Things I wish the Windows Phone would have

- An easy way to share contacts between 2 Windows Phones

Unbelievable, but there is no easy way to just send a contact info from my phone directly to my wife's phone. It is possible, but the solution I found is too complicated, requires computer use and having Office installed: from my mail account on Exchange (where my contacts are saved), send a mail to my wife's accout on Hotmail and attach the contact's info. On a computer, install Outlook with Outlook Hotmail Connector, then follow the steps in Importing contacts from PC article to copy the contact info in the Hotmail contacts of the other account. The phone will sync it from here automatically. There is also a caveat, that Office wants to store by default the contacts in the "Last, First" name format, so if you want them appearing on the phone correctly you'd have to make sure they are saved in the "First Last" format....

- An easy way to publish/share a video recorded with the phone


For pictures, the phone knows how to upload the pictures automatically on SkyDrive or Facebook. However, for videos there isn't a similar way. Why?!?
There is also a Youtube application from Microsoft, but this also doesn't seem to allow uploading a video I just recorded...
Now if I understand correctly, I can import the video on the PC after I'll install the Zune software (which btw, doesn't install on Windows 2008 R2 Server), and I can share it from there, but why do I have to use a PC and install software for this simple task?

If these things will annoy me too much I may end up writing an application to solve the problem (or some other developers may beat me to it).

But I'm hoping the version 2 of the Windows Phone software that will come early next year will help solve these simple tasks. This is functionality that should be directly supported by the phone, and should not require installing 3rd party applications, using a computer or install other software there (paid or free) :-(

Enabling Aero Glass or Windows 7 Basic theme in Remote Desktop Connection to a Windows Server 2008

By default, remote desktop connections to a Windows Server 2008 get Windows Classic theme. Enabling Aero or Windows 7 Basic theme requires a couple of steps, and here are the relevant settings (for next time I'll have to do this again)

On server:
1) Add the Desktop Experience feature from the Server Manager.

2) Set the Themes service to autostart, and start the Themes service.
3) Enable the “Allow desktop composition for remote desktop sessions” policy from gpedit.
The policy path is “ComputerConfiguration\AdministrativeTemplates\WindowsComponents\Remote Desktop Services\Remote Desktop Session Host\Remote Session Environment”
4) Enable 32bpp for RDP connections - In Server Manager, go to “Remote Desktop Session Host Configuration” under “Remote Desktop Services” role, right-click on the connection to bring up “RDP-Tcp Properties”, uncheck “Limit Maximum Color Depth” from “Remote Desktop Session Host Configuration.”

More details on the steps above here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rds/archive/2009/06/23/aero-glass-remoting-in-windows-server-2008-r2.aspx

5) Since the defaul theme is Classic and can't be changed from Display Properties while connecting through RD, you need to force Aero as a default theme. Again use gpedit, under User Configuration\Administrative Templates\Control Panel\Personalization\Force a specific visual style or force Windows Classic, set it to Enabled and type in the Path to Theme file "%windir%\Resources\Themes\Aero\aero.msstyles".

More details on this here: http://windows7themes.net/windows-7-theme-group-policy.html

On the client machine:
1)  In Mstsc's options, the color depth of the remote session must be set to 32-bit
2) “Desktop composition” must be enabled on the Experience tab
(If the above are not set, the Windows 7 Basic theme will be used instead of Aero)

Easily recording video of an application behavior

At times, when you encounter a bug in an application and want to report it to the manufacturer (e.g. when reporting bugs to Microsoft on Connect), it may help to attach a video demonstrating the problem when you reproduce it.

An easy and free way to capture such video is to use Office Labs Community Clips recorder. The video recorder can be downloaded directly from http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=117503&project=Community Clips

When installed and started, the Community Clips application displays an icon in the system tray where recording can be started/stopped.

After stopping the recording, the captured video can be re-played, saved locally as wmv file,  or sent via email.

Microsoft Language Portal -

Have you ever wanted to create a program localized in other language but were not quite sure what's the usual translation of a computer-related word or phrase?
E.g. have you ever wondered how to say "recycle bin" in French?

Well, now it's easily possible. Microsoft has made searchable the translations used in their programs.
Just search the words of interest on Microsoft Language Portal and your program can have the same familiar feel as other localized Microsoft programs!

Also there are available for download Style Guides for the languages, describing when to use capitalizations, or whether nouns/verbs should be preferred for buttons and menu items, etc.

Windows 7 Jump Lists and Visual Studio 2010

 

The jumplists in Visual Studio 2010 should display in the Recent Items list the most recently used projects and solutions. The list should be similar with the MRU list displayed on the StartPage, and with the project list in Files/RecentProjectsAndSolution menu.

Projects and Solutions are automatically added to the list by Windows on behalf of Visual Studio when projects are double-clicked in Windows Explorer, or when are opened using the standard File/Open/Project dialog. The items also end up in this list when Visual Studio calls explicitly SHAddToRecentDocs() with the file name.

We had reports that Recent items list in jump lists don’t display all the projects and solutions displayed by the other lists (as demonstrated below), without the user doing anything special like explicitly removing the items from Windows’ jump list.

It may be possible at times that Visual Studio 2010 jump lists don’t show any projects and solutions, as shown in this picture:

 

There may be a couple of explanations to this:

1) In Windows, the display of Recent Items and the number of items in the list are controlled by a couple of settings accessible in Taskbar properties. These settings may be modified by mistake or may be mismatched with the Visual Studio settings for the number of recent items.

Right click the taskbar, choose Properties, then in  StartMenu tab look for “Store and display recently opened items in the Start menu and the taskbar” checkbox. Make sure the checkbox is checked.

The number of recent items in the jumplist is controlled by a different setting. Right click the taskbar, choose Properties, then in  StartMenu tab click the Customize button. In the dialog that opens, look for the “Number of recent items to display in Jump lists”. Make sure the number of items is not set to 0 (zero) by mistake. The default value is 10.

The Visual Studio similar setting for the number of items to show in MRU lists (e.g. the recent projects list from the StartPage) can be accessed via Tools/Options dialog, under Environment/General category. The default is also 10 items shown in recently used lists.

 

2) The projects shown in Visual Studio recent projects lists may have been created in temporary locations.

By design, Windows 7 jump lists don’t show recent items that are created in temporary folders. This makes sense - no items in temp folders are ever added to Jump Lists or the Recent Items Folder, because Jump Lists and Recent Items are about getting back to important items, and by definition a temporary file is not something that users want to get back to.

The recent projects lists in Visual Studio’s StartPage and File menu don’t have the same restriction. You can easily see if the projects missing from jumplists are in temporary folder by hovering over the items in the StartPage and looking at the tooltips.

3) You’re running multiple Visual Studio instances, under different registry hives and their jump lists clash.

This may happen if you’re creating projects extending Visual Studio and have installed Visual Studio SDK.

Here you see I’m running 2 instances of Visual Studio, one of them started under Experimental Hive. The instances have different MRU settings (stored in registry under different hives), colors, etc. but they share the same icon in Windows taskbar and they share the jump list.

This is a VS10 bug we need to fix for next version of Visual Studio. VS started under the experimental hive needs to use a different AppUserModelID to have a different icon and have a separate jump list.

4) You’ve created your own shortcuts to devenv.exe and are starting Visual Studio using those shortcuts.

Visual Studio uses a custom AppUserModelID (e.g. for VS Pro and Ultimate this is “VisualStudio.10.0”), and for jump lists to work correctly this model id needs to be set on all User Interface elements of the application (windows, shortcuts, etc). The shortcut created when Visual Studio was installed has the correct property (System.AppUserModel.ID) set. However, any new shortcuts you create won’t have the property, and Windows may or may not display correctly the jumplists when starting Visual Studio using one of those shortcuts.

If you need more shortcuts to devenv.exe it is recommended to copy the shortcut created when Visual Studio was installed on the computer.

5) Mysterious jump lists disappearance/appearance.

We also had reports of jump lists mysteriously disappearing or reappearing (usually when upgrading the Visual Studio build from one daily build to another, or when upgrading say from beta or the RC build to the RTM version of Visual Studio 2010). Often times it just starts working, usually when opening a file from Windows Explorer by double clicking it, or by rebooting the machine.

So far we do not have a consistent repro, and we are only suspecting a Windows bug that Windows doesn’t correctly calculate the app user model ID associated with the running application calling SHAddToRecentDocs for a specific file extension (like *.sln).

Should this be indeed the case, you will be able to workaround it by declaring an explicit AppUserModelID for the ProgID used by the VisualStudio files.

E.g. for Visual Studio Professional / Premium / Ultimate, save the section below as a *.reg file and import it into registry.

  

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudio.sln.10.0] "AppUserModelID"="VisualStudio.10.0" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudio.csproj.10.0] "AppUserModelID"="VisualStudio.10.0" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudio.vbproj.10.0] "AppUserModelID"="VisualStudio.10.0" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudio.vcproj.10.0] "AppUserModelID"="VisualStudio.10.0" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudio.vcxproj.10.0] "AppUserModelID"="VisualStudio.10.0" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudio.dbproj.10.0] "AppUserModelID"="VisualStudio.10.0" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudio.vdproj.10.0] "AppUserModelID"="VisualStudio.10.0" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudio.fsproj.10.0] "AppUserModelID"="VisualStudio.10.0"

For Visual Studio Express SKUs you’ll need entries like the ones below (the example is for C# Express)

 

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VCSExpress.sln.10.0] "AppUserModelID"="VCSExpress.10.0" [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VCSExpress.csproj.10.0] "AppUserModelID"="VCSExpress.10.0"

You may need to replace the application names to match the Express SKU type you have installed, and the project files extensions used by that Express SKU.

E.g.

Microsoft Visual C# 2010 Express: “VCSExpress” name, “csproj” file extension.

Microsoft Visual Basic 2010 Express: “VBExpress” name, “vbproj” file extension.

Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Express: “VCExpress” name, “vcproj” and “vcxproj” file extensions.

Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2010 Express: “VWDExpress” name, “csproj” and “vbproj” file extensions.

Windows Update error 8024402C

Today I decided to check the Windows Update status on my laptop, and to my surprise, I was getting an error code 8024402C. Pressing the “Try again” button didn’t help, I was getting the same error over and over again.

And I clicked the “Get help with this error” link, which indicated a lot of possible causes that lead to this error message. This set me on the right track - while my computer is not “usually connected to a network at work”, I did connect once to the work network and I joined the domain there. (It was more than a month ago, before leaving in vacation, and I didn’t even remembered I did that; it was also the last time updates were installed on the laptop).

And so, when I joined the domain, the domain administrators have set my computer to be managed by Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) , as (not verily clearly) indicated by the message “You receive updates: Managed by your system administrator” near the bottom of the page. (I knew that joining the domain would be bad juju sooner or later, but I had to do it so I can access the TFS servers for source control and bug tracking.)

I started searching for policies that were set on my machine and I came upon this Technet page describing  how to  manage the WSUS automatic updates with Group Policy. Indeed searching in Windows7 for “Group Policy”, launching the policy editor and looking at Computer Configuration/Administrative Templates/Windows Components/ Windows Update I found out I had one policy set, for “Specify intranet Microsoft update service location”

Unfortunately, setting it back to “Not configured” and rebooting the computer, didn’t help.

I then found out the WSUS Client Diagnostics Tool, and when I run it it indicated WSUS was still enabled on my machine, and still using the server name I had cleared out in policies. So the settings must have been preserved somewhere else…  Searching for WSUS configuration settings location I found out a page describing how to use WSUS without Active Directory, and I learned that Windows Update settings are stored in registry under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate.

I used RegEdit to change the following registry setting, disabling the use of WSUS server.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU]
"UseWUServer"=dword:00000000

I tried again Windows Update and the error code this time changed from 8024402C into 80070057. This stands for ERROR_INVALID_PARAMETER, but indicated I was on the right track.

I stopped and restarted the Windows Update Service (I run in an elevated command prompt these commands)

net stop wuauserv
net start wuauserv

which saved me another reboot, and next time I tried Windows Update things were started working!

I guess next time I’ll connect the laptop to the work network the WSUS server will be re-configured and I’ll have to clear it up again, so here I’m writing this article to remind myself how to do it…

Network shares on Smb server could not be accessed - again

For a couple of days my server was down due to a hardware failure.  After I fixed the problem and I put the server back online I noticed a problem with the workstations: after login Windows popped up a balloon warning that “Could not reconnect all network drives”

All the drives I had mapped to Samba shares on my Infrant ReadyNAS system were now inaccessible, and they were showing disconnected in Windows Explorer.

Double clicking the shares in Windows Explorer was displaying a logon prompt with the following error “The system detected a possible attempt to compromise security. Please ensure that you can contact the server that authenticated you”.

Typing correct credentials was useless. The dialog just came back. Canceling the dialog was going through 2 more logon prompts and displaying a message listing all personal certificates on the machine. Needless to say, those were certificates for another domain and logon eventually failed.

I deleted the disconnected mapped drives and I was able to recreate them without problems and everything was fine again. Until the first reboot, that is. And then again, network drives were disconnected and “The system detected a possible attempt to compromise security” was back. :-(

Initially I thought Windows may have installed some update in the last week that strengthened the security settings and breaking network shares to old Linux boxes  (It wouldn’t have been the first time). But that wasn’t the case.

I checked access to the domain controller server. It was fine, I could ping it by its Wins name (SOL), by its fully qualified domain name (sol.constantin.comcast.net), by it’s IP address (192.168.0.2), I could access the network shares on the server, etc. So, server being inaccessible didn’t seem to be the problem.

I looked then in the System Event Log to see if any problems were logged. There were lots of errors like these:

• Time-Service event ID 129: “NtpClient was unable to set a domain peer to use as a time source because of discovery error. NtpClient will try again in 3473457 minutes and double the reattempt interval thereafter. The error was: The entry is not found. (0x800706E1)”
• GroupPolicy event ID 1129 “The processing of Group Policy failed because of lack of network connectivity to a domain controller. This may be a transient condition. A success message would be generated once the machine gets connected to the domain controller and Group Policy has successfully processed. If you do not see a success message for several hours, then contact your administrator”. with error code 1222 - "The network is not present or not started."
• Netlogon 5719: “ This computer was not able to set up a secure session with a domain controller in domain CONSTANTIN due to the following: There are currently no logon servers available to service the logon request. This may lead to authentication problems. Make sure that this computer is connected to the network. If the problem persists, please contact your domain administrator.”

I searched the net for more information them, but none of the solutions proposed or diagnostics like this seemed to lead anywhere in my case.

Eventually I rebooted the computer once more, and this time I got two different event types:

• GroupPolicy event ID 1055: “The processing of Group Policy failed. Windows could not resolve the computer name. This could be caused by one of more of the following:
  a) Name Resolution failure on the current domain controller.
  b) Active Directory Replication Latency (an account created on another domain controller has not replicated to the current domain controller).”

  (and a similar event 1053 for “The processing of Group Policy failed. Windows could not resolve the user name”)

Searching the net for this one proved to be successful. I found this Microsoft support page, which indicated to look for an additional error code in Event Details tab. In my case the error code was 1355 “The specified domain either does not exist or could not be contacted.”. The support page instructed further to “Use nslookup to confirm you can resolve addresses of the domain controllers in the user domain.”

Sure enough, the DNS server was not able to resolve the name of the domain server computer…

And then it hit me what was wrong. The DNS server I was using was the Wi-Fi router (192.168.0.1), a Netgear/Linux box. This was not able to provide DNS entries correctly for the local network computers, despite them being configured with static addresses. :-( It was my fault, too – I had set the router as preferred DNS when the DC server was down due to the hardware failure…

So, I went to Control Panel\Network and Sharing Center, clicked on LocalAreaConnection, Properties, selected “Internet Protocol Version 4”, clicked Properties, and switched the Preferred/Alternate DNS Severs to use the domain controller (192.168.0.2) as the Preferred DNS server.

Now I was able to resolve correctly the name of the Domain Controller, and I was able to access the network shares without problem again…

If you reached this point and you’re asking why I told you all this, it’s because 12 months from now when I may hit again the same problem with the network shares it’s likely I won’t remember it may be due to an innocent switch of the DNS servers. Having it documented in the blog will help me remember. I hope if you searched and reached this article, it might help you too….