Am creating an application where i need to disable/override the hardware start button on a windows 8 tab.Can anyone write down a small piece of code and list the libraries that i have to refer?
You can't do that. It isn't something you can control from an app.
Also, even if you do manage to find some way to do it, you will almost certainly fail certification and your app won't be available in the store.
First welcome to stack overflow. People here are awesome at helping you in a pinch. That said, if you want someone to just lay down fresh code for you you're better off at http://www.freelancer.com
Also, windows phone OS is one of the most secure, consistent OS on the market. Manipulation of the start button destroys this consistency and is prohibited. I would suggest reviewing the MSDN documentation for certification requirements.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsphone/develop/hh184843(v=vs.105).aspx
I know when I install most legacy installers I seem to get a boat load of shortcuts that I then have to unpin. However I recently tried using the util:InternetShortcut element and I got the opposite. I had to search the start screen to find the items to pin. Strangely the Bing1 showed up and I was able to pin it but the Bing2 shortcut did not show up as available. (Edit: Bing2 is showing up now. Weird)
This is kind of a broad question... but what do I need to know here in a Windows 8 world? I'm working in an enterprise IT environment currently and I'm being asked to come up with a strategy of managing the start screen for users and one of the tools I was researching was MSI based installers.
One of the high level requirements I have is to be able to create shortcuts to websites and configure the icon for the shortcut. This seems to be supported by .url files but not supported by util:InternetShortcut. (Edit: The shortcut seems to auto-sync with the target webpage.)
<util:InternetShortcut Id="test1" Directory="ProgramMenuFolder" Name="Bing1" Target="http://www.bing.com" Type="url"/>
<util:InternetShortcut Id="test2" Directory="ProgramMenuFolder" Name="Bing2" Target="http://www.bing.com" Type="link"/>
Explicitly setting the icon and other pieces of a URL shortcut isn't supported by InternetShortcut today. It would be possible but the WiX custom action code just doesn't implement it today. Probably wouldn't take much effort.
As for default pinning, I expect it's a difference between the way the shortcuts are being created in the WiX custom action vs the way the Windows Installer creates shortcuts. The WiX CA is very, very simple and isn't initializing data in the IPropertyStore which is probably why it is ignored by the Start Screen. Again, not to hard to implement but not available today.
I have a working vb.net project which runs successfully on my host computer through the console. I've published it, installed it on other computers, and run it successfully on those machines. I have installed xampp which is necessary for the php to run behind the scenes as well, and again, everything runs perfectly.
However, this morning, I went to install it on another computer and something weird occurred. One of the labels on the window, overlapped into a text field. This sounds somewhat harmless, but the result was that the user could not use the text field, and so the app will not work.
Basically my question then is, is there some way to limit the formatting so that it will work on all computers? (I find this odd to ask, since the questionable computer is a windows 64 bit operating system as is the computer's I've installed on and the computer I'm currently on)
It sounds like the DPI settings are causing your issue. You can verify this by changing the DPI settings back to 100%, restart the computer and see if it makes any difference. See this Link on how you can change your DPI settings.
I can't give you a straight up answer on how you can solve this issue that you are experiencing. But I am going to give you a lead to how you can solve it.
See the links below for two other threads on the issue:
Creating a DPI-Aware Application
How do I detect if the user's font (DPI)...
Some more information on the matter:
Creating an application that will scale correctly on other computers will depend if you have written the application in 100% DPI yourself. If you have not, then you might experience issues downscaling or upscaling the application size to fit other DPI settings.
You want the application to scale depending on user settings. You can use the following code to do so:
Public Sub New()
InitializeComponent()
Me.AutoScaleMode = AutoScaleMode.Dpi
Me.AutoSize = True
End Sub
Keep in mind, this will scale the current form, you will have to do the same for all other forms that you have in your application. See bullet-point link 2 for more information on this.
If you have used containers such as Panel, TableLayoutPanel, etc. whilst creating your form, you will have a better time making the form fit the other DPI settings. (I know this from personal experience with application scaling.)
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Every morning, after logging into your machine, you do a variety of routine stuffs.
The list can include stuffs like opening/checking your email clients, rss readers, launching visual studio, running some business apps, typing some replies, getting latest version from Source Control, compiling, connecting to a different domain etc. To a big extend, we can automate using scripting solutions like AutoIt, nightly jobs etc.
I would love to hear from you geeks out there for the list of stuffs you found doing repeatedly and how you solved it by automating it. Any cool tips?
I use Linux. I have a bunch of scripts that do anything I want. Typically I write a script whenever a "block" of work can be reused in the future. For example, simple refactorings, deployments, etc...
Over time I started to combine these blocks, hence getting ever more efficient.
Regarding the "load stuff at startup", under Linux that comes out of the box (you can "save your current session" when you log out or turn off the computer).
On windows, my suggestion is to use programs that can be automated via command line.
A favorite way is to leave the computer on at night or better, if it's a laptop, put it to sleep. Running a web browsing virtual machine in VMware or similar works also, you can set the VM start along with the machine and save its state on shutdown, so your web pages and email client stay open. This works for development also if you're doing scripting or something similar where the performance hit of the VM on large compiles won't negate the benefits.
SlickRun is very handy for this, just a few keys to navigate to anything common and a very small footprint. With input variables and file path recognition all part of it I can quick remote desktop to any machine, search anything, pull up whatever's needed.
On OS X, I have an Applescript that I run at the beginning of the day. It sets an away message on IM, hides or quits programs that would distract me, gets new mail, and so forth. I also plug in my USB backup disk, so when I'm going home, another script ejects it and quits some programs. When the script is done, so am I.
I invoke these scripts with key combos using Quicksilver.
If you don't have a Mac, by the way, Quicksilver and Applescript are probably the #1 and #2 reasons to switch. Between the two of them, you can tell your computer to do practically anything you want in very short order.
Use a good app launcher such as Quicksilver or Launchy to cut down on the time it takes to perform simple tasks. They're usually not scriptable, but they do let you do each step faster.
Writing shell scripts (Applescript, Bash, PowerShell, etc..) is a great way to automate most mundane tasks, assuming your apps are scriptable, as well as pick up a new language. As you venture further into this practice, you'll find yourself more and more annoyed at the apps you use that aren't scriptable, to the point where it starts to affect your choice of apps ;-)
Also, consider a cron job, Windows scheduled task, or similar OS X analog to automatically run certain tasks at certain times of day/week/month/year. You can use this for anything from the "workday morning" scripts mentioned previously, to reminding you of your wife's birthday and anniversary every year. There's some more info here for *NIX systems, or here for Windows boxes.
Happy automation!
I have a hard time wrapping my head around Applescript, but since Apple runs BASH scripts just fine, I just use those instead. I've got a development server on my mac, so I've got a script that I can run to create a new site directory, create a new virtual host in apache, add a new domain to my /etc/hosts file, etc.
It's especially cool to integrate Bash (or probably applescript, although I don't know how) with Growl. That way, you can put a nice message up on the screen, complete with a png icon. This is more useful for things that your scripts do during the day though.
I do most of my programming work on a development server at work, so in the evening I simply detach my screen session and re-attach it in the morning, so it takes just a few seconds until I'm exactly where I left the day before.
I have some macros defined in mutt to clean up my inbox (archive commit mails etc.), I have a script that mounts some directories on the development server on my notebook via sshfs (works without interaction using public keys), and after that all I have to do is start up a browser and get a coffee. :)
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I know this isn't strictly a programming question but y'all must have experienced this.
So...you have four or five RDP sessions open over the corp VPN, you're bashing away inside your favourite IDE, your VPN to the data centre bounces briefly then recovers, all your RDP sessions start re-establishing their connections and whilst doing so sequentially keep grabbing focus, one after the other. Pretty bloody annoying and downright rude.
Any idea how to prevent this behaviour and just make the RDP client flash it's taskbar button instead of totally grabbing focus away from whatever you were doing?
#Jason - thanks for the reply, I'm running 64 bit Vista and 64 Bit Windows 2008. Any ideas how well it plays?
#Jason - good idea. Done.
#Ryan - thanks also for the answer. I tried Terminals a few times before, but quite often I need to see two or three sessions side by side which the tabbing doesn't really facilitate too well, would've been nice to have a 'pop out in own window' button. I did once grab the source code to fix stuff like that, but never got the time. I also found it behaved oddly whenever there was a brief network disconnect (e.g. xDSL flapping) and it would reconnect to the wrong session (usually a new one) and leave the session I had opened in a disconnected state on the server. Otherwise Terminals would've been really cool, we have 200+ windows servers, and organising all those .rdp files can be a pain.
I use Tweak UI to configure explorer so that apps don't steal focus; you can also configure how many times they flash in the taskbar as well.
EDIT: Once you are within Tweak UI, these options are found under General > Focus.
EDIT: #Kev, apparently there is a 64-bit version (not MS approved, apparently, I would scan it for viruses of course) that works successfully with the 64-bit version of XP. From what I understand, you download that and then run it in XP compatibility mode as administrator and it will do the trick. Tweak UI is basically a nice wrapper around a collection of registry hacks, so I imagine you could find the hacks themselves if you didn't care for running Tweak UI in this manner. Hope that works for you!
As an alternative, you could try using something like Terminals. It allows you to have multiple remote desktop windows open at once all as tabs in the same window. Quite cool. Also, it is open source so you can change its behavior if needed (although I don't believe it steals focus like a normal RDP session does).
Since I don't think there's an approved version of TweakUI other than for XP. Apparently making this change in the registry has a similar impact for Vista:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ControlPanel\Desktop]
ForegroundLockTimeout = 0
However I found (Vista x64) that while focus on the original was maintained the offending window would still take the foreground - quite distracting.