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Friday, 15 June 2012

Visual Controls Updated, Remove Third Party Control Panel Applets

The Windows control panel is one of the central hubs of the operating system. It links to administrative tools, lets you maintain your system or troubleshoot it. Third party applications can – and will – add their own icons to the control panel which in itself is not a big issue. Examples of programs that do that are Oracle’s Java, Adobe’s Flash Player, or Nvidia with its control panel.

When you uninstall those programs later, it can happen that their icons in the control panel stay behind. That’s only the icon then with no functionality attached to it anymore.

Visual Controls was created back in 2008 to give Windows users an option to remove third party control panel applets from the operating system again. You can use the software to remove leftover icons or to remove icons from existing programs that you do not want to appear in the control panel.

You can start the program right after you have unpacked it on your system. It requires the Microsoft .Net Framework 2.0 or higher to run, which is a given on the majority of operating systems it supports The new version is now fully compatible with Windows 7, and Vista, XP and even Windows 2000. The developer has improved compatibility with older versions of Windows as well in this release. Please note that Visual Controls requires administrative privileges to run.

The program lists all third party control panel applets in its interface once you have started the application.

visual controls

Just uncheck the applets that you do not want to see anymore in the control panel, and click the apply button afterwards. Applets are listed in alphabetically order, another change in the new version. Once you hit the apply button you will notice that the selected items have been removed from the control panel. You can add them again at a later time by repeating the same steps.

The developer has added several command line arguments to the app which extend the functionality further. You can use the command –enable-global-mode to disable select control panel applets for all users of the system, and –disable-blacklist to display first party applets as well. Both options can be extremely useful for system administrators.

The developer has improved Visual Controls significantly. Better compatibility, and the command line options are especially noteworthy in this regards.

Manage Additional Control Panel Extensions
Display All Windows 7 Control Panel Tools At Once
Put Anything you want into the Control Panel
Quick Launch Control Panel Items From The Windows 7 Taskbar
Companel, Manage My Computer, Control Panel Items

About the Author:Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand. You can follow Martin on Facebook or Twitter.Author: Martin Brinkmann, Monday March 26, 2012 -
Tags:control-panel, windows software

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Friday, 6 April 2012

Microsoft Beta Day, Windows 8, .Net 4.5, Visual Studio 11

Microsoft has released several beta versions of upcoming products. You are probably already downloading the Windows 8 Consumer Preview that was released about an hour ago. The release marks the beginning of the beta phase of the operating system. Windows Server 8 Beta, Visual Studio 11 Beta and Microsoft .Net Framework 4.5 Beta have been released today as well. This article links to downloads for all released beta versions, and looks briefly at the changes and feature additions in those versions.

Windows 8

The Consumer Preview release was announced on Microsoft’s official Building Windows 8 blog. The post highlights what’s different in comparison to the developer preview version released last year:

Windows Store – Microsoft has integrated a preview version of the Windows Store in the Consumer Preview version of Windows 8.Cloud Support – Cloud services in the form of Skydrive have been integrated into Windows 8. This can be used to sync settings and files between devices efficiently.Internet Explorer Platform Preview 5 – A new preview version of IE10 has been integrated into the beta.Microsoft has completed the “user experience for touch, keyboard, and mouse” in this release.

The system recommendations have been posted as well:

1 GHz or faster processor1 GB RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit)16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver

Microsoft notes that these are not system requirements and not final.

Download: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/consumer-preview

Windows Server 8 Beta

The Windows Server 8 Beta has been released today as well.

Windows Server “8? is the broadest, most scalable and elastic platform for web and applications. Its consistent, open set of tools and frameworks give developers the flexibility to build and deploy applications on-premises, in the cloud, and in a hybrid environment. Windows Server “8? will empower you to deliver:
Flexibility to build on-premises and in the cloud: Developers can use the same languages and tools to build on-premises and cloud applications, allowing them to build applications that use distributed and temporally decoupled components.
An open web platform: Windows Server “8?, combined with Internet Information Services (IIS), offers a solid platform for both open-source web stacks and ASP.NET, opening up a wide range of choices for application development.
A scalable and elastic web platform: Hosting providers can use new features in Windows Server “8? to increase density, simplify management, and achieve higher scalability in a shared web-hosting environment.

Download: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/hh708764.aspx?ocid=&wt.mc_id=MEC_110_1_33

More Information: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/windows-server/v8-default.aspx

System Requirements:

Processor: Minimum: 1.4 GHz 64bit processorMemory: Minimum: 512 MB RAMAvailable Disk: Space Minimum: 32 GB Note: 32 GB should be considered an absolute minimum value for successful installation. Computers with more than 16 GB of RAM will require more disk space for paging, hibernation, and
dump files.

Visual Studio 11 Beta

Visual Studio 11 comes with many feature additions and improvements. It includes support for Windows 8 and web development.

visual-studio

Reduced toolbar commands. To help free up precious workspace, Microsoft has reduced the number of default commands that show on toolbars in the user interface. These commands can still be accessed through the drop-down menus or added back onto the toolbar if the user wants them, but now the default work area is significantly larger. For example, the cut, copy and paste toolbar commands were removed because research has shown that most developers use the keyboard shortcuts instead.Simplified graphics. “Visual Studio 11” eliminates the use of color within tools except in cases where color is used for notification or status change purposes. Now, the user interface competes far less with the developer’s content. Other user interface graphics, such as line work and iconography, also have been simplified to be less distracting.Comprehensive search. “Visual Studio 11” features a comprehensive search capability, allowing developers to quickly find what they are looking for within commands and configuration options, tool windows, and open files.Workflow hubs. New workflow hubs combine common tasks into one simplified window. Rather than force developers to interact with two or more tool windows to get tasks done, ”Visual Studio 11” streamlines common tasks so that many can be accomplished from within a single window.Preview Tabs. Developers can view the contents of documents using new Preview Tabs, which get reused as the developer works. As a result, developers no longer end up with large numbers of extraneous documents open as a byproduct of common tasks such as debugging or browsing results.

It includes the Team Foundation Server Express Beta, a free collaboration software for small teams.

Download: http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us

Microsoft .Net Framework 4.5 Beta

The Microsoft .Net Framework 4.5 Beta improves the framework in many different ways. Core enhancements include:

Languages. To help developers deliver responsive clients and scalable servers, the C# and Visual Basic languages now have built-in support for writing asynchronous code almost as easily as if it were synchronous. And to help developers tackle data-complex problems, F# integrates Type Providers to make data access trivial in F# programs and components.Performance. The Common Language Runtime has been overhauled to provide better performance, in particular for server applications and services. With additions such as background server garbage collection, multicore background JIT compilation and profile-guided optimization, managed applications can now start faster and run with better throughput and lower latency.Networking. With the proliferation of devices and continuous services in the cloud, .NET Framework 4.5 builds upon the high-quality networking libraries already available in .NET to further enable the development of increasingly connected applications. New support spans from modern HTTP libraries to WebSockets to support for contract-first service development.

Download: http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us

Closing Words: Four new beta releases in one day may seem overkill, even for a company like Microsoft. The servers seem to be capable of handling the traffic right now. It remains to be seen though if it stays this way or if they will slow down to a crawl eventually when more users start to download the beta versions.

Have you download and tried a beta version yet? If so, what is your impression so far?

Enjoyed the article?: Then sign-up for our free newsletter or RSS feed to kick off your day with the latest technology news and tips, or share the article with your friends and contacts on Facebook or Twitter. Get your free copy of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Standard
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Windows Vista Service Pack 2 Beta Download About the Author:Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand. You can follow Martin on Facebook or Twitter.Author: Martin Brinkmann, Wednesday February 29, 2012 -
Tags:microsoft, net framework, visual studio, windows 8, windows server

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Friday, 30 March 2012

Wikipedia Visual Editor Coming Soon

One of the biggest hurdles for new Wikipedia contributors is the editor that is currently offered on site. The editor is basically a plain text editor and authors have to learn the markup language to add, edit or delete information on Wikipedia pages. While it is often possible to use copy and paste for that, for instance to add a new link to a Wikipedia article, the syntax is often not that easy to cope with, especially if you plan on adding a new article to the site.

Howie Fung, Senior Product Manager, notes that there “is plenty of evidence that wiki-markup is a substantial barrier that prevents many people from contributing to Wikipedia and our other projects”.

That’s without doubt one of the core reasons why the Wikimedia Foundation has started to create a visual editor for Wikipedia. The editor is currently available as a developer prototype. The editor is nowhere near as robust to make it available for all Wikipedia editors just yet, but it shows some of the editor’s planned capabilities.

wikipedia visual editor

The developers have published a visual editor sandbox to provide all contributing and future editors with the opportunity to test the visual editor before it goes live on the site. When you open the editor sandbox, you see a single toolbar at the top and the article beneath. Everything on that page is editable.

The first half of the toolbar provides access to common editor options, like adding headings to the article, making text bold or adding links to it. The second half switches between different view modes. It is for instance possible to display a wikitext or json view mode next to the editor’s text. Strangely though, those view modes do not allow editing of contents.

The developers plan to add features and upgrade the editor to make it more robust before it goes live later this year on the site. A visual editor could increase the editor count on Wikipedia significantly. What’s your take on the move?

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