Page 2 of 3   « previous page   next page »

CF: I was just thinking that might make a really good dnrTV episode?
SH: It would. Shellextensions are really powerful, but there is one thing that I think Microsoft and that everyone is really punting on right now is that you can only have one version of the .NET Framework loaded into a process at a time. So what happens if I write a Shellextension in .NET 1.0 and you write it in .NET 2.0, and we try to live together? Nine times out of 10 it works just fine, but every once in a while my Shellextension, the 1.0 Shellextension, or 1.1.1, won't work if 2.0 gets in first. So, there is some really cool stuff going on right now about Shellextensions. There is a company that made a Shellextension maker that literally - like made it - integrated into Visual Studio.

CF: Really.
SH: Just go file, new, Shellextension. But I think that people are kind of missing the point that there are three versions of the .NET Framework out there and you really just don't know which one is going to get in memory.

CF: But if you'll target 1.1, you are probably pretty safe, right?
SH: For the most part, as long as your Shellextension doesn't do any remoting outside. I have worked within a Shellextension for Logitech. They did some remoting and there are problems remoting between 1.1 and 2.0. You will get this really obscure error that says date, time, min, ticks something-something is not compatible, it's kind of like the classic remoting error...

CF: Sort of like a version incompatibility.
SH: ...And that is showing that there is a compatibility problem. But, yeah, for the most part it will work, but I just wanted to warn people that when you are making any kind of extension whether it would be inside of, like, MMC or it's the Explorer. If you don't own the executable then you can't count on the right version of the .NET Framework, but you are right.

CF: Let's just put that aside for another day and we could do a dnrtv on Shell Extensions, would you?
SH: Totally.

CF: Cool!
SH: Totally, so the fact that Hermann's Shell Extension uses right-dragging - means dragging with the right mouse button and then letting go gets me into cool little-known feature number 6, which is right-dragging. There are so many places where you can drag something and drop with the right mouse button and get a different feature. The obvious one is, of course, Explorer. If you pick anything up in Explorer and right-drag it, you will get a move, copy, create shortcut, but a lot of people don't realize that this works in Outlook and Word. You can like go into Word, type a bunch of words, select one and then right-drag it, and you actually get a context menu about moving, copying, or linking to that word.

CF: Wow, cool!
SH: A lot easier than the whole cut, copy, paste, paste special thing, and really right-clicking and right-dragging will set you free, no matter what you are doing.

CF: That's cool. Something you don't really think of that much and I know for new Windows users it takes some long time to get conditioned to the right mouse button, just to get used to it.
SH: It's not discoverable.

CF: I am talking mere mortals here.
SH: Yeah, but it's not - it's reasonable because it's not discoverable, right. Why was the start menu added to Windows 95? It's because a monkey will never double-click right if you go into, like, a Program Manager on Windows 3.1. It's just - it's not discover, oh, double-click, oh, it's so obvious - triple-click. You know this is not obvious. Like, if you go into Word, try a double click will select a word, right.

CF: Yeah.
SH: You know that you can go in double-click and it'll work. If you triple-click in Microsoft Word, what happens? Selects the whole paragraph.

CF: A paragraph, right, yeah.
SH: Yeah, totally discoverable, right, completely obvious, but quadruple-clicking doesn't do anything. So these kinds of UI things are not particularly discoverable, but once you do find them it's very powerful.

CF: Yep.
SH: So the next one is number 5. Windows hotkeys, and I mean specifically hotkeys that use the Windows key.

CF: All right, yeah.
SH: Yeah, Jeff Atwood...

CF: Like Windows E brings up Explorer, for example.
SH: Exactly, Jeff Atwood actually listed them all out at http://shrinkster.com/dph at his very, very good coding horror site. Jeff is a fantastic writer and his site is a gem. I read it everyday, and he has got a whole list of them up there and he points out that where those keys end, like Window E for Explorer and Window M for minimize. Win Key, which is a utility, that is specializes in making the Windows key bindable to other things, is a great thing. Turns out that the company that makes Win keys is no longer distributing it but I found a download at http://shrinkster.com/dpi, so grab yourself a copy of Win key and know that it's no longer supported but it's rocking sweet and squirrel it away because one day you won't be able to find a copy anywhere online. Turns out the company found it too much of a support burden so they decided to move on to others things.

CF: Wow! Great tip.
SH: Yeah, okay, number 4 is command lines other than command, right? And we were talking about MONAD in our last - was it last show? So, MONAD is an obvious example but it turns out there are other shells command-line utilities within Windows that exist already. The first one is a thing called WMIC, if you go out to the command line you go out to cmd.exe, you type in WMIC, you will get a Windows Management Instrumentation Shell. This is a shell that just does WMI.

CF: Cool!
SH: So, you can go out there and type queries and things that you would ordinarily have to write a WMI program for but it will, like, you could say, process where description equals explorer.exe and you get information about the explorer.exe process. You can poke around all throughout the WMI namespaces and see all the information that's there, it lets you browse schemas, query all the different classes, you can work with remote computers, make aliases, you can write specific scripts for an administrator of a large network, it's just one more thing, one more query, arrow in your quiver. And I was totally surprised. It's like whenever you type something at the command line and you see a result that you have never seen before, and you didn't realize it was installed all the while. It's pretty cool, it's like discovering gold.

CF: Absolutely.
SH: So that's WMIC. That's at http://shrinkster.com/dpj.

CF: Okay.
SH: I had never seen that one before today, did you?

CF: No, I never heard of it. SH: Yeah, it's crazy. Netsh, this is a good one I actually use this one but not to the depths of what it can do. Netsh at http://shrinkster.com/dpk. This is a tool that lets you do all the kinds of things you would do from the network interface properties window from the command line. You can go type in Netsh, you could, say, add server and then add a dhcp server. You can go - if you want it to, like, uninstall IPv6.0. Sometimes that can screw up people's machines. I have got information up at http://shrinkster.com/dpl you can type netsh interface ipv6.0 uninstall.

CF: Wow!
SH: But the most useful thing I found you can do at Netsh is - I actually got my system in just such a buggered up way that when I ran ipconfig from the command line, it did nothing.

CF: Yup, hey! Here's a nice little tip for you with ipconfig...
SH: Yeah.

CF: Is that sometimes you will have a bad DNS entry because you are working on sites and editing DNS entries and you go in there and something gets in there that's wrong. You go and change it in the DNS server and it doesn't change on your client because of the time to live in all that stuff. So, there is a local DNS cache associated with your connection. If you type ipconfig/flushdns, it will remove it from the cache, clear the cache.
SH: Right, that's kind of the Ctrl+F5 equivalent, right?

CF: Absolutely.
SH: Flush through that, don't - trust me, I want fresh DNS absolutely.

CF: Right, absolutely, and I would like to remind everybody that Hanselminutes is made possible this week by Xceed Zip for .NET, which lets you handle Zip, Tar in Gzip files on FTP servers, in streams, in memory, and more, online at http://shrinkster.com/dt2.
SH: Netsh will let you reset your entire stack, you can say Netsh interface ipreset and this has saved me two or three different times when I got my system into all sorts of weird states by basically rebuilding my whole little IP stack under Windows XP.

CF: Yeah, I could have used that tonight. My connections weren't working at all and rather than having to log off and log back on and that kind of stuff.
SH: Yeah, totally.

CF: And you can read Scott's post about that at http://shrinkster.com/dt1. So, what's next?
SH: So, moving on, we get into the top three here. From the command line, are you familiar with PushD and PopD?

CF: No.
SH: So, go out to the command line and just - what directory do you drop into? Probably Documents and Settings, Carl.

CF: Usually in Documents and Settings, yeah.
SH: Okay, so go and say, like, pushd all one word, space, and then a period.

CF: Okay.
SH: And then cd off into, like, the Windows directory. Write cd/windows.

Page 2 of 3   « previous page   next page »