RocketDock!

Earlier I blogged about ObjectDock and their Flyout Menus, but there is another application which is really better and good 8)

It is RocketDock . Its sure better than ObjectDock in terms of Performance and memory usage. And there is lot more to enjoy RocketDock! The Mac Leopard Fan and Grid menu!

Here are some screenshots,

Grid

Fan

Windows Server 2008 and Vista SP1 are now RTM

                             

After a long wait, Microsoft today announced that Windows Server 2008 and Vista SP1 are now RTM!

Windows Server 2008 is available in Connect for a small time period of 30 days (without product keys though) and in MSDN/TechNet subscriptions from today, but Vista SP1 will only be available to public from mid of March. But that said, even we Beta Testers haven’t received our Vista SP1 copy yet 8)

Cant wait to install final Vista SP1 😀

Geekzone Blogs Vista Gadget

If you are regular visitor of Geekzone forums and blogs, then along with the already available Geekzone Forums gadget, you will find my Geekzone Blogs gadget too useful 8)

I developed it based on the forums gadget. Below are some screenshots,

Gadget docked

Gadget undocked,

Flyout window showing the contents of the feed (post)

(Click for a full view)

Please feel free to download and use it 🙂

Instant Viewer with Microsoft Presenter 8000 Mouse rocks!

Everyone likes the Apple Mac’s Expose feature and wondered why Vista didn’t bring it on along with Windows Flip 3D 😀

Well, today I found a function with my Microsoft Notebook Presenter 8000 Mouse that there is a function called Instant Viewer that does the same thing and you can bind any one of the mouse buttons to it (Thanks to David 😉 )! It works great and looks great! Wonder why this isn’t present by default in Windows Vista 😦

Here is a screenshot,

(Click for full view)

8)

Windows Vista Facts

I am not sure whether this page is there from the beginning, but I found this today via Neowin – Windows Vista: Facts 

I do agree with those Facts 8)

Microsoft ads comes to Youtube

Yes, its late, but not too late 😉

Windows Vista and Liv@youtube

SystemIcons.Shield Icon

Daniel Moth has blogged about the new SystemIcons.Shield icon added to the set of System.Drawing.SystemIcons collection. This new Shield icon can be used to display whenever an admin task is required to be carried out. You would be familiar with this icon if you are using Vista. For example – If you open the Indexing Options dialog box in Vista,

You can see the Advanced button has the Shield icon in it which indicates that it would be an admin task.

You can refer to Daniel’s post on how to add the Shield icon to Windows Forms application

If you want to add to an Image control in a WPF application, all you have to do is set the Image‘s Source property to a BitmapSource. You can create the BitmapSource object from an Icon as shown below 🙂

BitmapSource source = System.Windows.Interop.Imaging.CreateBitmapSourceFromHIcon
    (SystemIcons.Shield.Handle,
     Int32Rect.Empty, System.Windows.Media.Imaging.BitmapSizeOptions.FromEmptyOptions());

this.MyImage.Source = source;

And you can see something similar,

Using ExtendGlass

Few months back I wrote about my small library which helps to enable Glass effects in your WPF applications. Today lets see how we could really make use of it in order to get displays like – a portion of your window has glass effects and the rest dont. Best example to take is Windows Media Player

You should be aware that the WMP has the glass effects enabled at the bottom as seen in the above screenshot.

So how does our sample application going to look like? Below is the screenshot 🙂

Not so bad, but we did achieve to have the upper portion without glass and rest with glass 😉

So, what needs to be done to get something like this? Very simple,

1) Decide the margin M for which you are going to enable glass
2) Clip the part of the window W which you don’t want to enable glass to that margin M
3) Give a good background to that part of the Window W

In my above sample, below is the code where I enable the glass interface,

private void Window_SourceInitialized(object sender,EventArgs e)

{

      Thickness margin = new Thickness();

      margin.Top = 0;

      margin.Left = 20;

      margin.Right = 20;

      margin.Bottom = StackPanelTop.Width;

      ExtendGlassFrame extendGlass =

                new ExtendGlassFrame();

      extendGlass.Extend(this, margin);

}

Notice that I have set my bottom margin to my StackPanel’s width property. Its just some funky logic placed there 😉

And the XAML looks like,

<StackPanel Name="StackPanelTop" Margin="20,0,20,50" Grid.Row="0"
        Background="Lavender" Height="100" Orientation="Horizontal" >
        <Button  Content="No Glass" Background="AliceBlue" Width="80" Height="25"
                HorizontalAlignment="Center"  Margin="9,0,0,0"/>
        <Button  Content="No Glass" Background="AliceBlue" Width="80" Height="25"
                HorizontalAlignment="Center" Margin="10,0,0,0"  />
</StackPanel>
 <StackPanel Grid.Row="1" Orientation="Horizontal" HorizontalAlignment="Center">
       <Button  Content="Transparent!" Background="Transparent"
               Width="80" Height="25"/>
       <Button  Content="Transparent!" Background="Transparent"
               Width="80" Height="25"   Margin="10,0,0,0"/>
</StackPanel>

So, its some funky logic used here, but I wanted to show that having some logic for your User Interface, you could easily create wonders 😉

You asked for it, and here it is :)

As I had posted earlier that Vista SP1 RC will be available to everyone for download, Microsoft released it today 🙂

You can grab the RC Windows Update script here

Believe it or not, Windows Update has been the best and easiest way to get Vista SP1. We beta testers have had good success installing SP1 Beta releases and RC via WU.

You may be required to install at least 3 updates before the Service Pack. After installing those pre-requisites, restart your machine (if required), wait for at least 10 mins or so and then check for updates again. You should be prompted for Service Pack update.

To discuss regarding SP1 and to submit bugs, please visit here

Vista SP1 RC – IE and other native applications getting reset to defaults

UPDATE: This has been fixed, infact the Beta team was not able to reproduce too!

This is bothering many – After installing Vista SP1 RC, some or most of the IE settings and Windows Media Player settings are reset to defaults. Users have reported on IE and Windows Media Player, hope the list stays to these both 😉

Here are mine,

1) IE settings such as Security Settings and Addon got reset and my Flash, Quicktime and Kaspersky Internet Security Web Statistics plugins stopped working and had to reinstall them to see them working (didnt reinstall Kaspersky though)

2) My default DVD/CD player got changed to Windows Media Player

For some, the whole IE settings including Home Page, Favorites got reset. And you can add Java plugin to the plugins list as for some Java plugin stopped working too.

We beta testers have passed the information to Vista SP1 team, hope it will be corrected in the final version 🙂