My Windows 7 Experience

I installed Winodws 7 on my work computer yesterday. It is the latest Operating System from Microsoft after Vista. I was using Vista since long and had felt it was much better than XP. The initial release had many issues but the service pack that followed (SP1) fixed most of them. But still there were many areas for improvement in Vista, especially on the performance side.

Windows 7 has successfully addressed many such pain areas in Vista and it performs better. Apart from the multi-touch support, there aren't many new visible features, as the Win 7 team has focused more on performance and compatibility issues.

It installed quickly and booted fast. The Enterprise edition (there are many editions to choose from) took only around 9 GB of my hard disk space after installation. The changing desktop background images are nice. The changes in taskbar look and behavior will not be missed. ‘Show desktop’ is now at the right most corner and has a new ‘peek’ feature. The quick launch bar is missing and taskbar takes up that role as well. Here you will have to do ‘Pin to Taskbar’ on applications in start menu to make them stick to task bar as quick launch icons. Then you wonder how to launch another instance of an application as the quick launch icon turns to a minimized application during launch. Well, learn a new short cut (Shift + Click) to do this. There are many such new features that is supposed to make our lives better. :)

I installed all my work applications and favorite tools and configured them to my liking. All of them worked without any issues. The touch feature in Windows 7 require a supporting hardware. We have one big HP Touch Smart system here where the touch features work nicely.

Microsoft Tag

A High Capacity Color Barcode (HCCB), also branded Microsoft Tag, is a type of barcode that uses shapes, instead of black-and-white lines or squares used by other barcode systems. HCCB is not intended to replace traditional barcodes, but rather enhance them by allowing more information to be stored.

Creating Tags

• Go to http://tag.microsoft.com
• Associate your Live id (hotmail email address is fine) with the Tag site and sign in.
• Click on the 'Create Tag' button and follow the directions.
• Tag can be of type Url, Contact card, or plain text.
• Once tag is created, the information we provided is stored in Microsoft servers and a unique id is associated with it. This id is encoded in a graphical image to generate the tag.
• Click on the 'Render' button to get the generated tag in the format of your choice (png, pdf, jpg, etc).
• It is also possible to get it in custom format so that it can be used by overlaying on another image.

Using Tags

• The tags can be used anywhere in web (sites, blogs, etc.) as images.
• Tags can be printed and used on real world objects like books, product package, etc.
• They can even be printed big for displaying on a hoarding.

Reading Tags

• Tags are read using a mobile device having camera.
• The device need to have a software named 'Microsoft Tag Application' or simply 'Tag Reader' which can be installed freely from http://gettag.mobi.
• Start this application in your device and just point the camera onto to a tag to read it.
• It works by decoding the id encoded in the image and then connecting to internet to get the associated details from Microsoft servers.

To see more samples, visit my workshop page on this at: wayfarer.bizhat.com/techbites/workshop/tag.html

Microsoft Bing Decision Engine

Here comes a new search decision engine from Microsoft to replace it’s existing Live Search:

www.bing.com

Here is a pretty looking view of it:

Read more about it at: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/bing/default.mspx

Wolfram Alpha Computational Knowledge Engine

Wolfram Alpha Answer Engine gets us to what people thought computers would be able to do 50 years ago: quickly find answers to all the factual questions!

Stephen Wolfram, the British physicist behind this recently launched project clarifies that Wolfram Alpha is a website with one simple input field that gives access to a huge system, with trillions of pieces of curated data and millions of lines of algorithms.

It is not a search engine that lists out numerous links to information that exist on the web. Instead, it actually computes the answer using the available data and displays it in a easily readable format.

Link: http://www.wolframalpha.com/

Microsoft Surface Applications - Deployment and Object Routing

Continued from: Microsoft Surface Tagged Objects and Tag Visualizations

When users interact with a Microsoft Surface unit, they launch the applications from Launcher.  Launcher is the menu that displays the applications that are available to users in a horizontal interactive strip.


 As part of deploying the Surface application, we must register it with Surface so that it is available in the Launcher. This is done by copying the application’s xml file to the Surface’s program data folder (%PROGRAMDATA%\Microsoft\Surface\Programs).

This application xml file is created by default when the Visual Studio project template is used. Otherwise, we can create a normal xml file with the file name equivalent as the project (executable) name and with the following tags.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<ss:ApplicationInfo
 xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
 xmlns:ss="http://schemas.microsoft.com/Surface/2007/ApplicationMetadata">
  <Application>
    <Title>My Surface App</Title>
    <Description>This is a sample Surface application.</Description>
    <ExecutableFile>%ProgramFiles%\MyCompany\MyApp\MyApp.exe</ExecutableFile>
    <Arguments></Arguments>
    <IconImageFile>%ProgramFiles%\MyCompany\MyApp\Resources\icon.png</IconImageFile>
    <Preview>
      <PreviewImageFile>%ProgramFiles%\MyCompany\MyApp\Resources\iconPreview.png</PreviewImageFile>
    </Preview>
    <Tags>
      <ByteTag Value="C0">
        <Actions>
          <Launch />
        </Actions>
      </ByteTag>
    </Tags>
  </Application>
</ss:ApplicationInfo>

The <Application> tag specifies that this is a normal Surface application. Other options are <AttractApplication> for attract mode (similar to screen saver) applications and <ServiceApplication> for apps that run in the background and does not have a UI.

The <Title> is displayed on the Launcher all the time, and <Description> is displayed when the application is selected from the Launcher. <ExecutableFile> specifies the path to the actual application exe. If the application is accepting any command line arguments it can be supplied through <Arguments> tag. <IconImageFile> specifies the png image to be displayed in the Launcher as application icon and <Preview> specifies the image to be displayed when the application is selected in the Launcher. This can be a bigger static image(<PreviewImageFile>) or a slideshow of images(<SlideshowImageFile>) or a movie (<MovieFile>).

The <Tags> specify the tags used by the application and <Launch> is used to specify that the particular tag value is used for object routing (which is discussed later).

To summarize the deployment steps again:

• Build your Surface application in Release mode.
• Copy all the files from the build folder to any location in the Surface computer (typically %ProgramFiles%\CompanyName\ApplicationName\).
• Make sure that this path is specified in the Application’s xml file.
• Copy the Application’s xml file to (%PROGRAMDATA%\Microsoft\Surface\Programs folder.

That’s all to it and the application will now be available in the Launcher for the user to see and launch.

Tagged Object Routing
On 2009-May-10, Microsoft released its first Service Pack (SP1) to Surface 1.0 with lots of new features and improvements. Read about them at official Surface blog.

Object Routing is one of the new SP1 features that enable the developer to configure tagged objects which can open applications without using Launcher. The tagged object can be placed anywhere on the Surface interface (attract applications, other non-registered applications or the Launcher) to bring up the list of applications that are registered with that tag. The applications will appear as tiny bubbly icons that smoothly pops up from the object and can be launched by touching them.

 
To enable the object routing for an applications:

• Specify the required type of tag (Byte/Identity) within the <Tags> section of the application’s xml file and specify its value and have the <Actions> as <Launch>.

<ByteTag Value="C0">
  <Actions>
    <Launch />
  </Actions>
</ByteTag>

or

<IdentityTag Series="4245A8E4901C2C0B">
  <Actions>
    <Launch /> 
  </Actions>
</IdentityTag>

I have used an example value of C0 for Byte tag and 4245A8E4901C2C0B for Identity tag.

• Create a new registry key using this tag value under TagInfo section as below:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Surface\TagInfo\v1.0\ByteTags\C0
or

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Surface\TagInfo\v1.0\IdentityTags\4245A8E4901C2C0B

• Add the following String Value items on this key
• Text : ‘object routing card title’.
• BoundingBoxWidth : ‘3.25’.
• BoundingBoxHeight : ‘2.125’.
• PhysicalCenterOffsetFromTagX : ‘0’.
• PhysicalCenterOffsetFromTagY : ‘0’.
• OrientationOffsetFromTag : ‘0’.

This specifies the size of tagged object (business card size is 3.25 x 2.125 inches) and the location of the tag within this object (Zero means there is no offset from the center of the object; the tag is exactly on the center of this business card sized object)

Note that the other registry settings (enabled by default) to enable Object Routing (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Surface\v1.0\Shell\EnableObjectRouting ) must be set as well.

That’s all the settings we need to do to get object routing work. Now if you place a tag with the specified value, all the applications that have this tag value in their xml file registered will popup from this object.

If you have done everything right, and still its not working as expected, refer the event log (run the command eventvwr) and navigate to Applications and Services Logs/Microsoft/Surface/Shell/Operational for any possible warnings or errors. Chances are that there is some error in the application's xml file or the registry settings. A sample warning (when the required registry entry is not present) looks like below:

The application info file C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Surface\Programs\Macroni.xml refers to tag 29EB049F73061803, however, some configuration information for 29EB049F73061803 is missing from the registry. The default value '2.125' will be used for the missing setting.
Path to the tag's missing configuration setting in the registry:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Surface\TagInfo\v1.0\IdentityTags\29EB049F73061803\BoundingBoxHeight

Happy coding!