Windows 7 RC

Release candidate is finally out for MSDN subscribers.

Thanks for subscription Marc. :)

XPM

Illustration

There is new feature in sight for Windows 7. It is called Windows XP Mode and it will allow you to run Windows XP applications in virtualized environment.

Nice thing about this will be that XP windows will just open without showing the whole XP desktop. This is quite significant since whenever virtualization is employed, some reeducation needs to be done. Now education will consist of simple: “Just click shortcut and window will appear.” line. For “standard” consumer, everything should look the same (ok, title bar is giveaway).

P.S. If this feature seems like something you saw somewhere, there is more-or-less same feature in VirtualBox. It is called seamless mode there.

AutoUpgradeEnabled

My program was failing with MissingMethodException (Method not found: ‘Void System.Windows.Forms.FileDialog.set_AutoUpgradeEnabled(Boolean)’). This happened only on Windows XP and not all of them.

Culprit was obvious. I used OpenFileDialog and I decided to set AutoUpgradeEnabled property. Only problem was that this property was introduced with .NET Framework 2.0 SP1. Notice this service pack part - that property does not exist if you have version without it.

Solution is easy if you are trying setting this property to true - that is default value anyhow. If you want to set it to false, just use reflection:

var property = typeof(FileDialog).GetProperty("AutoUpgradeEnabled");
if (property != null) {
  property.SetValue(openFileDialog1, false, null);
}

Notice that this property is shared among other controls inheriting from FileDialog (e.g. SaveFileDialog) so same thing applies to them also.