Marcelo's WebLog : Windows

Microsoft Web Platform & You

marcelolr — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 22:00:00 GMT

If you build web sites and applications, you owe it to yourself to check out the resources at http://www.microsoft.com/web/ and to subscribe to the feed of the team blog to keep up to date with tools and capabilities. No reason to pass up on free software or to avoid leveraging the software you already have.

Enjoy!

Windows 7 - 7 Second Demos

marcelolr — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 22:37:00 GMT

Very, very cute of showing off some new Windows love - it even fits my attention span.

http://www.microsoft.com/en/us/default.aspx

Don't know if this will still be around a few months from now, so for future reference, these are "7 second demos".

XmlLite says: error C2146: syntax error : missing ';' before identifier 'IXmlReader'

marcelolr — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT

This is something that I've been asked more than once, and so here goes an answer that might help if you run into this.

Let's say that you create a new project and borrow code or do something of the sort, and suddenly start getting an error message such as this one

xmllite.h(49) : error C2146: syntax error : missing ';' before identifier 'IXmlReader'

This typically points to a missing macro. You can fix this by adding this to your include headers:

#include "objbase.h"

If you're using Visual C++-style projects, this may already be included via stdafx.h including the Windows headers for you.

How to set an XML attribute to an integer

marcelolr — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 01:00:00 GMT

Edward discusses how to set an integer in the MSXML APIs in this thread. I wanted to provide the snippet of code necessary to do this on an attribute, using the very awesome wrappers generated by the Visual C++ #import directive.

The catch is that becausae a VARIANT is passed in, you can actually use other variant types that can be converted to a string. Here it goes.

#include <windows.h>
#include <iostream>
#include <iomanip>
#import "msxml6.dll"

... 

void sample()
{
  CoInitialize(0);

  {
    MSXML2::IXMLDOMDocument2Ptr the_document;
    the_document.CreateInstance(__uuidof(MSXML2::DOMDocument60));

    _variant_t val(3);
    MSXML2::IXMLDOMElementPtr the_element = the_document->createElement(L"doc");
    the_document->documentElement = the_element;
    the_element->setAttribute(L"attribute", val);

    // Output:
    //
    // XML:
    // <doc attribute="3"/>
    std::wcout << L"XML:" << std::endl << the_document->xml;
  }

  CoUninitialize();
}

Note that all interfaces will be released, and even the BSTR returned by the xml property is wrapper in a _bstr_t, so it's released when it goes out of scope. In fact, the extra pair of curly braces are there to make sure that everything gets release before the call to CoUninitialize.

Enjoy!

Gorgeous typography in Windows 7

marcelolr — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 01:00:00 GMT

Gorgeous text is something I have long been passionate about. This recent Engineering Windows 7 blog post talks about Windows 7 improvements in text rendering and typography.

I love the variations on the Gabriola font, and the stuff they do with the Valentines sample is amazing - note how the beginning-of-word and end-of-word flourishes change depending on whether the word is at the beginning, middle or end of the line. Very cool.

A big shout out to Worachai, who worked with text rendering on WPF/Avalon many years ago, back when I was testing text editing (and we had all sorts of fun trying to figure out what the correct placement and size for the text box caret should be with highly stylized text).

Enjoy!

Kylie - rookie superstar

marcelolr — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 01:00:00 GMT

In case you haven't seen the ads on TV, it turns out that Kylie (4 1/2) can you show in a few seconds of ultra-cuteness how to auto-correct a picture and send it to your family.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/rookies/kylie4/

So long FolderShare - hello Windows Live Sync

marcelolr — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 01:00:00 GMT

In case you haven't heard, FolderShare will be going into retirement at some point, and Windows Live Sync, to be announced next month, will be the software you'll probable want to move to.

For more details, the announcement is on the FolderShare site here:

http://www.foldershare.com/syncpro.htm

Also, if you're a user of FolderShare you've probably received an email by now, although mine got stuck in my Junk Mail folder for some reason.

Note: No, I don't work for FolderShare nor Windows Live Sync - I'm just a happy user. I thought I'd pass the word along, though.

And if you're looking for something along the lines of "keeping stuff in sync", don't forget to look at SyncToy, which may cover your needs as well, in particular anything that has to do with keeping files and folders in sync.

AtBroker.exe failed to initialize properly message

marcelolr — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 01:00:00 GMT

If you get this error message while logging in to a Windows Vista computer using Terminal Services, here is the magic sauce.

http://blogs.msdn.com/spatdsg/archive/2007/03/14/atbroker-exe-application-error.aspx

I don't know anything about the problem to be honest, but the solution (Ctrl+Alt+End, log off, cancel log-off if there's any prompting) has worked for me, so I thought I'd pass the link along...