On a different note, I’ve finally gotten round to customizing my laptop. It came with Vista pre-installed, and in their wisdom the manufacturer decided to split the disk into two partitions. I prefer to have a single big volume to work on, and I’d heard that Vista allows you to resize partitions non-destructively, so I eagerly fired up the disk management applet (Administrator Tools -> Computer Management). I ditched the unwanted partition, then right-clicked on the partition I wanted to resize. The popup menu had a very helpful looking “Extend Volume” command, but sadly, it didn’t live up to its promise. It wouldn’t let me resize the main partition because it held the OS.

As always, I dived onto Google and found various tutorials on resizing partitions using Linux tools. I didn’t like the sound of this because the procedure requires a repair run from the Vista CD to make Vista bootable again after the resize. Fortunately a little more searching led me to an article on the VistaRewired site, which uses Vista’s diskpart utility directly. Happily, this let me expand the main partition to use all available space, without any data loss whatsoever.

Recently however HP MyDisplay became unusable on my Vista partition - it kept locking me out of the calibration controls. I wasted hours trying to get it working again: uninstall/reinstall latest version, clean registry and data files etc etc. Nothing did the trick, so I was forced to look for another calibration utility.

I found various hardware solutions, but they’re total overkill for me. I’m not a graphic designer, I just want colors to “look right” on my monitor. Finally I came across a wonderful little freeware utility called Calibrize. It’s really easy to use, and I got results that I was happy with on my third attempt. I just wish I’d taken the advice of countless other HP monitor uses and given MyDisplay a wide berth right from the start!

The ColorCache tool kit packs in a color picker, color scheme generator, web preview tools, a color scheme management system and much more. Designed to fit seamlessly with the way you work, ColorCache sits quietly in the system tray ready to be summoned with a simple mouse click or key press.

If you have any friends or family members who might be interested in ColorCache please let them know about this sale. We can’t afford to offer this kind of discount often, and it will only be available on Bits du Jour for a single day. Just tell them to visit http://www.bitsdujour.com on Thursday 27 March, 2008 to get ColorCache for $17.49. If you visit http://www.bitsdujour.com right now you can click the ‘Nofity Me’ button and you’ll be sure not to miss the deal!http://www.bitsdujour.com/software/colorcache/

How Does it Work?

1. Sign up for one of TrialPay’s partner services
2. TrialPay pay us for your chosen product
3. You get a free copy of either PTFB Pro, PromptPal or ColorCache

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The offers available depend upon the country you live in. Currently, there are significantly more offers available in America than the rest of the world, but the number of available offers is growing all the time!

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In some cases instantly, but it depends on the offer you select. TrialPay will always tell you when to expect your confirmation so there are no surprises. As soon as TrialPay tell us that the transaction has been confirmed we will send you a license key by email. You can download your software from our website.

TrialPay guarantee every transaction on their platform, so you can always contact them (or us!) if you have a problem.

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• Download CBalloonMsgSrc - 5.83 KB
• Download CBalloonMsg_Demo - 152.73 KB

I found an existing CodeProject article that seemed to be exactly what I was looking for: Balloon Help as a non-modal replacement for MessageBox(). On closer inspection, I decided against using this because it doesn’t use Windows’ own balloon tooltip. Instead, it draws its own, and at the time of writing I think it needs a small update for Vista. Surely there had to be a simpler solution that uses the real tooltip ctrl? Well I didn’t find one, so I wrote my own and it’s called CBalloonMsg.

Prerequisites

Before going any further please be aware that I coded this for use in theme-aware apps (ie. those with a manifest requesting common ctrls v6) running on Vista or XP (preferably SP2). I haven’t tried using it on Win 2000, but I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t look right. And don’t even think about NT4 and Win9x!

Using the code

This couldn’t be much simpler:

• Add BalloonMsg.h and BalloonMsg.cpp to your project.
• Make sure your stdafx.h has WINVER and _WIN32_WINNT set to 0×0501 or better and make sure you’ve got a manifest in your .rc2 (check out the demo!)
• Finally, use one of the Show or ShowForCtrl static methods to display the balloon message, e.g.

  CBalloonMsg::ShowForCtrl( _T(“Test Title”), _T(“Test Text”),
  &my_ctrl, hIcon );

The Show/ShowForCtrl methods display the tooltip at the nominated position or over the nominated ctrl. By default, the tooltip stays up for 10 secs then closes automatically. It’ll close earlier if there’s a change in focus or if the mouse moves appreciably. You can change the “stay up” or autopop time easily (more on this later) and you can close or “pop” the balloon at any time using the RequestCloseAll() static method.

How it works (briefly)

When you call one of the Show methods, a separate user interface thread is created. This in turn creates its own small, transparent window around the current mouse position, then sets about processing that window’s message queue. The window acts as the parent for a tooltip ctrl, and calls CToolTipCtrl::RelayEvent to make sure that the tooltip has first bite at all relevant windows messages. The tooltip is given a zero millisecond initial delay, so it appears as soon as it is activated. When the tooltip eventually closes, a call is made to PostQuitMessage which gets rid of the transparent parent window and ends the thread. The thread wrapper self-deletes for completeness.

That’s about it. You’ll find more detailed information on the inner workings in the code’s comments.

Points of interest

You can supply your own icon to the Show calls, OR you can use Windows’ built-in icons by using the special values described in the MSDN doc for TTM_SETTITLE: 1 for info, 2 for warning, 3 for error

You can also change quite a few of the defaults for CMessageBalloon by setting new values for its static members:

Finally, note the use of the handy function GetGUIThreadInfo which allows us to check the focus window in another thread.

History

First version: 6th March 2008.

Windows Vista for Developers by Kenny Kerr

That’s the first in a series of articles he’s written that cover the essentials including the new file dialogs, Vista “Aero” style wizards, and task dialogs. Each article has downloadable code samples, and although their mostly written using the Windows Template Library (WTL) it’s easy enough to translate his wrapper classes into MFC. Well worth a read!

Speaking of UAC, I thought I’d got used to its irritating little ways, but it’s found some new ways to wind me up. My machine is a dual boot, with a partition for trusty old XP and another partition for Vista. When I want to update a little text note in my development folder on the XP partition, I have to launch the text editor with full admin privs. Now the development folder isn’t stuck in one of those protected, account-specific places like My Documents - nope it’s just off the root of the drive, so why on earth can’t I just open files in a text editor and save ‘em out? What’s worse is that once you’ve launched the editor with admin privs, you can’t open files using drag and drop, because Explorer isn’t elevated and therefore poses a security risk to the text editor (**???!*)

Then there are the problems with my Logitech keyboard and mouse. I use Logitech’s SetPoint utility for both, and I like it. But in Vista, SetPoint has to be launched with admin privs for it to work properly with both devices. That’s quite easy to do if I use task scheduler to handle the launch at startup, but then you’ve got the problem that the control panel can no longer “talk” to SetPoint because one is is elevated while the other isn’t.

At this point you may be wondering while I don’t just turn off UAC and be done with it. Well, as a developer I think it’s helpful to see what typical users will have to put up with, and code around it wherever I can. I’m just hoping SP1 is going to help a bit. But there’s no way I’ll be installing it on my development system until it’s been out for a week or two!

On a happier note, we’ve recently released ColorCache v4.0.2.0 and PromptPal v1.5.7, and a fresh release of PTFB is due out in the next week or so.

Version 3 has the following additions and improvements:

• Custom reports / Custom Outputting and Archiving Formats
• Option to Run script, batch file or executable when scheduled report or data archive is generated.
• Bulk event feed creation from an external file
• New XML Feed Type
• Text logs - option for close to real time updates as well as regular polls
• Action notifications improved - now has Run As… to launch command under specific account
• Field substitution in action notifications
• Improved aggregate definition user interface
• Hierarchical display and navigation of feed groupings

(Obviously EventMeister doesn’t have the XML parsing or real-time text parsing).

Since these are major upgrades, they are free to customers who purchased v2.x on or after 1st October 2007. Customers who purchased prior to that date can upgrade for just $50 USD. We’ve sent out emails with free upgrade codes and discount upgrade links but if you haven’t received yours, just point your browser at http://www.tlhouse.co.uk/LogMeister/upgrade.shtml 

The actual upgrade process is very simple - just grab the latest installer from our site, and run it. It will automatically install over the top of your existing version, though note that a restart may be required if you’re using the service.

Other changes in this release include:

• ProgMon launch operations can now specify a starting directory for the target program.
• Some minor changes to wording within PTFB’s interfaces and Help file.
• Uninstaller is now digitally signed (saves unexpected elevation request under Vista)

You can download the new release here.

As usual, all licensed v3 users can upgrade for free.