The Moth

I am never happy when I learn about Microsoft things after they have hit the public (I thought one of the perks of working here is that I get to hear about these things in advance). Anyway, that is probably (if not definitely!) my fault.

* So the good news is that VB6 is basically supported on Vista from both an IDE and a runtime perspective. I didn’t know that probably because I don’t have a personal interest, but no doubt good news for those still in that world.

* We have now opened up a Beta release of SP1 for VS2005 (I knew about this one). This will not address all VS2005 issues on Vista (I didn’t know that, but admittedly, the issues are minor).

* The big news however for many of you and I am sure this will be discussed widely over the next few days: Visual Studio .NET 2002 and VS.NET 2003 will not be supported on Windows Vista.

Feel free to discuss these here.

Vista has a great mobility story for both the end user and the developer. By "mobility" here I mean the mobile PC (i.e. laptop/notebook, tabletpc, umpc). If you followed my Vista links, you’ll have come across the top 10 developer calls to action and number 10 on the list is: build for mobility.

One of the features I call out at my developer sessions is being power aware. Nobody likes a mobile PC that overheats and more importantly one that quickly runs out of battery; so you don't want your application to be the culprit that users point the finger at. When the user changes to a "power saver" plan, your app should respect it. When the user has pulled the cable and is running on battery, respect it! “Respect” means acting accordingly and consuming fewer resources avoiding unnecessary cpu intensive activities and thus saving battery life. Doing that, will allow your users to use your app for longer :)

To read more about being power aware, please visit the following 3 links:
- There is an msdn page here.
- There is also a nice article by Neil Roodyn here.
- You can follow links from the msdn page to a great Visual Studio solution that demonstrates what you have to do (direct link to exe here).

Once you download the lab (from my 3rd link above), browse to "\VISTA_POWER_CS\Lab 4 completed" and open "Vista Power Management" project. When you run it, it looks like this. Check it out, it is good :-)

I usually demo a very tiny subset of what is shown there. So if you've been to one of my talks and want my inferior demo, you may download the zip here. Run it on Vista, change your power plan and watch how the application responds. Do the same by pulling your power cable (note: do not pull your power cable if you are on a PC instead of a mobile PC! :-))

To programmatically use search, I've already mentioned that as a managed developer you should be looking at Catherine Heller's blog and nothing has changed. From there you can find a whole bunch of useful info including the relevant links to msdn and the windows sdk. I am not repeating them here 'cause I really want you to visit the source and learn :-)

So the point of this blog post is simply to share with you the sample I use in my sessions when demoing how to search from your applications. Download the zip here.

After you build the VS2005 solution, when you run the app, you'll see the following in the textbox:
SELECT <columns> FROM SYSTEMINDEX..SCOPE() [WHERE <predicates>]

To start with replace it with this (and hit the button to see the results in the datagrid):
SELECT "System.FileName", "System.Size", "System.DateModified", "System.ItemType" FROM SYSTEMINDEX..SCOPE() WHERE "Directory"='file:c:\Windows\System32' ORDER BY "System.ItemType"

As I said, to learn more about the OleDb provider connection string and the query syntax, follow links from my previous Vista Search blog post.

Off topic post, not even a pinch of technical content

Anyone that knows me can tell you that I am not into fitness/gym or any of that stuff at all (I've been to the gym twice in my entire life). When younger I was good with sports (e.g. football, basketball) and was in the school team and also played with colleagues at previous employment. However, in the last 13 months I have not played any sports (SCUBA doesn't count I guess) and today Jenny finally convinced me to do some exercise and she dragged me away from the laptop.

She signed us up for a trial at this thing here in the UK called British Military Fitness[1] where they tell you what to do, for 1 hour, outdoors in the park. Shocking! I thought I was going to die!! My ears where buzzing and you could fry an egg on my head. I am sure my heart stopped at one point. In fact, I've seen in films where people push themselves so far that they throw up... I never understood that, but today I came close... very close!! Needless to say I am not going back there again!

Having said that, if you think you are fit, give it a shot (they are all over the UK and also partner with a US company). Alternatively, play a prank on someone you don't like and buy them a voucher. If anybody is expecting a Xmas gift from me, now you know what it will be ;-)

[1] BMF

This is old news (12 days to be precise), but I just came across it. This guy writes a farewell letter to the Microsoft world on his blog. The poor fella describes how he has had the misfortune of working with developers that are not passionate about their job (what I call the 9-to5ers, what he calls DayCoders). He then concludes that it must be all Microsoft developers that do not love their jobs (!) and hence he has now switched to open source, mac etc so he can work with talented developers.

In the dictionary, under "unjustified giant logical leap" there should be a link to his blog post. (or maybe it is a great marketing move on his behalf to attract sympathy from the non-Microsoft friendly crowd... who knows...)

Here are some choice quotes from his post:

"...the word Consultant sounded so wonderfully romantic to me and I wondered if ever I'd make it there as one of the elite band..."

"...I found myself surrounded by power hungry muppets, the odd idiot, a few downright liars (the practice director in particular being one of them), and only a smattering of the elite coders I dreamed I'd find there..."

"...over and over I'd be lambasted for being too passionate (a condition muppets refer to as arrogance)..."

His blog entry attracted almost 300 comments! Read it for yourselves and, as an aside, get someone else's opinion on Avanade (but wear your laughing hat :-D).

I followed the launch link from Mike's blog and, unless I am reading too much into it, the official product name for the next version of Windows CE is... (drum roll)...

Windows Embedded CE 6.0

By now you know about the MSDN nuggets, of course.

Well, they finally published the one I did on Vista glass so you can watch/download it following the instructions from the link above.

This is a superset to the one I did for channel9. The additional 7 minutes are there to describe the feature and for a couple of slides (that I stripped out from the channel9 version).

Please note that, since Vista RC1, achieving glass through the TransparencyKey does not work anymore for Windows Forms (so ignore those 3 minutes in the video). The other two approaches are fine though :-)

Finally, for an overview of the DWM APIs see Greg Schechter's post.

Someone asked me about the different Windows Vista editions and what will be included in each one and I promised an answer on this blog...

If you download the product guide (item 1 link from here) you'll find section 2 dedicated to this topic (start at page 7).

First it describes the 6 SKUs as follows:
For Consumers: Home Basic, Home Premium, Ultimate
For Business: Business, Enterprise
For Consumer in Emerging Markets: Starter

You can then find a table on page 13 that summarizes the SKUs by customer segment, a table on page 14 that summarizes the SKUs by sales channel and a table on page 15 that compares the Windows XP SKUs with the Windows Vista SKUs.

Best of all, from page 16 to 20, there is a matrix of features against editions! (there may be an inaccuracy or two in there but overall it should give you a good head start before RTM).

Also of use may be these pages help and getready.

At most of my sessions on Vista I make the assertion that everyone has switched to .NET 2.0 and usually I get everybody nodding, but last week someone said:
"No, because it is not supported on Windows XP embedded".

I didn't know that at the time, but looking at the fountain of all knowledge (aka MSDN) I found this download that contradicts that statement: .NET 2.0 for XPe

While following links from the XPe site I also found a chat from a month ago about the longest product name ever:
"Windows XP Embedded Service Pack 2 Feature Pack 2007 Community Technology Preview"

What makes it even funnier is that besides the "2007" in its title, it is actually scheduled for release this year :-))

If you read this, that and the other, you'll know that I’ve been a headless chicken over the last 8 days. What you may not know is that I also suffered a hardware problem with my laptop, that my car got clamped at the worst possible moment (but that is a story for another day) and that I had an inexplicable electrical power failure in my flat!

I was hoping to rest a bit today but then I realised that I have to upload my slides for my Tech Ed sessions by tomorrow (sorry, that will never happen) and set a machine up for the Roadshow next Tuesday (yes we are doing it at TVP again, register now).

Anyway, in case you haven't come across this yet, I thought I'd pass on a link to jim's letter to Vista developers.