On 23^rd April Microsoft announces the launch of official SkyDrive application for Windows on Windows 8 blog. This is one of the most awaited applications among the developers and users. All we wanted is a simple app through which we can manage our cloud storage with ease. Download the SkyDrive app here.

Here is what available now according to this blog post:

• SkyDrive for the Windows desktop (preview available now). View and manage your personal SkyDrive directly from Windows Explorer on Windows 8, Windows 7, and Windows Vista with this new preview app available in 106 languages worldwide.

• Fetching files through SkyDrive.com. Easily access, browse, and stream files from a remote PC running the preview app to just about anywhere by simply fetching them via SkyDrive.com.

• SkyDrive storage updates. A new, more flexible approach to personal cloud storage that allows power users to get additional paid storage as their needs grow.

• SkyDrive for other devices. We’ve updated the SkyDrive apps on Windows Phone and iOS devices, bringing better management features and sharing options to those devices. We’re also releasing a new preview client for Mac OS X Lion, letting you manage your SkyDrive right from the Finder.

After downloading the application run the setup. This will install the app.

The installation will also let you sync the folders between your PC and other devices like WP7, Android and iPhone. You can un-check the option at this moment but if you wish to enable file sharing among devices then you can set this from SkyDrive app settings option later on.

Once the installation is complete you can then set the folder SkyDrive path:

After the folder has been set up the SkyDrive app will started in the background. The SkyDrive app will then download the files from the SkyDrive inside the SkyDrive folder set up while installing the app. Check out the below screenshot, as the SkyDrive is sitting in the task bar and syncing the files on the other hand. The folders which are synced are marked with tick icon and the folders which are still in sync process is having the sync icon. If you have worked with LiveMesh then you must be aware of the sync icon.

I am quite familiar with the application even before it's launch. I have use LiveSync app so this app seems pretty similar to me. To add a new file just copy and paste or drag & drop the file in the local SkyDrive folder. The file or folder will then get synced to SkyDrive which can be accessed from anywhere around the planet. If you want to un-install the app then make sure that you un-link the SkyDrive folder before you do that (I don't know why someone will remove tha app!!) To un-link the local folder right-click the settings icon and click Unlink SkyDrive button to unlink the folder.

In the end the most awaited SkyDrive app is out and is going to be a big hit soon. If you have some suggestions for the SkyDrive app or want to report back a bug or you have some suggestions or want some new features then please do so. Let's make this app a hit.

IMPORTANT: If you are not the current user of SkyDrive then be advised that for the new users the storage capacity available will be 7GB and not 25GB which is offered to old account holders. So make it quick to get the 25GB storage capacity before it gets too late.

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If you love playing Angry Birds on your PC or on your phone, then you will also love Angry Birds theme for Windows 7. The sound effects are cool, just like the one you hear while you play the game and the wallpapers are cool too. I like the red angry bird to sit on my desktop as it is the best wallpaper I can choose among the 6 wallpapers that comes with the theme.

You can download the Angry Birds theme from the Microsoft downloads center here

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This is great stuff. If you own a website or a blog you should use this excellent feature of pinning fav links of your site on user's Windows 7 taskbar. Though this feature of IE9 was on hype since it's beta realease. Now it's time to use this feature for my blog. But before you start grab the latest stable version of the Pinify (formerly know as IE9ify) from Codeplex.

About Pinify
This plugin is written in jQuery and is hosted on Codeplex. I highly recommend you to follow this project on Codeplex. This plugin is not just about pinning, but also allows the user to customize the skin of the browser, adds a jumplist of your favourite links to the taskbar, overlay icons, tasks and thumbbar buttons. This is a total different user experience for the users /readers of your blog or site.

Preparing your site for the new experience

By now you have downloaded the latest release of the pinify from Codeplex. Open your site in Visual Studio and get to the head section. Fire the below NuGet command to install the Pinify plugin.

 

For the simplest implementation of this plugin, use the below script in the head section of your page.

<script src="Scripts/jquery-1.5.2.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="Scripts/jquery.pinify.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

<script type="text/javascript">
$().ready(function () {
     $('head').pinify();
});
</script>

Hit F5 and make sure you have selected IE9 as your default browser. After you see your site home page in the browser hit F12 to get the IE9 developer window. Under HTML tab expand the Head tree and you will come to see few meta tags.

Drag and drop the tab to your task bar. This time a new IE window will open but with a difference. Check out below, the navigation buttons has a different color, the site has an icon also.

In the above screenshot you can see the default IE icon because I have not set the favicon for my site. Once I set the fav icon in the head section of my page, I will then have a new favicon to show off. Same is with the navigation buttons, here what you are seeing is the default color, you can set your own like yellow or red or some other different color which matches the theme of your site.

 

Let's take a bit more complicate example. Now I want to do the same for my blog. For the moment I will have the following in the jumplist.

• Archives - Link to my blog archive.
• Twitter
• Facebook and
• Contact Me

The icon will be the same as my current favicon. To implement pinify for my blog I do all the work in master page which is site.master in my case. Copy and paste the below script in the head section of your page. Change the text and links accordingly.

<script src="Scripts/jquery-1.5.2.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="Scripts/jquery.pinify.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
        $().ready(function () {
            $('head').pinify({
                applicationName: 'Midnight Programmer',
                tooltip: 'Programming For Fun',
                tasks: [{
                    'name': 'Archive',
                    'action': 'http://midnightprogrammer.net/archive.aspx',
                    'icon': 'favicon.ico'
                },
                {
                    'name': 'Twitter',
                    'action': 'http://twitter.com/prashantmx',
                    'icon': 'twitter.ico'
                },
                {
                    'name': 'Facebook',
                    'action': 'http://facebook.com/khandelwal.p',
                    'icon': 'facebook.ico'
                },
                {
                    'name': 'Contact Me',
                    'action': 'http://www.midnightprogrammer.net/contact.aspx',
                    'icon': 'favicon.ico'
                }]
            });
        });
</script>

After adding the script drag the tab to the taskbar and right-click it to view the task list.  

There are many other things which you can do with this plugin. I have just showed a simplest way to get you jump started with pinify. As you are reading this post try dragging the tab on your windows taskbar and right-click to see the task list as shown above.

Check out this video at Channel 9 by Brandon Satrom creator of pinify.

There are many things which can be done with pinify. To know more read the below links.

• Pinify - CodePlex
• NuGet Gallery - Pinify
• Pinned Sites: Windows 7 Desktop Integration with Internet Explorer 9
• Brandon Satrom post on Pinify 

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I wrote a blog post on how you can add a custom Jumplist on your Windows form application for Windows 7 platform using the Windows 7 API Code Pack, but that is for Windows Form applications running on Windows 7. 

WPF makes Jumplists more simpler. You need not to add any API reference or any other reference in your project. You can just make the use of Jumplists for better navigation for your users. 

If you are using WPF then, there is a simple way to add Jumplists. I will show how you can have a pre-defined jumplists for your application. The main part of the application in which we have to focus is App.xaml. All work related to jumplist will be done here. For instance use the below code to add calculator to the jumplist.

<JumpList.JumpList>
        <JumpList ShowFrequentCategory="True" ShowRecentCategory="True">
            <JumpTask Title="Calculator"
                      Description="Open Calculator"
                      ApplicationPath="calc.exe"
                      IconResourcePath="calc.exe"/>
        </JumpList>
</JumpList.JumpList>

You know why there is Title and Description. The ApplicationPath will have the fully qualified name of the application path or just the name of the programs that can be executed with their name. IconResourcePath will have a fully qualified path of the icon. If your application have an icon embedded in the application, then you can just set the application exe path or name else you can have a fully qualified path of the icon file.

To add a new Jumplist, add a new <JumpTask> tag with the above mentioned tags and for every Jumplist item you need to do the same.

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I am now using Windows 7 since its beta release and so far my experience is awesome. But as a developer the hard drive space is always been a problem for me, no matter how many external drives or other stoarge devices you have connected to your machine but the disk space on the host machine is always a primary problem. Windows 7 is more stable OS in Windows family so far (I found it more stable than Win XP) and the reason it is being more stable because everytime you install a program on your Win 7 machine, it automatically creates a snapshot of the host drive. This is because if anything goes wrong with the program or it just crashes causing problems, Windows 7 can recover automatically from that state with the snapshot created before the installation.

But these snapshots hogs up a lot of hard drive sapce and there is no way that you can copy them and place it in a different drive or just change the location of the snapshots been taken by the OS. Therefore to maintain the balance, the OS automatically deletes the last/oldest snapshot from the hard drive resulting some free space for the user and for other processes of the system.  If you no longer require the snapshots (only if you think that your machine is running perfectly fine) execute the below command to delete all the snapshots created so far:

c:\>vssadmin delete shadows /for=c: /all

In the above command /for parameter should have the letter of your Windows OS drive. In my case it is C: (as in majority of the cases it will be C:)

Just in case if you don't want to delete all the snapshots then instead of using the /all parameter use the /oldest parameter. This will dleete the oldest snapshot from the drive:

c:\>vssadmin delete shadows /for=c: /oldest

This will free up some GIGs of space if you are using it for the first time and if you are using it quite frequently then also you end up with MBs of free space.

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