Wednesday, November 04, 2009

If you've got an account that uses Google mail you have got to try out the Gmail Notifier Plus app as it looks so good on Windows 7. Just look at the Jump Menu for the app. At a glance you can see how many new items are in your inbox and gmailNotifierPlusJumpMenu most recent 10 have their subjects listed on the Jump menu so that you can go directly to any of them with a single click. Also from the tasks section you have the option to compose a new mail or go to your inbox, both of these options will open a browser with the selected page displayed.

Another very nice feature of the app occurs when you mouse over the icon on the Windows 7 task bar. You get a small preview window that allows you to step through your mail and read the first few lines from each and for convenience you have the ability to open the full email in your browser.gmailNotifierPlusMouseOver Trust me if you have a Google mail account you want to check this little app out as it makes it so easy to work with your gmail.

posted on Wednesday, November 04, 2009 1:52:55 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  #    Add Comment | Comments [1]
 Friday, October 30, 2009

windowsDiscImageBurner ImgBurn has always been a great solution for burning iso images on the Windows platform but with the final release of Windows 7 we now have "Windows Disc Image Burner". This allows you to simply right click on an iso file and select "Burn disc Image". This is a very simple program that does one thing and one thing only, burn your iso to a CD or DVD. ImgBurn still has the advantage of providing more features but if all your looking to do is burn an iso image to disc the built in functionality is more that sufficient.

posted on Friday, October 30, 2009 8:37:57 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  #    Add Comment | Comments [0]
 Monday, October 26, 2009

Just completed my fresh install of Windows 7 64-bit and one thing that has impressed me right away is that my media card reader now works! Since I moved from Vista 32-bit to Vista Ultimate 64-bit I was unable to get a working driver and had give up any hope of being able to use the card reader. It hadn't DriverProblemworked with the Beta copy of Windows 7 so I was really surprised when I got a message in the task bar telling me to fix an error with one of my drivers.  I'd searched the Internet high and low looking for a 64-bit driver and now all of a sudden Windows 7 had found one, so after a quick download and install I was able to take the SD card from my Canon and put it into the card reader and it works!!

You can see that I now can access the card just like any other drive in windows explorer.  myDriverIt's a small thing but it now means I don't have to connect my Camera to a USB port in order to download my pictures. So far for me Windows is doing what it says in the adverts, "Your PC simplified". I've worked with Linux, OS X and all previous versions of Windows and this is the first time I've been this happy with a new operating system, here's hoping the honeymoon period keeps going.

posted on Monday, October 26, 2009 7:25:41 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  #    Add Comment | Comments [0]
 Sunday, October 25, 2009

expandExplorerFolders In Windows 7 the navigation pane in explorer doesn't expand the folders as you navigate the hierarchy. I kind of liked the folders expanding as I go down through the hierarchy. If your like me and want to have the folders in the navigation panel auto expand click the 'Organize' menu and select 'Folder Options', on the General tab you will see a section 'Navigation Pane' simply tick the second tick box as shown in the side picture.

posted on Sunday, October 25, 2009 9:39:23 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  #    Add Comment | Comments [1]
 Thursday, July 30, 2009

Personally I prefer to keep my desktop as clutter free as possible, when working on projects I like to create root folders as described in the book 'The Productive Programmer'. However I know lots of people like to use the desktop as a dumping ground for things they are currently working on. If you like to use the desktop in this manner then you might be interested in fences. Originally I heard about fences as a Windows 7 feature however on looking into it a bit more I found that this is a feature that can be enabled in Windows XP and Vista, Stardock provide a freeware program called fences.

posted on Thursday, July 30, 2009 7:16:42 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  #    Add Comment | Comments [0]
 Tuesday, June 09, 2009

Included with the RC release of Windows 7 is PowerShell version 2 and a new editor called 'PowerShell ISE' (Integrated Scripting Environment).  Previously when I've been writing PowerShell scripts I've used PowerGUI as my script editor of choice so once I'd upgrade to Windows 7 I was keen to put the new PowerShell ISE to the test.

When I first started PowerShell ISE I get the standard screen as shown in the screen shot. I see there is a debug menu and with a script file open I can see there is reasonable support for syntax highlighting. PowerShell ISE

It's a relatively simple and clean interface, with a tabbed editor that allows you to easily move between scripts that you're editing and the toolbar isn't overly cluttered. However I did notice one thing slightly odd a slider control in the bottom right of the editor's window. This allows you to easily increase on decrease the size of the font used in the editor, not something I can see myself using that often as I'm normally set configuration like this up once in my development environment such as Visual Studio or Netbeans.

PowerShell ISE large text

One other point I noticed very early was the use of the Ctrl+W shortcut, in most web browsers this closes a tab and in PowerGUI it also closes the current editor window, however in PowerShell ISE the Ctrl+T and Ctrl+W key relate to output panel. My personal preference would have been for these to work with the script editor window.

The next thing I was keen to try was debugging, being well used to working with Visual Studio I tried to double click in the line number where I wanted the breakpoint, this didn't work but fortunately the keyboard shortcut F9, a small point but I'm always happy when there is some consistency between editors especially when they come from the same company. When debugging the shortcut keys F10 and F11 are also consistent with Visual Studio's debugging.

When debugging you can mouse over a variable name to see the value that has been assigned. However PowerGUI gives slightly more information as it will also tell you the type of the variable.

Debugging in PowerShell ISE Debuggin in PowerGui

 

 

 

One thing I did notice is that PowerShell ISE will break at the following line and allow you to step over it and wait at the next line, when I step over the second line PowerShell ISE will then display an error in the output window, however PowerGUI will report the error once I step over the first line and doesn't stop at the second line, to stop at the second line I needed to set a specific breakpoint.

lines of script

Another useful feature in PowerShell ISE is the ability to issue debug commands at the command window while debugging. For example just type the name of a variable and it's value will be displayed in the output window. PowerShell ISE DBG example

Other useful features are the ability to view the call stack using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+D, and highlighting sshot-7a cmdlet and pressing F1 to get the help form that particular cmdlet. 

However despite the very good support for debugging PowerShell Scripts I prefer the intellisense offered by PowerGUI. PowerShell ISE does offer tab completion in the editor for cmdlet names however I prefer the Ctrl+Space option available in PowerGUI as this matches what I'm used to given that Visual Studio is mostly my day to day environment. I do appreciate that Tab completion option would be more familiar to System Admins. PowerGUI intellisense

But PowerShell ISE still has one trick up it's sleeve with it's programmability. PowerShell ISE has it's own object model thus allowing you to extend it with your own PowerShell script. You can add the script to the ISE profile and this will then be persisted between sessions. Note that this is a different profile than PowerShell and you can create the necessary file by typing the following command into the ISE command prompt:

if (!(test-path $profile )) {new-item -type file -path $profile -force}

Once the profile script has been created you can open it and start changing settings some settings. In Visual Studio I like to use the font 'Consolas' so these two lines of code will set ISE to use the font I like and at my preferred size when the editor starts.

$psise.options.fontname="Consolas"
$psise.options.fontsize=15

This is a very simple example of what's possible using the profile script to customize ISE but more complex customization is possible such as adding new menu items. If you put the following script into your profile and restart ISE you'll see a new entry on the menu bar called 'Add-ons', under this you will find an option 'Say Hi' click this and the famous 'Hello World!' message will be displayed in you editor pane.

function Get-Message
{
    $psise.CurrentPowerShellTab.Files[0].Editor.InsertText("Hello World!")
}
$null = $psise.CurrentPowerShellTab.AddOnsMenu.Submenus.Add("Say Hi", {Get-Message}, $null)

 

If you want to find out what members are available on the $psise object just issue '$psise | Get-Member' at the command window in ISE.

So which is best? Out of the box PowerGUI suits me the best due to the similarity with Visual Studio however I found the debugger better in PowerShell ISE. Also I'll be giving serious consideration to PowerShell ISE's programmability and experimenting with this to see how far I can push it, I'll post any interesting extensions I create.

posted on Tuesday, June 09, 2009 8:18:58 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  #    Add Comment | Comments [0]
 Monday, June 01, 2009

I just upgraded to Windows 7 RC and solved my first issue. Upon upgrading I found all the folders and shortcuts under 'All Program' on the start menu was empty. Now the start menu isn't something I've used for a while since I started using the program Launchy. Launchy is an application launcher that runs in the background that I can call by using the Alt+Space keyboard shortcut, I then type the name of the program I want to launch and press the enter key. Been a programmer and very used to working with command line interfaces I find this much simpler that navigating any form of start menu. sshot-1

The screenshot shows what Launchy looks like, it remembers the programs you have launched in the past so now I can launch FireFox by simply typing the F and pressing enter. Since I installed Launchy I have stopped organizing the folders and shortcuts in my start menu simply because I know I'll never go looking for anything in the start menu that I install. This all worked fine while I was running Vista however after sshot-2upgrading to Windows 7 I found all the entries in the start menu gone. Yet when I navigated to the folder using Windows Explorer I found that all the folders and shortcuts still existed.  So after a bit of experimentation I found that by grouping the folders in start menu into groups such as 'Dev Tools' or 'Sys Util' I found that by reducing the number of item in 'All Programs' on the Windows menu that the Start menu was then able to display all the shortcuts. I'm not sure what the maximum number of entries the Start Menu can support is but 54 was fine for me.

If you right click on the 'All Programs' option in the Start Menu you will get a context menu that allows you to open the folder that holds the start menu folders for your account and an option to open the location for all users. You will need to check the number of items in both locations as both locations contribute to the total number of items in your start menu.

Launchy is an open source program and has builds for Windows and Linux, I first learnt of Launchy from the book 'The Productive Programmer' and would encourage you to give it a go as I've been using it for a while now and I've been really pleased with the program.

posted on Monday, June 01, 2009 10:00:03 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  #    Add Comment | Comments [0]
 Monday, April 27, 2009

Maintaining backwards compatibility has always been a pain, but with the Windows 7 Release Candidate almost upon us things look like they might get easier. It's been announced that Ultimate and Professional editions of Windows 7 will include a licensed copy of Windows XP. Windows 7 would then run a Virtual PC copy of Windows XP for legacy applications. You will select applications that run in 'XPMode' and these legacy applications will be executed within the virtual copy of Windows XP. I've seen Word 2003 running under XPMode in Windows 7 and it looks similar to VMware fusion on OS X.

You can get some more details on this here. An even more detailed explanation of this can be found on withinwindows.com


posted on Monday, April 27, 2009 8:17:40 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  #    Add Comment | Comments [0]
 Wednesday, April 22, 2009

windows7

Don't miss this opportunity to meet with the Irish TechNet team and have your questions on Windows 7 answered. The Windows 7 Road Show will include an overview of what's different in Microsoft's next operating system release, along with great demos giving you the opportunity to demo and win!! The Road show will be held at the University of Ulster's Magee Campus in the MS building at 18:30 on 25th May.

The agenda for the evening will be:

  • What's new
  • Upgrade path and licensing
  • Deployment
  • Dave Northey vs. Will Craddock - Windows 7 Demo Shootout
  • Public demo contest - prizes at stake for the best Windows 7 three-minute demos! ?
  • 'Install Fest' - Windows 7 Release Candidate provided

If you'd like to come along please register for this event on the Microsoft Events site.

Map to MS building where the Windows 7 Road Show takes place.
posted on Wednesday, April 22, 2009 12:37:45 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  #    Add Comment | Comments [2]