About code. Mostly on C++
Microsoft has made available the release candidates for the new Windows and the new Visual Studio tool set. Some of the products have been renamed: Windows Server 2012 is the new name for Windows 8 “Server” Visual Studio 2012 is the new name for Visual Studio 11 MSDN subscribers can download them from their account. … Read more
Dear Microsoft, I have recently read the two blog posts about the new “developer experience” with Visual Studio 11 (part 1 and part 2). I don’t have the IDE yet (since the beta will be made available on February 29), but from the blog posts I see that you once again changed the look and … Read more
If you tried the Win8 Developer Preview and built WinRT components (native or managed) you noticed the .winmd files. The name stands for Windows Meta Data and the format of these files is the same used by the .NET framework for the CLI, i.e. ECMA-335. That means you can actually read these files with a … Read more
Windows Runtime, or shortly WinRT, is a new runtime (siting on top of the Windows kernel) that allows developers to write Metro style applications for Windows 8, using a variety of languages including C/C++, C#, VB.NET or JavaScript/HTML5. Microsoft has started rolling out information about Windows 8 and the new runtime at BUILD. WinRT is … Read more
It is possible to register both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the same COM server on 64-bit machine. This leads to several questions such as how are they registered and which one of the two is used. I will try to answer them below. But first, let’s start with an example. Example Let’s say we … Read more
I’m sometimes asked what browsers do I use and why. I use Firefox and Chrome, 95% of the time, and IE for those few Microsoft sites that are specially designed to work only with IE. Here is a story that shows an argument why I use those two. A few days ago I used my … Read more
For several months, after I installed Windows 7 at home I had a very annoying problem: whenever I was writing double quotes (“) or single quotes (‘) in some text editors and all browsers, the quotes did not appear. Only after I was typing another character, then both the opening and the closing quotes were … Read more
In my previous post I wrote about a feature called “god mode” available in Windows 7 and Vista. By creating a folder with a specific name you get one entry point to all the commands available in Control Panel. It was reported that several such shortcuts exits. Below is an image with the 16 folders … Read more
There has been some buzz in the last few days about a feature in Windows 7 called “God mode”. Well, it doesn’t empower you as a God but allows you to access all the nested features available in Control Panel from a single entry point. All you have to do is creating a folder (or … Read more
Windows 7 RTM and Windows Server 2008 R2 RTM are now available for download on MSDN for MSDN and TechNet subscribers. Currently, the only available bits are in English. The other languages will become available on October 1st. Volume License customers with an existing Software Assurance license will be able to download the bits starting … Read more