PresentationMode, TN:G, in planning stages

It's been a while since I published any news here, but since I shamelessly took advantage of the TypeMock license offer by posting about their new product (ASP.NET Unit testing), I decided to update the blog with news about PresentationMode as well.

PresentationMode is in a full rewrite. The first version has worked well enough, but there are some limitations I have been wanting to address, and the current "architecture" makes it harder, but not impossible.

In any case, a full rewrite is in the works, in order to lay down the fundament for a better presentation tool.

Here's a short list of the features that I hope will make it into the new version:

• Plugin architecture: Make your own plugins that will be hosted inside PM, and that can interact with the PM workings (How about adding your own effects done to the display mirroring system?)
• More independent features, most of the current features involve the display mirroring, these will be made to have a standalone part as well, like the draw-on-screen function, on-screen visual shortcut keys, zoom, highlight, etc.
• Networked display mirroring, want to push your screen to a wall-mounted big-screen for the other people in your area to watch? On the to-do list for the next version
• Networked collaboration, imagine having a person using a laptop at a table at a big software launch, doing the actual demo, and the speaker standing on stage with a table pc, sharing the display over the network, with the ability to draw, zoom, highlight, etc.
• Auto-configuring your display driver to turn off acceleration, clear-type, etc. if you ask it to, instead of just a message box informing you of potential problems
• And much more

A release date is way too early to publish, as I have no idea myself when that will be. I have a nearly 4-week long vacation coming in june/july, and will focus on planning before that, and development when I get back.

I will publish more updates as they become available, but if you want to drop me a note and tell me about your pet peeve with PM, or your most sought after feature, or just, well, whatever you want to tell, me, please send me an email with your thoughts.

TypeMock releasing new product: ASP.NET Bundle

Unit Testing ASP.NET? ASP.NET unit testing has never been this easy.

Typemock is launching a new product for ASP.NET developers – the ASP.NET Bundle - and for the launch will be giving out FREE licensesto bloggers and their readers.

The ASP.NET Bundle is the ultimate ASP.NET unit testing solution, and offers both Typemock Isolator, a unit test tool and Ivonna, the Isolator add-on for ASP.NET unit testing, for a bargain price.

Typemock Isolator is a leading .NET unit testing tool (C# and VB.NET) for many ‘hard to test’ technologies such as SharePoint, ASP.NET,MVC, WCF, WPF, Silverlight and more. Note that for unit testing Silverlight there is an open source Isolator add-on called SilverUnit.

The first 60 bloggers who will blog this text in their blog and tell us about it, will get a Free Isolator ASP.NET Bundle license (Typemock Isolator + Ivonna). If you post this in an ASP.NET dedicated blog, you'll get a license automatically (even if more than 60 submit) during the first week of this announcement.

Also 8 bloggers will get an additional 2 licenses (each) to give away to their readers / friends.

Go ahead, click the following link for more information on how to get your free license.

Vista 64-bit problems, "solved"

Thanks to Scott Hanselman and some testing-help from my good friends on irc, I was able to prevent PresentationMode from crashing on startup due to the unmanaged hook library.

The problem was two-fold, first that PresentationMode was compiled as "Any CPU", and thus ran in 64-bit with 32-bit code inside, which was bad, and secondly that I had never changed a project to x86, and thus didn't know that this created new output directories for my binaries, so my build script still happily churned out 32-bit versions, old ones to boot (since the new files was in a different place).

However, if you run the updater now, you'll update to build 172, which will run on Vista 64-bit.

There are still some problems on Vista though, and XP also.

Here's the current issues (bugs and new things) I have in my bugtracking software:

• new: temporarily disable Clear Type while PM is running (Clear Type looks crap when zoomed)
• change: add zoom mode beyond 2x, up to 8x, this requires a major rewrite, but is the current top issue
• new: first-time wizard to help new users get going
• new: wizard to set up monitor configuration, not just configure PresentationMode for your current setup, but alter the setup to match what PresentationMode needs (ie. same resolution, no hardware mirroring, etc.)
• more drawing functions for lines, boxes, ellipses, arrows, text
• bug: animated cursors does not animate
• bug: alpha-blended cursors looks odd (semi-transparent bits painted solid black)
• bug: inverted mouse cursor (I-Beam for instance) hardcoded identification into app

The bugtracker list contains more features as well, but these are the top ones, and the rest are slated for "future releases", in other words needs to be planned better.

Vista 64, continued

After receiving some hints from Scott Hanselman, I changed the solution and project options to compile for x86, instead of "Any CPU" that I had. Hopefully this will make PresentationMode run on Vista.

You can either download the 2008.7.1.169 version from the links on the left, or if you've installed after the server change (a few posts back), you can just use the "Check for updates" start menu link.

I am still unsure wether this will make PM work just as fine on Vista 64 as on Windows XP 32-bit. For instance, I have a keyboard hook dll that is unmanaged, and one thing I am wondering about is if such a 32-bit dll will be injected into 64-bit processes.

Time will tell I suppose.

Oh, and if you are using PresentationMode, with or without problems, I'd love to hear from you. So far I have 2 known users, and they're both on Vista 64. Doh.

Windows Vista 64-bit

A friend of mine just tested PresentationMode in Vista 64-bit, and it crashed bigtime when attempting to hook other applications for keyboard shortcuts.

I guess the application doesn't work properly on 64-bit at all, so if you're running 64-bit, be warned that it might give you a big hairy exception when you start it.

Server change

Due to a server change, I'm building my new website and changing ISP in a few days, the "Check for updates" program won't work when I've done that.

To counter this, just go and download the latest version from the menu on the right and install on top of your existing files, which will replace the update location file as well.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Version 2008.6.8 is out

This release fixes a major problem I've had since the beginning, that some transparent and floating windows are not captured. This also meant that menu shadows was not captured.

I finally got around to fix this and it should now work as expected. This should also fix major problems with PM on Windows Vista related to the Aero theme and not capturing everything.

Go download and enjoy!