Microsoft made it very simple to get information about the displays available to Windows with the Screen class in Windows Forms. Using this class you can identify the primary screen, and get properties like size from any display device.

For anyone developing an application which supports multiple monitors the Screen.Bounds property may be useful in finding screen offsets. If you have multiple monitors attached try the Get Current Screen Info button on your secondary display.

Download the C# sample code and binaries to explore further. Like all good API examples I have omitted error handling

• Microsoft InfoMesa Project Whiteboard for your data
• Fabric – like Capistrano but written in Python
• A Visual Introduction to Screen
• retlang – Google Code
• Tim Sneath : The Bumper List of Windows 7 Secrets
• update-engine – Google Code

Recently I was migrating several Subversion repositories from a Windows server over to a Solaris one and ran into a rather frustrating issue. Actually it’s quite an interesting problem, but was frustrating due to the size of the repositories involved, and my fear that repositories were borked.

It all started with my decision to fire up PowerShell rather than cmd.exe to do the initial dump of the repostories. The following code was executed to dump a repository:

svnadmin dump repositorypath > repository.dump

All seems to go to plan but this is where a silent corruption of the dump file occurs. Not suspecting that the dump file was malformed, I copied repository.dump over to the Solaris box. I issued the standard commands to create a new repository and load the dump file:

svnadmin create repository/path
svnadmin load repository/path < repository.dump

After executing the second command I got an error from svnadmin complaining about a malformed header on the dump file:

svnadmin: Malformed dumpfile header

My first instinct was to re-copy the dump file and try again, but I thought I should dump and load the repository on my Windows server. Lo and behold this fell over with the same error. At this point I was thinking something was really wrong with my SVN install and repositories, but then I stumbled on this newsgroup discussion.

It turns out that my problems were the result of how Windows PowerShell handles binary data that is piped on the command line. I really want to look into the details of this, but it would appear that the new found ability to pass .NET objects on the command line can mess with old school expectations of how the command line works.

After a very quick install on a Dell XPS M1710 laptop, and a few hours of messing around, I have come to the conclusion that this is going to be the best release of Windows yet. At the same time, it’s not very exciting for the alpha geek in me. Perhaps it is good to have regular stable releases and leave the fireworks to user applications?

Before I list some of the things that I like, or didn’t as the case may be, I have a tip for anyone trying to get Aero running on the M1710. For some reason, Beta 1 doesn’t have drivers in the box for the NVIDIA GeForce 9700M GT. Just download the mobile drivers from the NVIDIA website and install the Vista version using the “Have a disk…” option. Ignore any warnings about compatibility, the Vista drivers are close enough and I would expect NVIDIA to release some beta drivers for Windows 7.

What I liked

Performance improvements

This has been a problem for a large number of Vista users and Microsoft have made big strides according to my unscientific testing. Little things like searching for programs on the Start menu is noticeably quicker than Vista on the same machine. No doubt anti-virus vendors are working on ways to reduce the performance.

System protection

You can now reserve a percentage of disk space to storage of old versions of user and system files (just like Recycle Bin has done since Windows 95). This is something I would want to increase for someone like my Mum.

Task bar application integration

The thumbnails introduced in Vista are now more useful since you view individual tabs in an application like Internet Explorer 8. When you have a long running task like a file copy, the progress is shown directly on the task bar when minimised.

Easier wireless network access

Clicking the network icon in the task notification area now shows a list of network connections. This makes it much easier to connect, and is similar to the experience in Apple OS X.

Notification area grouping

I find the pollution of the task notification area to be a real pain. Every application thinks it belongs there and needs to be visible. With Vista you could force some items to be hidden, in Windows 7 they are grouped under a single icon. It only takes simple stuff to improve the overall experience.

Requires more thought

Taskbar application identification

So is Internet Explorer running, or do you have a shortcut pinned to the task bar? It’s hard to see on the task bar, but I can see the rationale for this design decision. It would be nice if there was an option for clearer identification, such as the name of the application appearing on the task bar. I suspect more use of Windows 7 will result in a change in my expectation for this aspect of task bar operation.

IE 8 rendering issues

There is a still a lot of work to do here. I suspect that a lot of people will enable compatibility mode to enable sites to load. One site with problems was GMail (I’m using Google Apps for e-mail).