Vista API Demos with C#

knom — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 19:10:00 GMT

Last week I was "On-Tour" at local Usergroups in Vorarlberg (Dornbirn) and Tyrol (Innsbruck).

I did one of my last presentations of Windows Vista Development! (Meaning NOT .NET 3.0, but unmanaged APIs, like those already posted on my blog).

Thanks for everyone, who joined me!
For everyone else - the Topics included:

User Account Control
Windows Error Reporting, Restart & Recovery API
Vista UI Look & Feel
Search
Network List Manager

Here is the presentation as well as the demos!

Presentation (4,55 MB)
Demos (3,82 MB)

UAC Elevation for MSI Packages

knom — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 18:05:00 GMT

It has been serveral times now, that I tried to install an MSI package and occurred some strange error! The reason for this... yes Vista User Account Control!

Unfortunately MSI Packages do not elevate automatically, and it's also hard to elevate them by hand (there is no Run As Administrator menu or anything else..)

So I thought of ways, how to elevate MSI packages..

The easiest way, open up an elevated command prompt and run

MSIEXEC /i myMSI.msi

The problem.. I'm a lazy guy! This is much too hard for me :-)

So I found another way: Just create you custom elevation Context-Menu:

To do this, you need to open regedit, and create a new key under HKEY_Classes_Root\Msi.Package\shell\.

I called this key RunAs. Select the key and set its default value to the title of the context menu (like "Install &as administrator").

Create a subkey HKEY_Classes_Root\Msi.Package\shell\RunAs\command and set its default value to msiexec /i "%1" !

Voila!

BigDays Demos and Links

knom — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 13:03:04 GMT

Yesterday was the final spurt of our Big>Days 2007 Roadshow!
One day of sessions in Vienna's "Austria Convention Center"!

At the same time as our conference, there were official exams for financial inspectors - which resulted in a funny incident:

As I left the session-room, after having tested my laptop a girl entered and asked me: "Have you already started ?!" - I answered.. "No we'll start in about 1 hour!" - "Aah-said the girl - can I enter?! I guess you haven't passed out the exam sheets?!" .. Exam sheets ?! I thought.. Then I realized that she was looking for the inspector's exams :-)

So anyway.. If you are interested in the presentation-slides and demos, here they are (in German):

User Experience, Web 2.0 und Windows Vista - Slides - Demos

Windows Presentation Foundation - Slides - Demos

XBOX Game Development with XNA - Slides - Demos

Clean Up the Vista Networks

knom — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 11:00:59 GMT

In my last post I wrote about the Vista Network List Manager! If you ran the sample, I attached you might see a lot of "old" networks still stored on your machine! (like some WLANs at hotels, ...) I was wondering how to clean up the list of networks and remove those "Network 1...2..3...11..". I played around a little bit and found a way to do it:

Go to the Control Panel and select "Network and Sharing Center":

There pick the Customize Link below the connection map graphics.

Then choose "Merge or delete network locations".

In the following dialog you can see all remembered networks, as well as delete any of them or merge two or more (for instance if the network detection somehow failed to detect them as one network).

By using this you can get rid of unused Networks like "Marriott Bregenz WLAN" or others..

Vista Network List Manager

knom — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 11:00:00 GMT

Another new feature I came across is called "Network List Manager"!

This new COM Type Library allows you to enumerate all available networks or network interfaces and read or even write extended properties of those.

To use the new API, you need to add a COM reference to the "Network List Manager 1.0 Type Library" to your project.

After doing that, you can instantiate a NetworkListManagerClass as an entry to the NLM API.

NETWORKLIST.NetworkListManagerClass _networkListManager = new NetworkListManagerClass();

On the newly created object, there are a bunch of events, which get fired if the network connectivity or any other properties of a network change, as well as a lot of methods..

To understand what they do you need to differentiate networks and network-connections:

Network Connections (INetworkConnection) represent unique connections to a network. There can be multiple connections to a single network.
Every computer can be connected to several Networks (INetwork) over multiple Network Connections.

To build a simple online/offline sensing application you can subscribe the ConnectivityChanged event, which monitors the overall connectivity property of ALL networks. But you could also be notified if a single network connectivity changes..

_networkListManager.ConnectivityChanged += new 
    INetworkListManagerEvents_ConnectivityChangedEventHandler(ConnectivityChanged);

After attaching the event handler you can access the NLM_CONNECTIVITY enumeration value of the delegate to determine the computer's new connectivity:

Another possible way is querying the NetworkListManager's properties:

 bool connected = _networkListManager.IsConnected;
 bool internet = _networkListManager.IsConnectedToInternet;

If you want to find out more information about a network or a network connection use on of the two ways to iterate through them:

foreach(INetworkConnection c in 
   _networkListManager.GetNetworkConnections())
{
}

foreach (INetwork n in _networkListManager.GetNetworks(
   NLM_ENUM_NETWORK.NLM_ENUM_NETWORK_ALL))
{
}

where you can chose the type of network (connected, disconnected, all) with the NLM_ENUM_NETWORK enumeration.

After having queried for a specific network (directly or via the connection) you can access several properties like the name, description, category (vista categories: public, private, work/domain), connectivity (none, IPv4, IPv6, Intranet, Internet, ...) or even set the name and description of it.

Caution: You cannot use the NetworkListManagerClass over different threads, but only out of the thread, which instantiated it!

If you like to, you can download an attached sample below!

Vista Command Link Control with C# / Windows Forms

knom — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 10:44:00 GMT

How to write a wrapper control for Windows Vista command links in Windows Forms / C#....(read more)

[Update] Big>Days 2007

knom — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 22:56:00 GMT

Hi!

Last week we tested our session in a 5pm - 11pm rehearsal.. Unfortunately we've found out: it is far too long. Unless you don't care spending > 2 hours we should shorten it up a little. So here's the plan: I threw out the UI and UAC stuff (I will post an entry on the UI stuff details tomorrow, so it's not lost) and Andreas will cut down the gadget demos to the really gadget specific parts!

So finally we will show: Gadgets, Vista Search Integration, Windows Error Reporting - also giving an overview of Vista Development in general and Web 2.0 / UX (and how gadgets can help to establish this).

This should fit into 70 minutes (although there will be little extra time left..)

SQL Server User Provisioning Tool for Vista

knom — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 15:35:59 GMT

After installing SQL Server 2005 or Express on Windows Vista you may have noticed, that your user accounts (even though being in the local computer's administrators group) are not allowed to connect to the SQL Server. Which is bad if you're not running in Mixed Mode...

With the newly released Service Pack 2 for SQL Server and SQL Express there is a new tool available called "User Provisioning Tool for Vista"
(%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Shared\sqlprov.exe).

This tool is automatically launched on upgrade (but can be started manually as well, if any errors occur at the first time). The small app tells us that, even if users are in the local administrator group, the don't have admin access to SQL Server for security reasons under Vista. You can use this tool to explicitly grant admin permissions to the current user (if it is in the local admin group).

God bless this tool :-) Now I am able to login again...