Marius Bancila’s Blog

MSDN Code Gallery made available an update for the Windows API Code Pack for .NET Framework 3.5 (or above), a library that provides access to some Window 7 features and some existing features in previous operating systems. It includes:

• Windows 7 Taskbar Jump Lists, Icon Overlay, Progress Bar, Tabbed Thumbnails, and Thumbnail Toolbars.
• Known Folders, Windows 7 Libraries, non-file system containers, and a hierarchy of Shell Namespace entities.
• Windows 7 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
• ommand Link control and System defined Shell icons.

The requirements for using this library are:

• .NET Framework 3.5
• Windows 7 RC (some features work on previous operating systems too)
• DirectX features have dependency on Windows SDK for Windows 7 RC and March 2009 release of DirectX SDK

You can download the Code Pack library from here.

Visual Studio 2010, currently in beta 1, replaces VCBuild with MSBuild as the build system, aligning C++ with the other languages that already used MSBuild. The VC++ team has already posted several articles on it’s blog about the new build system. Channel 9 has published recently a video with Bogdan Mihalcea, a developer in the VC++ build and system project team, talking about MSBuild. You can watch the video here.

In a recent post I wrote about Code Contracts in .NET. Now you can find a more detailed article on this topic at sharparena.com. In this article I’m providing more information and examples on:

• pre-conditions
• post-conditions
• object invariants
• asserts and assumptions
• quantifiers

In additions, you should check the official user documentation, which can be found here.

Google has unveil the next product they will launch later this year. It’s called Wave and it’s a communication protocol. It’s like the email of the 21st century, but much more than that. Wave is a collaborative product. The waves are communication objects, both conversation and documents, allowing people to almost instantly communicate on the web.

Waves allow people to send emails, but do it in an instant messaging style, sharing media like pictures and movies and being able to see live what the others are typing or sharing, and playback the entire conversation.

Wave is also an open source platform for building blogging sites or discussion groups. It provides APIs for collaboratively editing documents, building games (and playing back the moves), integrating with other communication systems (like twitter) and others.

To see what wave actually is, see this preview.

You can learn more about the waves here and here.

There is a new search engine in town. It’s called Bing, and was created by Microsoft. Looks like they are going to invest massively in advertising it; according to AdAge, it will be between 80 and 100 million dollars.

You can find a short video here, with Stefan Weitz, the director of Windows Live, talking about what this new search engine bring new.

In addition you can find an article about comparison searches with Bing and Google, here.

Go Bing!