More Windows Code Pack and Windows 7 developing delightfulness

CodeProject - Windows 7 : New Features Explained Using .NET

“New features like Jumplist, Taskbar Progressbar, Tabbed Thumbnail, Icon Overlays, Application Restart Data Recovery, Network Management, Power Management, Task dialog, Sensor Api etc explained with simple demo applications

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Introduction

Hi Guys, Windows 7 is microsoft latest version operating system. As many of you wonder what are the basic facilities that we will get which is absent in Windows Vista, or why you should go for it, basically this was also in my mind, but after I tried it, I found this is much better than the one that I was using.

Features of Windows 7

Windows now runs much faster than the other operating system (Such as Vista) while consuming lesser amount of resources. It reduces the background activities just by triggerring start of important services when they actually required. So Network Discovery will only occur when you actually connect your computer to a network, rather than going this process over and over in background. Thus services will run only when they are required and stopping them will release all the resources that it blocked.

The most interesting thing that I found that not only I need to rely this on background windows services, but we can easily configure our own service to facilitate this just by switching to Trigger Start Services or Scheduled Tasks. I will discuss about it later on. Lets see some of the exciting new features other than this that Windows 7 brought to us:

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Windows API Code Pack

In .NET 4.0, the features of Windows 7 are not(except a few) exposed properly. So we need to rely on calling API directly by creating InterOp services to them. To make these features available directly for applications windows published an open source project here. This project is basically a COM wrapper, so that the complexity of the code could be reduced. In this article I am going to demonstrate most of the interesting features that Windows 7 introduced through Windows API Code Pack.

Minimum Requirement

The minimum requirement to run the sample applications is Visual Studio 2008(preferrably 2010) with .NET framework 3.5 SP1 and of course Windows 7 Environment.

Getting Started

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After you finish this, you are ready to create your first Windows 7 Application.

In all the sample applications, I have added the projects directly to the application, so while you try those, if you find error message that projects cant be loaded, Please remove them from solution and in the same way mentioned here.

Application Restart and Recovery API

Application Restart API introduced with Windows Vista is a unique feature to recover lost data whenever the application crash takes place or the application is terminated abruptly. …

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Application Restart and Recovery API

Application Restart API introduced with Windows Vista is a unique feature to recover lost data whenever the application crash takes place or the application is terminated abruptly. Microsoft built an API Support to all its application to recover lost data. …

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Windows 7 Taskbar Jump Lists, Icon Overlay, Progress Bar, Tabbed Thumbnails and Thumbnail Toolbars.

The next interesting thing of windows 7 that I am going to introduce is Taskbar. Windows 7 Taskbar is not similar to other windows. It has lots of functionalities like JumpLists, Icon Overlay, Progress Bar, Tabbed Thumbnails etc. to enhance user experience. Lets create this in our own application.

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Network List Management APIs

Detecting networks and getting network related informations of the system is now very simple using Window 7 API Code pack. Network API provides a class Network which interfaces one network …

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Power Management API

If you are using Laptop / Tablet or any device to run your application this should be the most exciting feature for you. Sometimes, if you are working on a service that requires long running processes, you might sometimes have to look on the battery level from your application …

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Windows 7 Task Dialogs

Windows Task Dialog is an alternative to the old windows MessageBox. You all are familiar with MessageBox of Windows and its limitation. TaskDialog is introduced to show more enhanced version of Message…

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Sensor Platform API

Sensors are another amizing addition to Windows 7 API. It enables you to sense the current environment and change your application accordingly. …

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With all the goodness in Windows 7 and the expected speed of Windows 7’s deployment (i.e. it’s getting deployed quick, fast and will be everywhere by the end of 2010) getting all the help we can get to take advantage of it is a good thing…