Just been using Windows Presentation Foundation ( WPF ) to prototype an application that I am working on and althought Microsoft Expression Blend is a fantastic tool I am finding some frustrating limitations with WPF already. Chiefly amoung these is support for Multiple Document Interfaces or MDI.

I was hoping to create an interface where I could open and close windows within an application ala Photoshop, After Effects, Director or any application in the last 10 years to do with media creation but Microsoft have decided, in their infinite wisdom, that MDI is a no no. Now I don’t mind that Microsoft, Apple or Xerox Parc spend millions of dollars on interface design, further interface human interaction etc. But when the best method of interaction for using an application is disable I get a bit annoyed.

People do find Photoshop hard to use, but the interface to me really does serve its purpose. The problem with Photoshop is actually user education and understanding not the fact that it has multiple dragable windows. Its a hard application to get to grips with (I still find it amusing that users describe themselves as expert at it - those are the users that usually don’t understand it as an application, in fact I would say that anyone that hasn’t played with API doesn’t know photoshop, but hey that is another story..) and that is nothing to do with the interface just that the application has a lot of depth and many ways to do the same thing. While we are on the subject, any user that hasn’t paid the license fee and doesn’t spend hours a day in front of Photoshop can NOT be classed as an expert.

But it is really bugging me that Microsoft have decided that its legions of developers of its next GUI interface paradigm can not choose for themselves the method that they want users to interact with their application. They do not always know best - and there are many examples of this, and saying that there are better ways than using MDI is a chief example. The fact that if you are creating an interface in Visual Studio and want to use MDI is non-trival should speak volumes, but instead we are told to use tab views or a single document model.

What happens when I want users to be able to drag and drop multiple media types of different sources into an application window that they are working on? A tabbed interface doesn’t work in this situation, a single document window certainly doesn’t. How annoying. Thanks Microsoft. Perhaps I should make my application OS X based.

I needed to map a folder on Windows XP to a drive letter to emulate another machine, and looking around for an application that would do this I came across one that has been bundled with Windows since the DOS days: Subst

This handy little util will map any folder to a free drive letter, fire up a cmd shell window and type:

subst e: s:\myfolder\

This will map myfolder to the e:\ drive.  Simple as that.

Excellent post here with lots of tips and tricks to make Windows a better experience - or at least make it easier to live with it day to day. It includes:

• How to hack windows XP admin password
• Registry Hacking
• Increasing options in add/remove programs
• Automatically Kill Programs At Shutdown:
• Speeding Up Share Viewing
• Aspi

This is the Digg description “Have you ever run into a “Missing HAL.DLL,” “Invalid Boot.Ini,” or “Windows could not start…” message?

That was when I learned about XP’s built-in “Rebuild” command. It often can easily fix “missing HAL,” “Invalid Boot.Ini,” “Windows could not start…” and similar problems in just a minute or two.”

However this article also gives insight into not only rebuilding but pointers into streamlining installs and reinstalls and other areas users don’t often see with their Windows boxes until too late.

read more | digg story

Running an SSH server on windows can be very advantageous particularly when the server has Cygwin running on it. Luckily if you are running Cygwin, it is very easy to start up your own SSH service and run it as a service.

Follow the instructions here.

I am currently using it on Windows XP, where it doesnt need quite so many details when it is setting it self up so just check out the ones you need on the instructions.

Just read on the register that VMWare is going to offer a free version of its server product. There is no mention of this on their site yet unless they are talking about the VMWare Player which can be used to host VMware / Microsoft and Symantic virtual PC sessions.

I am really interested to see where they go with this. For instance at home it would make for a really good test system and its a good competitor to Xen running on Linux.

Had to reinstall this the other day due to a problem on the server, so in the end I installed a fresh copy of Windows 2003 server, implemented Terminal Services in the server configuration menu (can also be done from add/remove windows components) and pointed the licensing to the licensing server running on our Active Directory Domain cController. At this point, its good to do the windows update and get on with something else as Microsoft tries to patch itself in to semi-security!

There is a nice little download that will install the remote desktop web connection for Windows 2003, enabling users to browse to the box using Internet Explorer and use an ActiveX component to bring up an almost fully feature terminal services session. It requires IIS (what doesn’t!) to run, but again this is very trival to install. If you are installing IIS at the same time then it is one of the configuration options for IIS6, just install it at that point.

There are somethings that Microsoft do well (SQL server 2000 being another) and this is one of them.

Nice little resource on Windows Scripting for Logons:

http://www.rlmueller.net/LogonScriptFAQ.htm

This is a fantastic little offering from Microsoft:
http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/children/kidtalk.mspx

I have been a long time user ofAdobe Photoshop scripting support. Firstly with using Javascript, and VBScript and then going on to build programs that interact with Microsoft SQL Databases using Visual Basic.

I was starting a new project and I am now using Photoshop CS which has the scripting built in now. A very welcome feature. I haven’t yet tested the backwards compatibility but I will be doing so soon. If you ever need to do more complex operations than the normal Photoshop actions allow, look in your install directory for photoshop and you will see the scripting sub directory and contained within are example scripts and the documentation. I am going to upload into the blog some examples, but until then theres everything needed to get started.