Development Dan's Blog

The one thing that bugs me about Google Chrome is its fairly poor bookmark management.  It turns out I’m not the only one:

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=45365

It’s currently #37 on the issues list, so could do with a bump up if anyone’s got the time to vote.

Just saw this over on Engadget.  Looks like the Optimus Maximus could have some interesting competition:

Well, I’ve not posted in ages, but this is just too awesome to not call up.  If you’re a developer, watch and drool:

http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/acb/codebubbles_site.htm

Just noticed over on the Virtual Earth blog, that Microsoft have bought over Caligari which gives them access to their range of tools including trueSpace.  What’s interesting about this is they’re now giving trueSpace away for free.

That’s certainly very generous of them.  Wonder if this has anything to with playing catch up with Google SketchUp?

Now that SP1 is rolling out, you may have noticed that Vista is ignoring your hi-res customised boot logos and using its own one.  Sadly, SP1 has disabled the trick we’ve been using to replace the logos, so we’re pretty much stuck with the lame default one for the moment grrrrrr.  You can still replace the old 16 colour 640×480 logos, but they suck!

To summarise the situation:

• The hi-res boot logos are contained within a resource (a .wim file) within winload.exe.
• You can’t patch winload.exe directly because its digital signature is verified during boot.
• Prior to SP1 we could get round the digital signature check by adding the the logos to winload.exe’s associated MUI file – winload.exe.mui.  In SP1 this no longer works

Anyone got any ideas how to get round this?

Microsoft have been on a roll releasing new techologies lately, but from a developer prespective, the Entity Framework looks like it’s going to be the most exciting and genuinely useful technology in years.

Channel 9 have got a great video on the current progress as well as a demo.

I especially liked the part where they hooked their project up to an Astoria service and immediately made their app accessible over the web

Just came across a really cool post on thewpfblog showing how a WPF application can be controlled using the input from external sensors!

This definitely looks like something I’d like to play with!  Check it out (and follow the link to the video on the Content Presenter site):

 http://thewpfblog.com/?p=89

Update: Wow, I’m really impressed with the response time of the triage team on Connect.  They acknowledged the bug same day and are already looking into a resolution.  That really is first class support.  Thanks guys!

Just ran into a rather annoying bug in WinForms.  You’ve got a ContextMenuStrip which is shared by a number of controls on your form.  When the user right clicks one of the controls, and chooses an item in the context menu, the SourceControl property of the ContextMenuStrip is supposed to be set to the control that you right clicked on.

This works fine if you have a flat context menu, but if your context menu has sub-menus, and you click one of those items, then the SourceControl property is always null!

If this bug affects or annoys you, please vote for it here:

https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=282496

Thanks to everyone who took the time to send in feedback and bug reports.  I’ve updated Vista Boot Logo Generator to v1.1 which includes a couple of bug fixes and new features.

To anyone having problems with blank screens during boot, this should now be fixed.  Vista is quite picky about the format of your source BMPs, so the images are now being processed internally by the tool so that they behave.  You can now also drag and drop your images directly onto the application to save a few clicks.

You can download the latest version for Vista x86 RTM here:

Vista Boot Logo Generator v1.2 (BETA) (30th Jan 07 Updated version to 1.2)

I know a lot of people were disappointed by the lack of a decent boot logo in Vista, so I’ve thrown together a tool that should simplify the process of creating the new high resolution boot logos!

Your works of art need to be saved as 24-bit BMPs, and you’ll need to create them in two sizes: 800×600 and 1024×768.  On my machine the boot logo always defaults to 1024×768, but I assume the 800×600 version automatically kicks in if your graphics card is rubbish   Once you’ve selected your two images, just click File -> “Save Boot Screen File As…” and it will generate the logo file.  To make the logo come up during boot, you’ll need to copy the file to the following folder: 

%windir%\System32\en-US

You’ll also need to make sure the /NOGUIBOOT option is enabled in the MSCONFIG tool, otherwise you’ll only get the old 16 colour boot screen.  For full details, make sure you read the info during setup.

Download Vista Boot Logo Generator BETA 1.2

IMPORTANT: It’s still beta and there may be bugs so use at your own risk, and make sure you backup first!