C++ Windows 8 Store Apps: The series

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

So I’m going to start writing my own apps - I’ve been doing C++ for a while now (15 odd years) and fancy a new project to occupy my commute each day. I’ve equipped an old laptop with a cheap SSD and Windows 8 and installed Visual Studio. The SSD really makes a difference !

Some things I’ve noticed: - System Restore Protection was not enabled for drive C: out of the box. I suffered some registry corruption (old laptop) and had to rebuild because of this. - It took about an hour to build my refresh/reset image in case I suffered more problems. I really feel there should be UI elements advertising this feature.

I’ve been using it on my desktop (dual monitor) for a little while now, and while the base of the OS is good, it is hampered by a slightly unclear UI design. The ModernMix application that changes full screen Store apps to windowed apps is very welcome, but I still don’t like the number of clicks required to restart/shutdown, or that Control Panel/Preferences exists in two places.

Finally, some C++ and the class scope “internal”. I didn’t catch this in my first reading and it is essential to building your application. As you can’t have public class members which are not a Windows Runtime type, this is the only way of allowing classes to have accessible non-private members. For more information, see Namespaces and Type Visibility (C++/CX ) at MSDN.

Windows 8 and recent hotfixes

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

So I bought a laptop about 6+ years ago and it died about 4 1/2 years ago, refusing to take a charge when plugged into the mains. Now I’m pretty sure I tried everything I could to get it to work, considering that I had a University assignment due in 2 days later and I was half way through writing it up and my only recourse was to drive back to work and grab an spare, old, bad, slow laptop to complete it (it’s good to be in charge !). This laptop (not the work one, that got taken back as soon as I was done) was on a shelf in our spare room (I do hoard some things) and I decided to give it a go. Plugged it in. Green light. Oooohhhhh.

I got it to boot once, but soon determined that there were hard drive errors. So, as much as I don’t like not being able to take a backup of a drive, I wiped it and installed the Release Preview of Windows 8.

The laptop is an Acer Aspire 5020 and has a single core AMD Turion 1.8Ghz and 1.25Gb RAM and runs Windows 8 surprisingly well. Apps are quick to start, switching is responsive. I can’t get the wireless to work yet (Acer require their launcher software to be installed to allow the wireless to be enabled) and the screen resolution isn’t quite right yet (working on) but no real complaints yet. I’ve installed the Office preview and Visual Studio 2012 so the test over the next few weeks is putting together a c++ metro app. Windows 8 is different, but better to be in front of it properly rather than running it in a VM.

Two issues I’ve run into recently:

Group Policy Preferences and item levelÂ targetingÂ - on Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2. There is a bug that creates additional ldap connections and leaves them in a CLOSE_WAIT state. Had a server that had *lots* of ldap connections building up until it was unable to service any more socket requests.

The knowledge base article and hotfix is here -> http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2561285

If you use PerfMon to track TCP Connections then you’ll see the number of connections slowly rising. “netstat -o” will show you the connections and their state.

IIS with Integrated security set doesn’t fall back to NTLM if Negotiate fails - I had this on Windows Server 2008 (I think, could have been R2 but was a long weekend !). I was trying to visit a /certsrv site on a DC and I was being prompted for credentials - but I could not provide DC credentials that worked.

Looking at the providers for the Windows Integrated authentication method showed that Negotiate was ahead of NTLM - the workaround was to swap them round. The kb and hotfix is here -> http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2522623/en-us.

This article led me to the solution, so I can’t take any credit ;)

Windows-8 on Neale's Corner

C++ Windows 8 Store Apps: The series

Windows 8 and recent hotfixes