Screen Capture for Invisible Windows

I was recently tinkering around in an admin tool that is used to build web-sites, and found myself wondering if it was possible to create a "preview" of the web-site as an image. The idea being, I want to show a list of pages in the website with thumbnails of page previews; thus the site administrator can see the entire site on a single page and would be able to know what they were editing before they opened the page configuration.

If you're like me, these kinds of problems drive me crazy. I ear mark them as "nifty ideas" and I slowly mull them over in my head when my head has idle time. (What, you don't have head idle time? Between 3-4 in the morning when I change sleeping positions, I have to force myself not to address my mental challenge To-do list. I recently discovered that our brains solve a lot of problems after only a few hours of sleep.)

So although I haven't actually cracked the code open to tackle this problem, here's what I envision the implementation to be:

1. Use the .NET Process object to launch a window to the web page.
2. Grab the handle of the Process and pass it to the GDI+ to convert into an image. This CodeProject article gives a really good overview of doing just that.

I'm hoping that if the .NET Process is launched with the ProcessWindowStyle set to "Hidden" that it still has a valid device context used to paint onto the screen. If that's true, there should be no reason why I couldn't convert the hidden window's content into a Bitmap.

Few other things to consider, such as when to determine that the browser has fully loaded the requested page? I might have to consider using the WebBrowser control to load the webpage and wait until the document onload event or page status changes....

Yet another task to play with...

Shell extensions in C#

I work with a lot of Xml files, where the filenames are random GUIDs. Since all the documents have the same structure, I wonder if it would be possible to create a shell extension for Windows Explorer that could add a column to the details tab.

This CodeProject article, Explorer column handler shell extension in C# - The Code Project - C# Programming, looks like a good starting point.

Update 06/07/2008: I've written a few shell extensions following this example.  Although they work, they can seize a lot of memory if you need to spawn a debugger.

Recorded Media Center programs, meet Pocket PC

Dang!

Recently I bought a 2 GB SD card cheap from Future Shop ($99 CAN) so that I could start to take some of my recorded Media Center TV shows onto my Pocket PC. This has proven to be a bit difficult task...

First off, it's takes a lot of time to find a convenient way to transform Microsoft's dvr-ms files into something less... massive. One hour of recorded TV is roughly 2.5 GB. And -- everyone has got a piece of software to do the job for a price. I've test-driven several freeware applications, but you've got to be really frikkin patient to try some of these things out.

DVR 2 WMV has proven to be the quickest way to convert into Windows Media Format, where 1 hour of video takes about 20 minutes. Initially I had some problems getting the application to work, but after I turned on Compatibility mode, things seemed to work fine. (I've also got my eye on using the MSDVR Toolkit to automatically strip out commercials and convert into various formats, but it's not as straight forward as DVR 2 WMV)

The next big challenge is actually my PocketPC. I have an iPaq 3870 which was released back in 2002 as a Compaq product before the big HP merger. At that time, the 203Mhz, TFT screen, 64Mb internal memory, SD Card slot and built in Bluetooth was HOT. It was crazy expensive compared to some of the units available today. (Yet another pioneering effort on my part. You do realize that me buying this stuff at the early-adopter stage is what it makes it affordable for you people? You're welcome)

Although I've used my PDA fairly frequently, I even wrote some applications in Compact .NET framework, it's become more of a second-class peripheral on my cluttered desk. I use it mainly to display my calendar for the day, and since my Laptop has Bluetooth, I don't even have to worry about hooking it up in the morning.

Sadly, it's also only running PocketPC 2002 which has Window Media Player 8.5 for Pocket PC. Guess what format DVR 2 WMV uses? If you guessed Windows Media 9 you would be absolutely correct. Enjoy a coke on me.

So, at long last, I finally found a reason to download and install The Core Pocket Media Player, an opensource media player for pretty much any portable device. It can play most media formats, including divX. But I was shutout again! It looks like the Windows Media Support for TCPMP is based on the windows media codecs installed on the device. Back to square one, either find a way to acquire the codecs, or look at finding another tool to encode the DVR-MS files.

Although I wasn't able to find the codecs as a separate download, the real killer is that you can't just download Windows Media 9 for Pocket PCs -- you have to upgrade your OS, which is... sub-optimal. Turns out you can't just walk into a store and buy a copy of PocketPC 2003, it can only be upgraded through the manufacturer of the device. Specifically, the ROM has to be reprogrammed. Do you think HP is going to have a ROM for a 4 year old Compaq device available for purchase on their site? Rhetoric question answerers may drink another coke for answering no.

Then, on a whim, I tried E-Bay. I was pleasantly surprised to find the ROM for only $2.99 US, free shipping. Skip the afternoon $2 coffee, have that sucker shipped to my office, pronto. So, we'll see what an upgrade brings. Maybe I'll find myself with a renewed interest in my Pocket PC. Or, as a late-adopter, I'll break down and buy an iPod like the rest of you (thank you for making that stuff affordable)

SubInACL

Pretty powerful ACL tool for windows.

Markdown.NET

A recent project at work, our content management system converts the raw text into HTML and persists the translated values as part of an XML document.

However, Markdown.NET would appear to be an interesting alternative. MarkDown, which started off in perl has been ported to php, phyton and others. I'd be interested to see how it would fit into our solution framework.

DVD-Decryptor is dead, now what?

I'm really interested in taking DVD content and ripping it into a format for my portable media player, but I came late to the game -- the fan favourite DVD-Decryptor is out of business, simply because their application could break copyright encryption.

But ShrinkTo5 may stand as the next successor to DVD-Decryptor. I've heard rave reviews about this tool, and I need to find some time to play with it.

The big difference: it doesn't break CSS encryption. Well, at least not on it's own.

A popular DeCSS encryption dll, "machinist.dll" can decrypt the CSS... if this dll was included in the same folder as ShrinkTo5, it'll load the decryption algorithm and decrypt on the fly.

A quick google and I was able to find a location that posts the machinist.dll for download. Remember, decrypting is not illegal in all countries.

....set the building on fire....

I can understand why Milton Adams (Stephen Root) of Office Space would be up in arms about his Red Swingline stapler gone missing. My brother-in-law bought me the stapler for christmas as a joke. But make no mistake, this heavy-duty diecast metal stapler is all business. I'm able to punch documents that would make normal staplers roll over and die.

Google Sightseeing

Google's social influence meets world tourist.

Get Geolocation stats for your web site, for free...

gVisit.com has provided a simple tool that collects the last 20 visitors to your site and then correlates and displays this information on a google-map. Yet another example of how everything is becoming more ubiquitos and coadjuvant.

CodeProject: Server-side handling for css and js

This post on CodeProject talks about creating a custom handler for css and js files, so that relative paths can be resolved. The ability to specify relative paths to your application root is clearly an advantage if your application root is a virtual directory or sub-folder from the web root. But I think this solution could go one further: II6 supports wildcard mapping, so that all requests can be funelled through the asp.net runtime, an advantage if you want to use virtual URLs for both folders and files. I believe that dotText is using wildcard mapping in this manner, and I think they have implemented a very decent handler for static files, such as js, css, images, etc. I wonder if the dotText controls can be extended to support this type of ~ (AppDomainAppVirtualPath) mapping.

Hot Keys and Quick Launch groups

I've been watching too much G4Tech TV recently, specifically "Call For Help". While maybe the context of the show is geared towards computer-newbies, they do seem to cover a wide range of stuff.

A segment of the show includes a "download of the day". A few days ago they featured PS Hot Launch, a lightweight tool quick-launch toolbar for the applications that you use frequently. What makes it unique is that you can group them together and assign hotkeys to the group. You can configure to show a quick-launch menu for the hot-key or to launch all applications in a group -- perfect if you have tasks where you need an IDE, command-line, nunit, and browser!

Microsoft Google Search

I don't know how many times I've tried to weed out what I was looking for in a search result. Turns out, Google has probably noticed that I (ok, and the rest of the planet) have done a lot of Microsoft related searches.

In the Advanced Search of Google, they've provided customized search pages for common searches, including:

• Apple
• Macintosh
• BSD
• Unix
• Linux
• Microsoft
• and others

Even better -- you can add the Microsoft search to Firefox as a Search Engine Plugin

Simplified Database Unit testing using Enterprise Services

Simplified Database Unit testing using Enterprise Services Clever.

Classic Computer Magazine Archive

How old school is this? Fond memories.

Das Keyboard

Ya, you typing.

UltraMon

I've been running a laptop and a flat-screen monitor for a few months now and stumbled upon UltraMon. It's a commercial product but it provides a trial version. After reading it's specs, I'm definately going to check it out.

Dynamic control generation using XSLT

In a recent project, we needed to render .net controls dynamically. Instead of using ascx controls, we used XSLT to transform static Xml data into dynamic presentation layers; a viable approach to providing multiple look and feels for the site. Here's a quick walkthrough of how it works.

Dynamically loading the HTML is simple, using the built-in ParseControl method of the System.Web.UI.Page class.

Control c = Page.ParseControl( "<b> Literal Text </b>");

The same logic can be applied to parsing the output of an Xslt transformation.

string transformOutput = xslTransformer.Transform();
Control c = Page.ParseControl(transformOutput); 

If you want to add server-side controls into the transformation, there are a few gotchas:

1. XSLT parser needs namespace definitions for .net and custom tag prefixes.
2. Namespaces appear as attributes in the formatted output, which will need to be stripped out before adding to the Page.Controls collection.

If you're adding asp.net controls or custom controls into your XSLT file, you'll need to declare the namespace at the top of the xslt header, otherwise the XML Parser will complain:

xmlns:asp="http://schemas.microsoft.com/AspNet/WebControls"

Incidentally, if you're using Visual Studio 2003, adding this namespace declaration will give you Intellisense for your asp.net controls in your XSLT file.

With all the proper namespaces defined, you'll bypass any nasty Xslt Parser errors, however, these namespaces will now appear scattered throughout your transformed output as attributes. If you leave these values in and try to parse the output into a control, the .net runtime will try to resolve the namespaces as attributes of the controls and will generate runtime errors.

Fortunately, a quick regular expression can strip all these namespaces out of the transformed output:

string transformedOutput = transformedOutput.Replace("xmlns:\w+=\"[^"]+\"", "");

With the namespaces stripped out of the transformed output, you should be able to parse the string into a control.

using System.Xml;
using System.Xml.Xsl;
using System.Web;

XslTransform transform = new XslTransform();
transform.resolver = new System.Uri("http://localhost"); 
string xslFilePath = Server.MapPath("/controls.xslt");
transform.Load( xslFilePath );

string xmlFilePath = Server.MapPath("/data.xml");
string transformedOutput = transform.Transform( xmlFilePath );
transformedOutput = transformedOutput.Replace("xmlns:\w+=\"[^"]+\"", "");

Control c = Page.ParseControl( transformedOutput ); 
Page.Controls.Add( c );

Cheers

Poking around in SMTP

A few years back, I had seen a mailer engine that spit out email messages in EML format. I found this engine to be extremely helpful because I could turn off the SMTP service, run the mailer-engine, and then manually inspect the messages in Outlook Express. If the messages were fine, I re-enabled the SMTP service.

At the time, it was clear that the engine was leveraging the CDO.Message object's ability to persist to a file.

Recently, I wondered if this was possible using the .net framework, but was dissapointed to find out that the System.Web.Mail.SMTPServer object only exposed the method "Send".

Enter Reflector.

The SMTPServer implementation is very interesting. Reflection shows that there are three internal classes:

• CdoSysHelper
• CdoNtHelper
• LateBoundAccessHelper

As it turns out, the SMTPServer object acts as a proxy between the legacy COM objects, "CDO.Message" and "CDONTS.NewMail" -- it detects which environment you are using, then delegates the sending of the message to the "Send" method to the appropriate COM object.

What's equally interesting, is that the .net framework doesn't use COM Interop to talk to the COM objects. Instead, it uses the LateBoundAccessHelper to instantiate the COM object by it's ProgId, and then manually sets its properties and methods using Late Binding.

To stream my messages out into EML format I suppose I could use COM Interop to the CDO library, but that would mean I would have to package the interop wrapper (and its dependencies) with my assembly.

I'll have to take a look at extracting this code using a Reflector add-in, and extending the class to save to a file instead of sending directly. It'll be interesting if I can do this without adding an Interop wrapper to CDO. I wonder if there'll be any performance drawbacks in this approach...

yet another side-project...

The saga ends

At the end of Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith, everything wraps up nicely, making a decent bridge between episode III and IV. However, it's a surreal experience, to see the end of a saga complete itself in the middle.

So how was it? Prior to going to the show, everyone gave me one of two reviews. Either "Good, the first two were bad." or "Awesome, the first two sucked." Clearly the delta between good and bad and awesome and sucked or equal.

Personally, I enjoyed it -- or rather, parts of it. Unlike all other star-wars movies there seems to be a whole lot more story to tell: from Annakin's fall to the darkside and the dawning of Darth Vader, to the end of the clone wars and the death of the republic, not to mention the wrapping up of one trilogy and the segway to the next.

This bulk of multiple stories can't be told with action alone, so there's a whole lot of Lucas-style dialogue that has to find its way into two hours and twenty minutes. As result, I found it to be very fragmented -- only a few seconds of setup for a scene, some forced dialogue, followed by the traditional Star Wars "swipe" to the next story.

But it's done well, and clearly one of the lessons Lucas has learned since the last two films is the special effects are the vehicle, not the story. Revenge of the Sith uses the technology from the last two films transparently. There isn't a twenty minute Pod race, nor a pointless cgi character that doesn't seem like a ILM "show off". Yoda and General Grievous are done so well, you become absorbed by the complexities of their character rather than than their near-life-like representation.

All in all -- it may be Lucas's redemption for the Star Wars saga. I might even see it again.

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith - Review Digest

I nearly soiled myself while reading this.