Category: Development

My first look at Windows Sandbox

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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

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Issues Installing Windows Phone IsoStoreSpy on Windows 8

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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

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

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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

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

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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

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

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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

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