Lonely Windows Phones

I’ve got a couple of Windows Phones in my office that are a bit lonely. They are Nokia Lumia 710 models and rather nice. If you are a continuing Hull Student and have a Windows Phone project in mind, tell me your idea and if I like it I’ll get one posted out to you for you to play with. There are only two rules:

• You must blog the progress that you make over the summer.
• You must put something in the Windows Phone Marketplace before the end of summer.

I’ll send the phones out on Monday next week to the two best ideas.

Windows 7 Pin To Task Bar Trick

I like pinning things to my Windows 7 task bar (well, everyone needs a hobby I suppose). It provides quick access to the programs that I use most often. However, I found a snag with doing this, which was that it was hard to start a second copy of the program pinned on the task bar. If you press the icon on the task bar once the program is running you get sent to the open program, it doesn’t start another one.

Then, by mistake I found the answer today. If you right click on the icon in the task bar you get a menu the option to run another copy of the program. Very useful.

Talking Windows Phone 7

Took this picture in 2007 by mistake. And I love it.

Had a great time today. I’ve been talking to folks about teaching with Windows Phone 7. Saw some amazing XNA games produced by student teams and met up with some Microsoft people. Slightly marred by the four hour train journey back, but everything was on time, which was nice.

If you want to find out about teaching with Windows Phone or learn something about it (subtle plug) take a look at my Blue Book material which you can find on this link.

Unblocking Files from the Internet

Sometimes you get a file from the internets, or in an email, which you actually trust. Thing is, Windows doesn’t. This can result in fun and games when you try to use this file or, if it is an archive, files from the archive.

As an example, I downloaded the TouchGestureSample from the Creators Club and I don’t want any messages about un-trusted files in Visual Studio 2010.

Solving this is actually quite easy (and best done before you remove the files from the archive). Right click on the item and then click Unblock to say that you trust this file.

(of course, if you do this with dangerous files it might not have a happy ending)

Creating Windows Phone apps on a Netbook

It does work, although you might want to attach a larger monitor...

I was wondering if it is possible to run Visual Studio 2010 and create Windows Phone applications on a very small machine, say a tiny MSI Wind netbook with a lowly Atom processor. Turns out that it is, and it is just about useable (as long as you take the precaution of upgrading the memory to 2G).

You can run Silverlight applications on the windows phone emulator but for XNA you need to find a machine with a bit more graphical grunt, since the graphical power in the phone is actually greater than the netbook, which therefore can’t properly emulate it.

Running Windows 7 64 Bit on a Macbook Pro I didn’t know was old..

I’ve had so much success with 64 bit Windows 7 on my new Dell Laptop I thought I’d put it on my MacBook Pro. I got this around 2 and a half years ago and it has been quite reliable, only needing a new power supply, battery and system board so far. Thank heavens for AppleCare.

But I digress. I bought a new hard disk and got number one son to fit it. Then we installed OS X and fired up BootCamp which is the Apple program to partition the drive and put Windows on it. At the appointed time I put my Windows 7 64 bit distribution disk in the machine to begin the install. And I got a very strange error message, as if the disk was stuck at a menu I hadn’t seen before.

Turns out that the Windows 7 64 bit DVD uses a format that doesn’t work on old (i.e. made more than 18 months ago) Macs. After a bit of searching I found my way to a web site that explained how to make a new DVD that worked OK.  The command I used (with my not-working DVD in drive d:) is this one:

oscdimg.exe -n -m -bd:\boot\etfsboot.com d:\ c:\windows7x64.iso

The oscdimg program is provided by Microsoft for making disk images. Once it had finished I then had an image on drive C:  which I could burn to make a working disk. I still have it. I’m going to put it somewhere safe.

Anyhoo, that got Windows 64 bit working on my machine and then I hit a second snag. The machine is so old that Apple don’t provide a version of BootCamp for it. This means that I couldn’t do the automated install of all the Apple and other drivers to make it work properly. The good news is that I’ve got all the important bits working without it and I’m sure I can live without the light up keyboard. From a performance point of view everything is fine, and I can now use all of the 4Gbytes of memory the machine has inside.  If you have an older Mac I’d definitely recommend the move to 64 bit.

Windows 7 on Artigo PC

Some time back I got an Artigo PC to play with. This is a lovely little PC in a tiny box which will fit into the drive bay of a “proper” computer. It was supplied running Windows CE, which is a very nice operating system, but I wanted to do a bit more with it. I wanted to run Windows 7 on it.

I started small, with the Windows Embedded Standard 2011 CTP2. This is the latest version of Windows Embedded, basically a componentised version of Windows 7 where you can select just what you want in your installation. The idea is that you can make small footprint, customised, builds of windows for things like kiosk displays. My plan was to get maximum performance by just including the bits that I needed to let me watch recorded TV over the network and BBC iPlayer from the web.

It really is easy to install. If you have had horrid experiences of customising operating systems this will be a revelation.  You just boot your target device from the distribution image and then start selecting what you want to have in your custom Windows 7 deployment. There are a number of templates you can use as a starting point, or you can build your configuration from the ground up. You can pick which components that you want and the installer checks the dependencies and tells you the size of the footprint on the hard disk that you will end up with. The idea is that once you have made a machine that that works the way you want you can pull this back off the device and use it to manufacture as many more as you need. 

Works a treat. I quickly had a version of Windows 7 running with just Media Player and IE. This kind of thing would be great for use in open areas. It removes the need to worry what people might do with things like the command prompt, since there isn’t one there from the start.

The hardest bit of the job was upgrading the BIOS on the Artigo so that it would work with later versions of Windows. To do this I ended up making a boot floppy (I’ve not touched a floppy disk for years) and using that to boot the Artigo into Windows 95 and run the BIOS upgrade program.

If you fancy having a play with this you can get a free download of the entire thing by signing up on the Microsoft Connect link above, and the software will run for 180 days (until summer next year) so it might even be properly useful for a while.

As for me, I found that Windows 7 ran so well on my tiny machine that I thought I’d go for broke and put Windows 7 Ultimate on it. This worked very smoothly.  The only problem was with the drivers for the graphics display, where I’ve had to use the original ones that were designed for Windows XP. These mostly work, but at the moment the video playback is a bit choppy for full screen viewing, although it works fine in a reasonably sized window on the desktop.

Great fun though, and a very interesting exploration of where Windows Embedded is going in the future.

Help your Eyes with Windows 7

One of the problems with ultra high resolution screens is that they often display text in ultra low sizes. My little Toshiba tablet is a case in point. It has a lovely display with loads of dots that I can't read. If you have a similar problem you might be interested in a Windows 7 feature that is rather nice. In the screen resolution dialogue box there is an option to "Make text and other items larger or smaller". If you select this you can enlarge most of the hard to read things on the screen by 125 and 150 percent.

It doesn't work for everything, programs that insist on rendering their own dialog boxes for no good reason (step forward Adobe Photoshop Elements) will still be hard to read, but it beats the alternative, which was to set the resolution to a value that didn't really fit the display and then have everything slightly blurry.