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Google Takeout

2011-07-03T09:18:00.000-07:00

Google released recently a service to donwload all the information that one has stored in their services. I immediately wanted to try this in the hopes to recover my movies that I uploaded to Picasa, movies that one cannot download in the original form right now.

The service is intuitive and minimal as usual for a Google service. If only it would work as well...

The first problem was when it indicated that my Picasa archive will be 2 GB, a very surprising detail given the fact that I pay $20 to have 80GB, 50% of which I use. Apparently, there go my hopes for a copy of my movies... Nevertheless, I give it a try and press "Create Archive". A nice progress bar appears and marks the progress. When it reached 100% a download button appeared. Happy, I pressed the button and immediately received a "Page not found" error. Hmm... I must have done something wrong, right?

Tried it 2 more times and each time something else "happens", but the end result is the same - there is no way for me to download my Archive!

Maybe it is my fault somehow, or the fault of my computer's configuration. Maybe. However, this takes me back to the point that I just cannot understand how a company that gives me a service for payment ($20 remember?) does not have a customer service center...

This model of recent years of internet giants who deny customers a proper human response is annoying and worrying. Maybe that should be the next startup, a general purpose online customer service company that takes care of your complaint for a fee.

Using NKDbgPrintfW in the Compact Framework

2010-09-06T02:59:00.000-07:00

In case you wanted to use RETAILMSG or NKDbgPrintfW in your C# code and was struck dumb when you saw that no Dll was specified for the function on the MSDN page have no fear.
As you may have guessed, you need to use Coredll.dll for the declaration. I tried and confirmed it.

[DllImport("Coredll.dll")]
public static extern void NKDbgPrintfW(string str);

Format the string before sending it to the native function to avoid the multiple variable stuff...

Make your OSDesign more readable

2010-07-06T06:30:00.000-07:00

There are some unknown hidden tags to the sources file that can make the navigation through your OSDesign much easier and convenient.
One of these excellent tags is FILE_VIEW_INCLUDES_FOLDER. This excellent tag makes files such as txt,jpg, etc.. accessible through the IDE. Pretty comfortable!

IOCTL_HAL_INITREGISTRY and its place in the boot order

2010-06-13T10:19:00.000-07:00

I'll start by saying that this is intended for OEM platform developers.

When you develop an OSDesign it usually supports several hardware configurations. One of the first questions that arises is where in the boot process can we decide what is the configuration we are running on and which drivers should we enable. For this purpose Microsoft introduces IOCTL_HAL_INITREGISTRY.

This OAL IOCTL is called in the boot phase. The description by Microsoft is:

It is called before other applications are started, so the OAL can modify registry settings used by all applications.

This is where this post comes in. From what I have experienced, using Hive Based registry, the registry that is available in this function is the Hive Boot section. Any change that is done to the registry will be merged (override) to the boot phase of the device manager.

The delicate points to pay attention to are:

Changes that have been saved before the last restart are not reflected in the current state of the registry.
After this function finishes the device manager is loaded. This means that boot phase one relies on the updated registry. So, if you add driver entries in this functions you may encounter weird problems in the loading order of drivers (suddenly drivers will load in boot phase one when they were not supposed to be avialble yet).

To solve number 2 I use the following solution:
Say I have two hardware implementations for a USB controller (revision 1.2 of the HW has a differnet controller than revision 1.1). This means I need two different code paths to initialize the hardware. Admittedly, there are many ways to implement this, but what I do is put two different drivers in the source code and add two different entries in the registry. When the IOCTL_HAL_INITREGISTRY is called I update the flags entry of the corresponding drivers based on the revision of the board.

Additional reading:
How to set up an OAL IOCTL

All I wanted to do was move to GIT...

2010-03-09T04:13:00.000-08:00

I received a simple assignment: move our svn repository to git.
You can skip to the end and read the steps to take or read the boring story that led to this blog post.

I thought it shouldn't be hard since our repository is local and you have git-svn. Well it's not that easy as well.
I must admit, I am lazy. I don't want to do it in batch mode and I don't want to be the master of git and svn to accomplish this. At the end I was forced to work in batch mode most of the time.

So I started by doing a simple google search and found the following blog:
Cleanly migrate your svn repository
Sounds promising!
My repository is located at C:\SVNRep so I typed:
git svn c:\svnrep --no-metadata
Wrong!
Once I issued the: "git fetch" I was warned that it could not find the svn repository.
Back to searching. Now I found this answer on StackOverFlow. I understood I am an idiot. No surprise there...
I tried to issue the following:
git svn file://c:/svnrep --no-metadata
The process started and I was happy. BUT, I received another error: similar to "Permission denied: error line 2723" with a tmp folder that was not in my svn repository. Google dug an answer quite fast with this message:
Porting svn with an error
I thought I was done, but apparently I am not that talented when it comes to svn.

I downloaded the svn version I created the repository with (1.6.5) and ran the svnserve command only to find that git did not find the path I specified (svn://localhost/relative/svnrep/). I then downloaded VisualSVN, copied my repository to the repositories directory and created a user with the same name as the Windows user. I was now able to access my repository through the web with the user I created. So.... once again I hit:
git init http://shay-vm-git/svn/SVNRep/ --no-metadata
This time it worked!!! The process takes along time to finish.

To summarize:
System settings -

Windows XP SP3
VisualSVN with SVN 1.6.5
Git-1.6.5.1-preview20091022.exe

Objective -

Turn my TortoiseSvn repository to a TortoiseGit one

Steps to take-

Read Cleanly migrate your svn repository
Read Porting svn with an error
Install VisualSVN that corresponds to the SVN version of your svn repository
Create a user in VisualSVN with the same name of the user you are logged-on with in Windows
Copy your repository to the Repositories folder of VisualSVN
Right click the repository folder in VisualSVN and choose Browse
Copy the URL of your repository from the web page that opened and use it in the "git init svn_address --no-metadata" command
Wait a long time for the fetch to finish

Hope this helped someone.

The new Windows CE Internet Explorer missing icon

2010-02-25T12:28:00.000-08:00

The newly released Internet Explorer for Windows CE comes without a shortcut on the desktop. Annoying and funny that Microsoft missed that (and did not fix it via a QFE).

Not only they did not place a shortcut, but they also did not set an icon for the new application. This means that placing a regular shortcut will look odd since the shortcut takes the icon from the executable it points to.

I am adding a link to a subproject that adds an application with the IE icon that launches the new IE. The subproject also places a shortcut on the desktop.

The subproject is not built in case the component for the new IE is not chosen.

No warranty is given in any way. The code is supplied as is.

Platform Builder 6 and Windows 7 64 bit

2010-02-23T11:18:00.000-08:00

A fresh install of VS2005 and Platform Builder 6 on a Windows 7 64 bit does not work.
To save you some trouble of searching the web go straight to the following post and read it: link

Read MichaelH's solution at the end. It works.

QFE mess?

2010-02-23T11:15:00.000-08:00

With the release of Windows CE R3 the CE Updates tool ceased to function. Add the fact that the instructions on Microsoft's website were confusing at first you get a mess when it comes to updates.
To check what updates you have installed, you can open the folder %WINCEDrive%\Wince600\updates

By the way, the easiest way to get past the confusion with R3 is to just install the yearly update of 2009 after you install R3 and that's that.

Silverlight Error codes in String format

2010-01-23T04:15:00.000-08:00

I recently had to debug a simple Silverlight application and found myself looking for the error code one Silverlghit function gave me. Soooo I ended up creating this function that can help you when you debug your application. Nothing fancy, it will just save you time doing the same:

TCHAR*    GetSilverLightErrorString(
HRESULT retcode)
{
    static TCHAR    pszUnknownMessage[50];
    static    TCHAR    pszErrorStrings[][50] =
    {
        {TEXT("XR_E_ABSTRACT_BASE_CLASS")},//0
        {TEXT("XR_E_COLLECTION_DUPLICATE_NAME")},//1
        {TEXT("XR_E_COLLECTION_ELEMENT_ALREADY_ASSOCIATED")},//2
        {TEXT("XR_E_DUPLICATE_REGISTRATION")},//3
        {TEXT("XR_E_ELEMENT_NOT_CREATED")},//4
        {TEXT("XR_E_ELEMENT_NOT_FOUND")},//5
        {TEXT("XR_E_INVALID_OBJECT")},//6
        {TEXT("XR_E_INVALID_PROPERTY")},//7
        {TEXT("XR_E_INVALID_ROOT_FOR_CREATING_HOST")},//8
        {TEXT("XR_E_INVALID_STATE")},//9
        {TEXT("XR_E_INVALID_THREAD_ACCESS")},//10
        {TEXT("XR_E_NOT_INITIALIZED")},//11
        {TEXT("XR_E_PARSER_ATTRIBUTE_OUT_OF_RANGE")},//12
        {TEXT("XR_E_PARSER_ATTRIBUTE_READONLY")},//13
        {TEXT("XR_E_PARSER_FAILED_RESOURCE_FIND")},//14
        {TEXT("XR_E_PARSER_INVALID_ATTRIBUTE")},//15
        {TEXT("XR_E_PARSER_INVALID_ATTRIBUTE_VALUE")},//16
        {TEXT("XR_E_PARSER_INVALID_CONTENT")},//17
        {TEXT("XR_E_PARSER_INVALID_PROPERTY")},//18
        {TEXT("XR_E_PARSER_MISSING_DEFAULT_NAMESPACE")},//19
        {TEXT("XR_E_PARSER_MULTIPLE_PROPERTY_ELEMENT_VALUES")},//20
        {TEXT("XR_E_PARSER_RESOURCE_KEY_AND_NAME_SET")},//21
        {TEXT("XR_E_PARSER_TEXT_CONTENT_UNSUPPORTED")},//22
        {TEXT("XR_E_PARSER_UNKNOWN_ATTRIBUTE")},//23
        {TEXT("XR_E_PARSER_UNKNOWN_ELEMENT")},//24
        {TEXT("XR_E_PARSER_UNKNOWN_NAMESPACE")},//25
        {TEXT("XR_E_STORYBOARD_BEGIN_ANIMATION_COMPOSITION")},//26
        {TEXT("XR_E_STORYBOARD_BEGIN_INCOMPATIBLE_TYPE")},//27
        {TEXT("XR_E_STORYBOARD_BEGIN_INVALID_KEYTIME")},//28
        {TEXT("XR_E_STORYBOARD_BEGIN_INVALID_PROPERTY")},//29
        {TEXT("XR_E_STORYBOARD_BEGIN_INVALID_TARGET")},//30
        {TEXT("XR_E_STORYBOARD_BEGIN_NO_TARGET")},//31
        {TEXT("XR_E_STORYBOARD_MODIFY_ACTIVE_ANIMATION")},//32
        {TEXT("XR_E_STORYBOARD_MUST_BE_ROOT ")},//33
        {TEXT("XR_E_STORYBOARD_SKIPTOFILL_NO_DURATION")}//34
    };

    switch(retcode)
    {
        case XR_E_ABSTRACT_BASE_CLASS:
            return pszErrorStrings[0];
        case XR_E_COLLECTION_DUPLICATE_NAME:
            return pszErrorStrings[1];
        case XR_E_COLLECTION_ELEMENT_ALREADY_ASSOCIATED:
            return pszErrorStrings[2];
        case XR_E_DUPLICATE_REGISTRATION:
            return pszErrorStrings[3];
        case XR_E_ELEMENT_NOT_CREATED:
            return pszErrorStrings[4];
        case XR_E_ELEMENT_NOT_FOUND:
            return pszErrorStrings[5];
        case XR_E_INVALID_OBJECT:
            return pszErrorStrings[6];
        case XR_E_INVALID_PROPERTY:
            return pszErrorStrings[7];
        case XR_E_INVALID_ROOT_FOR_CREATING_HOST:
            return pszErrorStrings[8];
        case XR_E_INVALID_STATE:
            return pszErrorStrings[9];
        case XR_E_INVALID_THREAD_ACCESS:
            return pszErrorStrings[10];
        case XR_E_NOT_INITIALIZED:
            return pszErrorStrings[11];
        case XR_E_PARSER_ATTRIBUTE_OUT_OF_RANGE:
            return pszErrorStrings[12];
        case XR_E_PARSER_ATTRIBUTE_READONLY:
            return pszErrorStrings[13];
        case XR_E_PARSER_FAILED_RESOURCE_FIND:
            return pszErrorStrings[14];
        case XR_E_PARSER_INVALID_ATTRIBUTE:
            return pszErrorStrings[15];
        case XR_E_PARSER_INVALID_ATTRIBUTE_VALUE:
            return pszErrorStrings[16];
        case XR_E_PARSER_INVALID_CONTENT:
            return pszErrorStrings[17];
        case XR_E_PARSER_INVALID_PROPERTY:
            return pszErrorStrings[18];
        case XR_E_PARSER_MISSING_DEFAULT_NAMESPACE:
            return pszErrorStrings[19];
        case XR_E_PARSER_MULTIPLE_PROPERTY_ELEMENT_VALUES:
            return pszErrorStrings[20];
        case XR_E_PARSER_RESOURCE_KEY_AND_NAME_SET:
            return pszErrorStrings[21];
        case XR_E_PARSER_TEXT_CONTENT_UNSUPPORTED:
            return pszErrorStrings[22];
        case XR_E_PARSER_UNKNOWN_ATTRIBUTE:
            return pszErrorStrings[23];
        case XR_E_PARSER_UNKNOWN_ELEMENT:
            return pszErrorStrings[24];
        case XR_E_PARSER_UNKNOWN_NAMESPACE:
            return pszErrorStrings[25];
        case XR_E_STORYBOARD_BEGIN_ANIMATION_COMPOSITION:
            return pszErrorStrings[26];
        case XR_E_STORYBOARD_BEGIN_INCOMPATIBLE_TYPE:
            return pszErrorStrings[27];
        case XR_E_STORYBOARD_BEGIN_INVALID_KEYTIME:
            return pszErrorStrings[28];
        case XR_E_STORYBOARD_BEGIN_INVALID_PROPERTY:
            return pszErrorStrings[29];
        case XR_E_STORYBOARD_BEGIN_INVALID_TARGET:
            return pszErrorStrings[30];
        case XR_E_STORYBOARD_BEGIN_NO_TARGET:
            return pszErrorStrings[31];
        case XR_E_STORYBOARD_MODIFY_ACTIVE_ANIMATION:
            return pszErrorStrings[32];
        case XR_E_STORYBOARD_MUST_BE_ROOT:
            return pszErrorStrings[33];
        case XR_E_STORYBOARD_SKIPTOFILL_NO_DURATION:
            return pszErrorStrings[34];
        default:
            _stprintf(pszUnknownMessage,TEXT("UNKNOWN_ERROR (0x%x)"), retcode);
            return pszUnknownMessage;
    }
}

This code is provided as is without ANY guarantees and might be mssing a few error codes.

How to install Windows CE

2009-12-16T23:29:00.000-08:00

Today I needed to install a clean installation of Windows CE 6.0 R2. My problem was I was not sure what QFEs (windows CE updates) I need to install afterward. The problem is that now you primarily get information about R3.

I was getting really frustrated and was thinking of writing a detailed post with the needed QFE for each release when I found this post by Mike Hall:
http://blogs.msdn.com/mikehall/archive/2009/06/10/steps-needed-to-install-windows-embedded-ce-6-0-from-scratch.aspx

Thanks to Mike I saved at least 2 hours of digging through the net.

Hope this will make his post pop up faster in the search engines.

A nice resource googled

2009-12-01T07:20:00.000-08:00

am debugging a RIL dirver now in Windows CE. Check out this short table of error codes for the GSM:
CME Error codes

Google does not find the Embedded Silverlight documentation

2009-11-05T07:10:00.000-08:00

I don't why Microsoft does this, but unitl this moment doing the following search only leads to Valter's blog. On Bing you do get to the MSDN documentation...

By the way here is the link to the documentation: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee502198.aspx

Weird and hurts only the developers.

UPDATE:
apparently it just took Google some time to crawl it. Now the documentation is available on Google as well.

What I hate most about Platform Builder

2009-11-01T12:15:00.000-08:00

This list of things will be updated from time to time:

When you open a new OSDesign and run Sysgen only to find out that the default settings are for Debug and now you need to wait another 20 minures while Sysgening the Release build.
When Platform Builder hits a DEBUGCHK in Debug mode it automatically opens the assembly window.
...

Embedded Silverlight For Windows CE 6.0

2009-10-29T09:09:00.000-07:00

Today I gave a (too) quick answer in the newsgroups regarding the development of a Silverlight application for Windows CE 6.0. It seems that you do not need Platform Builder to develop Silverlight Applications. Makes sense....

I took the time to see whether it was possible to work with VS2005 (I presume VS2008 will have the same results) alone and was successful. So here is a short tutorial on how to do this:

Open a new SmartDevice Win32 project:

Choose an SDK that was produced with R3and Silverlight

Then press Finish.

Open the RC viewer and delete everything (except for the icon maybe) that you do not need.
Go to the project properties (right click on the project node).
Choose all configurations.
Go to linker-> input. In the Additional Dependencies field enter: xamlruntime.lib
Go to the main file of the project and use the code described in Valter Minute's blog (Silverlight Tutorial). For convenience, My code is at this link along with the XAML file for my project.
Now all that is left to do is to add the XAML file to the resources in the same way Valter describes in his blog.
Open the RC viewer. Right click on it and choose "Add Resource".
Now choose "Import". Choose the XAML file and in the resource name type "XAML".
I am not including screenshots because this is covered in Valter's blog.
To build you will need to make sure that the "pwinuser.h" file is included in your SDK. When I produced my SDK this file was not included automatically.
This is it. You can Build and run your project.

I'll organize this post later and maybe include the project. For the mean time, here is the link to the Expression project (includes the XAML) and the cpp file.

Shai

This is my first post, if you find it not organized or missing crucial information, drop a comment and I will try to improve it.