Entries for jmazner

How To: Use Vista's Recovery API To Save Data When Your App Crashes [How To: Use Vista's Recovery API To Save Data When Your App Crashes]

jmazner — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 21:20:32 GMT

Let's face it, every app crashes -- so what can you do to help preserve the user's important data when your app fails unexpectedly? Windows Vista provides a new application recovery API that gives you a chance to save off as much in-memory data as possible before your process terminates.

Ian Griffiths has a screencast that shows off the basics.

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How To: Tell Vista's UAC What Privelege Level Your App Requires [How To: Tell Vista's UAC What Privelege Level Your App Requires]

jmazner — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 16:32:12 GMT

Windows Vista's UAC feature is designed to minimize security risks by running most applications under a standard user token, lessening the risk that an attacker could gain admin rights to the machine. UAC allows executables to specify what privelege level they require -- if an app doesn't provide a specification, it will be run in the context of a standard user, but UAC will provide some virtualization features to make it appear as though certain admin tasks succeeded.

Ian Griffiths presents another screencast that covers the default virtualization behavior, and then shows how to write a UAC manifest to specify a desired privelege level, for both native win32 apps and managed .NET apps.

Be sure to also check out the UAC team's blog, as well as <assembly xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" manifestVersion="1.0">
<trustInfo xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v3">
    <security>
      <requestedPrivileges>
        <requestedExecutionLevel level="asInvoker" />
      </requestedPrivileges>
    </security>
</trustInfo>
</assembly>

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How To: Use Vista's UAC Feature To Avoid Always Requiring Admin Rights [How To: Use Vista's UAC Feature To Avoid Always Requiring Admin Rights]

jmazner — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 20:50:45 GMT

Windows Vista's UAC feature is designed to minimize security risks by running most applications under a standard user token, lessening the risk that an attacker could gain admin rights to the machine. This is a great step forward for users, but it may leave developers wondering what to do when their apps do really need admin rights to complete a task.

Ian Griffiths to the rescue, with another screencast showing how to structure an app to enable certain admin tasks to run in an elevated context.

Be sure to also check out the UAC team's blog.

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How To: Use Vista's Power Management APIs to Be A Good Laptop Citizen [How To: Use Vista's Power Management APIs to Be A Good Laptop Citizen]

jmazner — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 21:24:34 GMT

Is your application the reason why my laptop only gets two hours of battery life? That's not a question you want to hear from your paying customers. Windows Vista provides an enhanced power management API and control panel which lets the user express their desired power usage profile, and lets applications query and respond to changes in power state.

In the second of our Vista How To Ian Griffiths shows how to listen to power change events in a WPF app, and respond to low power or power saver modes by reducing the amount of animation in the app (thus saving GPU and CPU cycles)

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How-to: Query Vista Search From Your App [How-to: Query Vista Search From Your App]

jmazner — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 20:39:10 GMT

Ian Griffiths, dev trainer extraordinaire, recorded a series of "how-to" videos for us, each one demonstrating how to write code that takes advantage of a feature of the Windows Vista platform. Here's the first in the series -- how to issues queries against the desktop search engine.

[Update: the second installment,