How to determine what CLR versions are installed using C++

You may have multiple versions of the .NET framework installed and used on your machine. The framework has two components: the set of assemblies that provide functionalities for your application, and the common language runtime (CLR) that handles the execution of the application. These two components are versioned separately. If you what to see what…

Changing Windows password complexity requirements

I recently encountered a problem creating new logins with SQL Server. Something that has worked for years suddenly stopped with the following error: Password validation failed. The password does not meet Windows policy requirements because it is too short. Since SQL Server was using Windows local security policy I went and checked that at Security…

CRT Refactored in Visual Studio “14”

Visual Studio “14” CTP ships with a refactored C Runtime. The first thing you’ll notice is that msvcrXX.dll has been replaced by three new DLLs: appcrtXX.dll, desktopcrtXX.dll and vcruntimeXX.ddl (where XX stands for the version number so in this version it’s appcrt140.dll, desktopcrt140.dll and vcruntime140.dll). You can see in this image that both desktopcrt140.dll and…

You Chemical Name – My First Windows Store App

My first Windows Store app (for Window 8.1) is now available in Windows Store. It’s called Your Chemical Name and shows names (and text) using chemical elements symbols in the Breaking Bad style. The application allows to: customize the appearance of text, colors, background customize the position of the text on the background save image…

Working with the Settings Charm for Windows 8.1 Store Applications

Windows 8 features a Settings charm to display both application (the top part) and system (the bottom part) settings (you get it from swiping from the side of the screen). The system provides two entry points, Permissions and Rate and Review, the later only for applications installed through the store. You can customize the settings…

Render the screen of a Windows Store App to a bitmap in Windows 8.1

In WPF, Silverlight and Windows Phone it is possible to render a visual object into a bitmap using the RenderTargetBitmap. This functionality, that I find pretty basic, was not available for Windows Store applications. Fortunately, Windows 8.1 provides that functionality for Windows Store applications too, through the same RenderTargetBitmap class. There are some limitations though:…

cppconlib: A C++ library for working with the Windows console

This project has been moved to GitHub. New location: https://github.com/mariusbancila/cppconlib Many years ago I published on my blog a helper class for working with the Windows console that was wrapping the Windows console API. Looking back at it I realized it was a pretty naive implementation. So I decided to start a new and make…