[Action Required] Battery Tracker - download new version

Less, then 12 hours and more then 2500 downloads - that's the verdict for this tool. Awareness, there are some critical bugs found in Battery Tracker. Please download the new version (from the same location) and replace the version on your computer. This is required action, due the version from August, 29th has number of bugs, that prevent you from sending me system traces. Sorry for inconvenience and thank you for cooperation.

Download Battery Tracker >>

Battery Tracker - Power management and battery tracing tool

A lot of people ask me about how to measure power charging or discharging rate. How to know the quality of your battery and power needs of operating system. How to be sure, that Vista Battery Saver really helps to prolong your battery life and detect exactly how it prolongs it. Two evenings and I wrote small utility, that helps you to know exactly what happens with your laptop battery and helps me to understand what to fix and what to add to VBS to make it better.

All you need to do, is to download Battery Tracker, run it, and after some time of tracing hit Stop Tracking link. It asks you to save traces. Write work conditions or any other useful information and then press Save button then, hitting Submit link, send it to me via email. If you want me to know any particular event, write it into text area. By pressing Add link you'll save in into current trace.

Log data-minding tool still not ready to public release, thus currently you can not work with log files, however, submitting this information, highly important for me for future development of Vista Battery Saver. Also, this program works on Windows XP, so if you still have it, please send me traces as well (this mode is not checked enough)

This tool is not collecting any personal information, so, you can quietly submit traces to me. Thank you for cooperation.

Download Battery Tracker >>

XBox 360 don't know to swim

The moral of that story is "Do your homework before you play video games" via Nathan Weinberg

How to test localized application?

You finished writing World-Ready application. It detects current system culture, or possibly, UI culture, or, even Region and change it's layout language to language, detected with those methods. Now, you want to test it on different locales. What to do? You can go to test PC or, if you're advanced user, install virtual PC images and test the application, while changing Regional and Language Options for each of locale, you want to test. Pretty complicated, especially,  when you want to change UI culture - MUI application requires restart. How to make it easier?

You can try tinny test application, I wrote to perform such task. All you have to do is open your target application via LocTester (or just drop the executable into it and play with cultures to test localization support. Here the screenshot of LocTester

And small video, that demonstrates the way you'll use it.

Now a little bit about localization in general. First  of all, we have to decide what we want from localization. If all you want is locale-specific dates, currencies or formats, you, probably have to use CultureInfo.CurrentCulture class, if all you want is detect the geographical location of end users, use RegionInfo.CurrentRegion (it's derived from CurrentCulture). In case, you do not need to change formats, but you want to localize user interface for those users, who has Start button on other language, use CurrentCulture.CurrentUICulture class. How to use it? Simple

 
    
if (CultureInfo.CurrentUICulture.TwoLetterISOLanguageName.Equals("fr")) 
      
 { 

      
 this.ChangeUICulture("fr"); 
      
 } 

      
 else if (CultureInfo.CurrentUICulture.TwoLetterISOLanguageName.Equals("de")) 
      
 { 

      
 this.ChangeUICulture("de"); 
      
 } 

      
 else if (CultureInfo.CurrentUICulture.TwoLetterISOLanguageName.Equals("it")) 
      
 { 

      
 this.ChangeUICulture("it"); 
      
 } 

Now test it with LocTester to see results. You can compare them later, by changing system locale :)

Download LocTester Binaries >>

Download LocTester Source >>

Italian locale for Vista Battery Saver

Grazie to Andrea Dellamonica from Tisource for Italian translation of Vista Battery Saver. Get latest installer from CodePlex (some minor fixes there)

I want to purchase Code Signing Digital ID for VBS to sign code and pass Certified for Vista. There are more, then 500K installation of this software. All we need is 99$ (simple certificate) or 399$ (advanced), thus if each 1000th person will donate 1$, we can buy the certificate and have one dollar spare :). Chip in for Microsoft Authenticode here

Add Windows Live SkyDrive attachment to your post, by using Windows Live Writer

As you, probably, know, about two months ago, Windows Live team released new sharing platform, named SkyDrive (known as Windows Live Folders). This is really useful service, that allows you to share up to 500MB of your files in internet, by using nice and simple user interface. Why not to use it for attachments (especially, when current version of CS here has known bug to use attachment API :) ).

I think, that all of you using Windows Live Writer to write and publish your posts, thus I decided to write simple and "straight-forward" plugin to use SkyDrive from WLW. Feel free to download, use, rate and tell what you think about.

Unfourchantly, there is no API for SkyDrive, thus the plugin is really big one. :)

Have a nice drive.

Download Windows Live SkyDrive Attachment plugin for Windows Live Writer >>

Microsoft Live comes to Nokia

Nokia always was bad to Windows Mobile, however, it looks like, even with Symbian, they can not be popular enough without Windows Live Services. See yourself. I already using Windows Live Messenger on my E61 device and it's really great. Worth to download and test, however they want you to pay for it... (not now, but afterward)

via Josh