.NET From India

Vista System Calendar – Cool Feature

 

Most us have used the small calendar that pops-up when when you click the clock running on the system tray.  I don't know what this is officially called, so I am calling it the System Calendar (Not to be confused with Windows Calendar)

When you click on the clock a calendar comes up and I almost always use this when talking someone on a possible meeting date or appointment.

Last week when working with this calendar I came across a feature that I did not know existed and it was a surprisingly useful and cool feature (I am not sure if this a Vista feature or it existed in XP too and I don't have a XP machine now to check).

If you want to check the calendar of a different month, you can click those small arrows to move next or previous. Obviously this can become cumbersome if you need to move  more than a couple of months.

So once I clicked on the month,year displayed in the top and I got this animation that collapses the calendar and shows all the months. This is a feature that I have used multiple times now (especially when looking for Microsoft event dates etc, which are usually 4-6 months away).

Continuing to click on the top display collapses the calendar away till you reach the decades level.

This is indeed a very useful feature hidden away and most probably 90% of the Vista users do not even know about this feature.

 

Developer Notes

I was curious to see if this feature is available thru out the system or only in the system tray. The first area I tried was the Control Panel, Date and Time Setting. This was available there.

So I kind of curious to see if this was actually built into the control itself. The calendar is a common control available to the Windows developer. So if this feature is built into the common control, then everyone using the common control will actually get this feature.

So I tried writing a small .NET windows app.

This feature seems to be built into the Common Control set. So when I used the  DateTimePicker in my WinForm application, I had the same feature available in my application too.

Technorati Tags: Windows Vista,Date and Time,Common Control,Calendar Control

Telnet in Vista

Had some problems with my email box and I wanted to use telnet to do some initial checks.

But to my surprise I could not find Telnet on my box. It had been many many years since I have used telnet, but then I knew that it was part of XP.

So after some searching around I found that Vista actually does not install Telnet by default and that you need to enable it via Programs. Here are some steps to get it enabled:

1. Go to Control Panel->Programs.
2. Choose the option called "Windows features" or "Advanced ...."
3. Go inside these and look carefully you will find option to install telnet client

Then Vista will enable this and then once it completes you should have your command line telnet.

Getting Hibernate Back

Hibernate was perhaps the most important option on my old laptop as it had a very bad battery. So if I need to take it off power, I had to Hibernate.

After I got my new Laptop with Vista, I currently use Sleep, but I still missed Hibernate during some situations. Obviously I tried searching the first couple of days, then gave up as I never could find the option that was supposed to allow me to enable Hibernate.

I was working on some stuff on my blog redesign when I found a blog entry by Deepesh(why don't you enable trackbacks on your blog, Deepesh) that had a solution.

Open a Command Window with Admin Access (My preferred way, type cmd in Start->Search, right click the shortcut, then choose Run as Administrator)

Type

powercfg /hibernate on

That's it, you now have Hibernate on your shutdown options.

Vista SP1 - Experience

I have SP1 RTM running at my home machine for around 2 weeks now. There are any number of articles on the web on the changes, both on how many things are faster and some on app incompatibilities etc.

Looking at it purely from a end user perspective, SP1 is quite transperant from an experience perspective. Maybe things are a little faster, but not enough to actually be felt. I know a lot of file operations have become faster, but I don't copy/move files that often that I have actually noticed anything.

It does look to improve reliability, apart from nVidia driver crashes (which were present even before SP1), but then this maybe because of other factors too.

Is this good or bad?? Good in that it does not break any of my work and all those bug fixes are not affecting what I want to get done. I know it has not drastically changed stuff to make them better, but I prefer a SP that does not break and has minor improvements, to one that has major changes that may break stuff.

Vista SP1 Application Issues

If you are installing Vista SP1, then you maybe intersted in this KB Article that talks about some programs that do not work on SP1 and which may need a update.

Most of these are Firewall and AV software, so it is important that you take a look before you install SP1. Obviously, SP1 is not yet available to the end consumer and so this maynot be a major problem. But if you plan to play around with it and have access to it, then this is something you need to take care of.

Security Centre and WMI Repository

One of my machines runs Vista with AVG for antivirus. It has been running fine for around 6 months and then suddenly a couple of weeks back I started getting security centre warnings. When I go into Security center I find that AVG (my antivirus) is not recognized and so Vista says I don’t have any Anti-virus and it also says defender is off.

So I try turning on defender from SC and it shows up a windows saying checking for updates and kind of hangs there. When I look at Defender and AVG separately, I find both of them are running fine. After a bit of searching I found a couple of posts that talk about how the WMI repository being corrupt can popup such problems.

So I went ahead and run

winmgmt /verifyrepository

and sure enough it tells me that the repository is inconsistent. The way to repair the repository is to run

winmgmt /salvagerepository

There are quite a few posts in the internet on how this can fail multiple times and that you need to keep running this till it succeeds. It did fail the first time for me, but it did give the message that it had requested for a service to be stopped. So I kind of gave it 5 minutes and ran again. This time, it went through fine.

A reboot later, security centre was back to recognizing defender and AVG.

More information on winmgmt (From MSDN).

Vista Restore

Happy New Year 2008 to all the readers of my blog (or at least the few of you who have continued to visit/subscribe to my blog, given that I have not been a regular blogger the past couple of months)

Apart from my being kind of overwhelmed at office, one of the reasons for the silence is that my home machine conked out due to defective memory. After the memory was replaced, I found that during that time my Vista install has been corrupted and quite a few services were refusing to start up (including the Network Location service, which means I could not connect to any network). After a day spent searching the internet, I decided, it would be easier to just reinstall the OS. Since I did not want to reinstall all the other software, I decided I would do some kind of a repair install, thus just updating the OS file only.

The problem is, I could not find a way to do a repair install. The Vista Installation DVD just allows me to do a completely new install and the recovery console, just has options to check memory, repair a damaged boot record, do a system/backup restore or go to the command prompt. No OS repair option. I was stumped for quite some time. Then after some research, I found that there was an option on the Vista Installer to Upgrade to Vista and this can be used even if you are launching it from Vista. This option, when you use it from Vista, actually works like an OS Repair. Once that was done, my machine was back to normal like before.

Though it is not easy to find and I could not find too many documentation of this particular use of this feature, it sure worked fine for me. If you get into a similar situation, this post maybe of help. Do note, that after this reinstall, your Vista becomes deactivated and you will have to activate it as soon as you boot up first time. You do not get any grace time to activate. All other software (including Office) already installed seem to retain their activated state.

Vista DVD Security Features

One of my fellow MVPs forwarded this link, with the same question as in the post, "Who are the three men in the photo??"

Well, looks like Vista Blog has the answer Taking a detailed look at Windows Vista DVD hologram. You can also find the official MS site about the security features on the disc (though the photo is not mentioned).

Well, how many people get duped with copies of the original?? Well, I dont suppose many, atleast not when you go and buy a copy of Vista from a big retail electronics shop [If you are buying from a roadside vendor, I am sure you were not looking for the original version anyway..:)]. But I have seen things like this happen in the OEM channel though. You buy a PC from a local vendor and you pay for the full OS and the vendor tries to make a quick buck by giving you a pirated copy.

UI Concept - Moving files

One of my fellow MVPs Saurabh has come up with a Concept UI for moving file in explorer. If you are moving a lot of files with explorer and using the mouse, then this does make a lot to sense. I think this is a very logical way to sort the problem and am suprised it is not already in the product. But then, this may not be a very common scenario that MS has come across when doing their UI testing.

Well for me, personally I always use the keyboard, as I find it easier and faster than doing it with the mouse. For the more complex file based operations I use the good old Command Shell..:) (One of the most common things for which I have to use cmd is for renaming multiple files as explorer does not have a provision for that)

Tweaking Windows Vista

One of my fellow MVPs, Vishal Gupta, posted a list of Vista Tweak utilities that are available. I decided to take a preliminary look at these share the list here:

Tweak VI http://www.totalidea.com/content/tweakvi/tweakvi-index.html - Free basic version with additional plug-ins being charged

Vista Manager - http://www.yamicsoft.com/vistamanager/index.html - Commercial Version only - 15 day trial available

TweakVista - http://www.tweakvista.com/tweakvistautility/ - Free utility, seems simple but does have a forum with a lot of tweak information

DTweak - http://www.daoisoft.com/index.html - Free and commercial version available

TuneUp Utilities - http://www.tune-up.com/ - Commercial Version Only - Free trial available