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I downloaded and installed the latest version of the Media Center SDK just now, and was a bit surprised to see that WPF apps are now officially deprecated as a supported way of extending Windows Media Center on Vista. There’s no big announcement around this so far, it’s almost just a footnote in the “What’s New” section:

Deprecated features

The following features have been deprecated:

• Hosting for Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) browser applications (XBAPs).
• The Triple-tap/Soft-keyboard ActiveX control for hosted HTML applications.
• Support for using alternative shells to run and host HTML applications.

The reason I’m surprised is that Microsoft announced the support for WPF based extensibility apps at PDC05 with some fanfare.

I guess interest among developers just hasn’t been there for WPF-based Media Center apps, and Microsoft needs to make judgment calls on where to invest in their extensibility platform. The rest of the deprecated features seem to have been made for the same reason: limited interest among developers for these features. In addition I think there might be issues of an architectural nature that just make the three things that got dropped too expensive to maintain or improve.

I’m sad about this development, mostly because I still don’t see a great set of development and design tools around for MCML. WPF seems to me to have a whole lot more momentum than MCML (WPF has the Expression suite of tools and has been billed as the “GDI for the next 20 years”), but who knows what may be coming for Windows 7, or even an earlier interim update for Media Center?

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Categories: Microsoft, Opinion, Software development, Vista, WPF
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I spent 45 minutes or so writing up a post in Windows Live Writer this evening. All the while I repeatedly dismissed a Windows Update countdown dialog that was asking for a restart. “Not now, dammit. I’m writing something.”

Then the phone rang. Someone wanted to talk to my wife. She was in the process of reading a good-night story to my older daughter. The caller couldn’t wait. So I volunteered to read another chapter of the story.

When I got back, Windows was at the logon screen. Dammit, the Windows Update had gone through with the restart, with me not there to dismiss the countdown dialog.

And Windows Live Writer hadn’t saved a draft.

Both programs violated two cardinal rules for software: Don’t ever do something the user didn’t ask for, and don’t ever, ever, ever lose the user’s data. It’s worse than what Jeff Atwood talked about recently, since there were no crashes involved.

I’m so mad I’m not even sure I’ll want to re-write that other post. It has the potential to help out a fellow developer. Maybe I’ll do it. But right now I hate Windows Update. Or Windows Live Writer. Take your pick.

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Categories: Microsoft, Software, Software development
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My Process Explorer view got messed up a while ago. The process tree view wouldn’t display any more no matter what I did in the View menu. At the time I searched for solutions on Google, but found nothing.

Today I repeated my search - and Google found a site that mentioned the same problem: http://west-wind.com/WebLog/posts/9849.aspx

The solution was given by Matthijs van der Vleuten in the comments of that post: Remove the ProcessExplorer registry tree. You’ll have to reconfigure everything in ProcessExplorer afterwards, but that’s a small price to pay for getting the tree view back.

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Categories: Microsoft
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This happened to me once before, and I didn’t write down how to fix it then. This time I will, just so I can look it up easily next time.

If your ntldr goes missing, here’s one way to fix it:

• Boot from your Windows XP SP2 CD.
• Choose the “R” option to repair using a recovery console.
• copy ntldr and ntdetect.com from the i386 folder on the boot CD to the windows hard drive root.

• Double check that the boot order of the hard drives in the BIOS is still how it should be (for some reason my order was messed up, so the system tried to boot from the wrong drive, which puzzled me quite a bit.)

That last point messed me up for a good twenty minutes this time around.

But now everything is good again.

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Categories: Microsoft
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If you’re a lucky MSDN subscriber and have been waiting for the final Windows Vista bits, they’re available for download now.

What I’ve been waiting for is also ready: the ability to request a key for your Vista development system. I’ve got mine and am writing this from Windows Live Writer running on my shiny new Vista Ultimate work laptop. Yay!

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Categories: Microsoft, Vista
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For all of you who have access to MSDN online downloads, Office 2007 is now available.

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Categories: Microsoft
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With some help from Peter Gurevich, one of the IE 7 Performance PMs, I tracked down what caused IE 7 to basically lock up on my machine. Turns out it were the IE Developer Toolbar and IE DOM Explorer add-ons that were to blame. I disabled all but these two add-ons and saw no lockups any more.

I’m going to properly uninstall these add-ons so they’re completely gone and then I’ll be a happy IE 7 user!

Thank you Peter G for getting in touch!

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I installed the offical IE 7 release a few minutes ago, ran it, and it immediately started consuming 50% CPU time. The part of the UI where the Tabs get rendered (and the address bar / stop / refresh / search) was frozen and I couldn’t get the Favorites area to pop up.

Not good. Looks like I’m going to stick with IE 6 / Firefox for a long time.

Uninstalled.

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Categories: Microsoft
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