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Development

2018-12-19_17-24-28

My first look at Windows Sandbox

Earlier this week, Windows Insiders who were part of the Fast Ring, got their first glimpse of an isolated desktop environment called Windows Sandbox.

Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 18305 contains this new capability that will allow users to test out applications, untrusted or otherwise, without the fear of it destroying their existing their existing desktop environment.

Through the magic of the Windows hypervisor (and some Windows Containers goodness), this isolated non-persistent environment looks just like a Windows 10 virtual machine with its own file system, registry, and network connectivity, but is walled off from your actual desktop protecting it from any rogue-ness that could otherwise render your installation unusable. read more...

by 2 months agono comment

Issues Installing Windows Phone IsoStoreSpy on Windows 8

Windows Phone IsoStoreSpy is a great utility for interrogating the Windows Phone Iso Store when developing applications.  It usually if you want to check to see if files are being created correctly, and identifying what is in a file on the phone’s local store.  IsoStoreSpy can pier into both the emulator and physical device.  It also provides some other functionality like being able to create ringtones, but I haven’t used that.

I had a brand new install of Windows 8 with Visual Studio 2012, and not a lot of old components installed.  This was a fresh install, so the most recent versions of most things were already installed.  When I tried to install IsoStoreSpy with the ClickOnce installation, it error’d out indicating that version 3.5 of System.Data.SqlCE needed to be installed in the GAC.  For some reason it wasn’t, although I would’ve assumed that Visual Studio would’ve had that in there (I believe VS actually installs 4.0).

In order to even install the application, you need this component installed.  I did a little search and found that you can install SQL Compact Edition 3.5 SP1 with a standard MSI for both x86 and x64 versions.  You can download those here.

Once I installed that, I was then able to get the ClickOnce installation going and completing successfully.

by November 26, 2012no comment

Creating an Add-on for Outlook with Add-in Express

Several months ago, I wrote a post on creating an add-on for Internet Explorer using Add-in Express.

I’ll preface this with Office and Internet Explorer both provide the capabilities to build extensions or add-ins that enhance the product experience or add functionality that might be missing from the product.  The process of creating these snap-ins can be extremely challenging since most require that they are coded in a language like C++.  Although it is possible to create them with managed code in C# or Visual Basic, they require a “wrapper” which provides the basis for the snap-in to interop with the application, a difficult and arduous process. read more...

by January 17, 2011no comment

Be More Fluid with the New Storage Center Command Set for PowerShell

Windows PowerShell was designed as a scripting language to help IT administrators automate repetitive tasks that could otherwise be error-prone by nature and in return free administrators to focus on other activities of the IT Pro. 

We began the voyage over two years ago in expanding the capabilities of automation with the Compellent Storage Center by creating the Compellent Storage Center Command Set for Windows PowerShell.  As the first storage vendor on the PowerShell scene, we offered over 60 cmdlets in our 1.0 release to handle anything from user management and alerting, to storage provisioning and volume management for the Windows platform. read more...

by November 21, 20102 comments

Creating an Add-on for Internet Explorer with Add-In Express

Introduction

For some time I have had a few ideas for Internet Explorer add-ons that I’d like to create.  One of the biggest challenges was with creating the wrapper that is required to encapsulate the executing code.  You could create context menu actions pretty easily through the registry, but you were limited to what you could do via JavaScript.

That being said, I was doing some research to see how I could accomplish this.  Almost immediately I came across Add-In Express which makes a product called Add-In Express for Internet Explorer.  They have a number of products available that help build add-ons around Microsoft Office and Microsoft Internet Explorer. read more...

by October 6, 20101 comment