Help Me

Good

After all those years of having help content in proprietary form, there is some change on sight. If you go into C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Help3\content\Microsoft\store directory there you will find files with extension .mshc. There is no program registered for handling it but you can open it with WinRAR (or any other smarter archiver – it is actually a zip file). Snoop inside a little and you will notice that these are actually XHTML and image files. For some reason, while text has html extension, pictures have no extension whatsoever (those I saw were in PNG format).

You might wonder why I consider this to be such a big change. For one, formatting content to be in same form as Microsoft’s own documentation just got much easier. I am sure that at least some developers of components for .NET Framework will integrate their help into Visual Studio 2008. Having help for all your components in same format with cross-references between such independent component and .NET Framework itself cannot be bad.

I still remember old days when MSDN Library was highly useful even without Internet connection. Last few years formed such a huge gap between what was in local version of MSDN and what was in Internet version of it. I hope that if formats that are used on their Internet site are used also internally, there would be more frequent updates and gap would not be that big.

Bad

Help viewer is now same application you use for browsing Internet. It can be Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome or whatever your preferred browser is these days. Bad thing is that every browser has own issues with XHTML (less) and CSS (more) code used for display.

Internet Explorer does not align menu correctly on 120 dpi systems and that results in all code being below menu - not something that looks or works nicely (lot of scrolling involved). In other browsers, menu and content alignment is correct but there are issues with not quite getting window width settings just right.

Also there is no setting to limit browsing to only some subset of data – e.g. C# and .NET Framework 2.0. This way it is just too often that you can find a function you need only to see that it is not supported with framework that you need. With Visual Studio 2008 we got framework targeting. Maybe with Visual Studio 2010 we can get same support in help.

I cannot help but to count on .NET community to come up with much better help system than one in Visual Studio 2010. Just small application with local search and browser windows (with tab support!) will do. :)

Ugly

Startup time is awful. It is faster to load your favorite browser, go to online MSDN and find what you need there. And you can do it faster than local help can load first window. Maybe because Visual Studio 2010 is so fast that slowness of help system annoys me so. I cannot but to wonder what efforts were involved to make it that slow.

Conclusion

Maybe it will be a little unfair from my side (since Visual Studio 2010 is only beta) but if this is how help will look like, we may as well be without one. Only situation when it is semi-useful is when there is no Internet connection available.

Summae 1.00

New freeware is ready to go.

It is small utility that attaches it-self to context menu of all files. In that way, calculating sum is always near. Do not worry, that option can be turned off. In such case you can use standard user interface to add files and calculate their sums. In case that you need command-line, again, it is there. Supported algorithms include CRC-16, CRC-32, MD-5, RIPEMD-160, SHA-1, SHA-256, SHA-384 and SHA-512.

Summae.exe is main program that is used to select files and configure settings. SummaeExecutor.exe has command-line interface. Sum.exe is command-line interface. It may come in handy in cases where scripting support is needed.

For readers of this blog, I added download of zipped files also. If you prefer to try software without installation, this is way to go.

Download

• Installation
• Zipped files

Windows 7 and Intel Graphics 4

My laptop was on repairs for a while. Since it came back, I decided to update Windows with newest bits. One of installations Windows Update offered was also new driver for graphic adapter. Nothing fancy - just standard Intel Series 4 Graphics chipset.

Few days ago I, as I changed screen brightness, screen went black. And not pure black. I could see image but very dimly. I saw it before. It looked as background light is gone. I already saw myself packing laptop back for second round of repairs.

I shut it down (with good old Alt+F4 repeated multiple times). When I started it once again everything seemed to be alright. I was puzzled and when it happened again after some time. Since broken back-light doesn’t fix itself too often, I decided to search my system for cause of error.

It ends up that whenever I bring screen brightness to lowest setting (either by key combination or selecting it on slider) it turns off backlight completely. And there is no obvious way to turn it back on. No matter how much you increase brightness after that nothing brings light back.

Well, almost nothing. In Windows 7 you can use Win+P key combination to call upon window that gives you choice of display you wish to use. It was enough to change display to “Duplicate” in order to restore brightness. Since that left screen in resolution that was not optimal one, another call to Win+P window and selecting “Computer only” was needed to restore everything where it was.

Since I often change screen brightness, this is my workaround to avoid reboot each time I go one notch too far. I tried to restore driver to older version but, for some reason, I cannot get driver rollback to work. Updating to latest Intel drivers didn’t help much (Microsoft delivered 8.15.10.1872, Intel had 8.15.10.1986) since same “feature” is present there.

I am not sure how wide-spread this error is since I could not find anything about it on Internet (or I didn’t search good enough). However, I do know that my particular combination of HP 6030b and Intel Graphics 4 Series is affected. Lately, with this laptop, I feel that driver gods are not on my side.

P.S. No, screen is not broken, I tried older Windows 7 installation (VHD boot) and problem cannot be reproduced there. Only installations (both VHD and normal boot) where I use Windows Update regularly are affected.

Eating at McDonald's

Whenever I am in foreign country (in my case those are all countries that are not Croatia) I usually get my first touch with any food at McDonald’s. I definitelly cannot say that they are best possible choice. I cannot even call them cheap choice. But I always counted on them as being safe one.

I always valued McDonald’s as place where I can get same food no matter in which country I am in and I could always count on that food to be of certain quality. I am sorry to say that my belief has been quite shaken lately.

I made an error when I went to Berlin east train station. It was late and I figured that McDonald’s is better choice than some local fast-food stand. To make long story short – I got cold Big Mac, with cold fries and cold Cola – at least they were consistent. I was hungry and I ate it. That was my mistake. My stomach wasn’t well to begin with, after 5 hours of train, 2 hours of airplane and few hours of waiting in-between, this was last straw of patience.

In my town of Osijek there is also one McDonalds. They got me used to fresh hamburger, good fries and clean environment. I cannot remember that I ever ate stale food there.

With little care you can avoid making too much things in advance and still serve all your customers without too much waiting. I am sad that their coworkers in Berlin haven’t learned the same lection.

Team Foundation Server Does Not Like Encryption

I got my laptop from repairs and I got puzzled with Team Foundation Server not working. At once I saw one reason - SQL Server would not read from database files. Tracing back my steps before repair, I just decrypted files and everything was fine once more.

However, although I could see my collection in Team Foundation Server Administration Console I could not connect to it neither through Visual Studio 2008 neither through Visual Studio 2010. I just received message “Unable to connect to remote server”.

After confirming that indeed my server was down, I tried to start it back up from IIS Management Console. That failed with message that two additional services are stopped too - Windows Process Activation Service (incorrectly refereed to as Windows Activation Service) and World Wide Web Publishing Service.

Working on a hunch, I decrypted inetpub directory. After that was done, both services could be started once more. With that my Team Foundation Server went back among living.

Lesson of a day: be careful what you encrypt.