Hey guys, Haven't been on this forum for like a few years and i see that there have been more than a few changes around here (wasn't there an unrelated programming section of the forum?) And ive missed out on so many deals, saving and special offers.... Anyway. After being busy with the real life to my surprise i have decided to accomplish at least something before my mid-life crisis kicks in and part of this is rediscovering visual studio.net (lat one i worked with was a VS.net 2005)
Anyway ive hit a roadblock before i even started coding. Simply fiddling around with the properties of a Visual Basic form. (yeah i know but VB is the best thing i can quickly re-learn from scratch right now and if my thing works, i will try re-coding it in "C" or something...)
Lets just say that part of this thing i am dong (the one i got stuck on here after a whole day of trying to figure it out) is trying to recreate a long dead feature that windows XP had which is a second task-bar (really you could cover your whole desktop with them) but for me a second one on the side of the screen has always been more than enough for me to create a bunch of convenient shortcuts menus and maybe other neat stuff... I remember looking for a program like this for windows 7 or 10 a year ago and failing to find a suitable replacement.
So early Today as i was working trough a guide on assembling a custom windows installation disk from literally files (That's the bigger project i finally got around to. Making my own personal fine-tuned Windows Distro) and working with the tools that MS gives out for free i realized that i can .... probably whip up a decent second task-bar with visual basic or something.
I got to it and soon enough after finding the right properties to tweak, a decent form that i thought would work OK for my purposes.
See how cluttered my regular task-bar is? that's the result of doing something as tedious as assembling a boot-loader from files you found using specialized tools combined with guides that you read during the process to only realize that for the next step you have to get some more tools and files to make it work all while trying to write your own HOW-TO guide because i have better luck understanding what i wrote than figure out the robotic text of some drone in microsoft who wrote this.... And This kind of work as some of you know after a day of coffee dumbs down your perception to the point where you start to loose track of your short term memory. Thats why i need the second toolbar so i can unload those menus and shortcuts. clutterring my primary toolbar. (I also do a lot of custom icons, makes it much easier to find a certain folder in a field of identical folder icons without having to read in a state of a code zombie)
Anyway I just lost track of my train of thought so getting back to the point. I got the Visual Basic toolbar-prototype template in the spot i wanted, stable and un-moving and always above all the windows on the screen. But as i made an effort to point out on those screenshots. All applications still think its just another window and when clicking expand to fullscreen everything ends up with being underneath my VB form completley ignoring its presence.
Like i dont even know how to properly name tjhis, Thats how long i havent toched programming. I remember in linux LXDE this was called Margins- a setting which dosent let a window expand past a certain amount of pixels before the edge of the screen...
And this might be just a dumb assumption but i know that this is a fixable problem because with a product like Visual Studio 2017 it would be very dumb to overlook parameters such as application margins/borders (whatever that pseudo-invisible wall in the interface is called)...
The thing is. i literally dont know how to properly google this particular problem (interface boraders for task-bar unresponsive?... im gonna get something completely unrelated...) Nobody i know programs anymore (just like me they abandoned their hopes and dreams) and and i strongly suspect that there is an easy solution under my nose somewhere.
Meanwhile, ill continue painstakingly reading this manual https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff794728(v=winembedded.60).aspx of in depth construction and optimization of an install image. (i got the bootloader to boot off a flash drive YAY!
)
If you are curious as to why, i want to rid myself of the work i put into setting up and optimizing and tweaking and trying software and i usually forget to install something here or there, resulting in forgetting to remind myself to find the FTP logins i had on my old installation because the web designer for the guy who i am hosting a website for did a ninja-version of rage-quit, by completing the contract and dissapearing without leaving any directions on how to properly maintain the website which is written on some hybrid of PHP and Wordpress. And now the owner of the site might start looking at me as the "Websdite/computer guy" (i tried doing PHP 2 months ago, but it was too much for me to handle, i didnt even have my full grip on HTML yet) And their website folder is a total mess, there are like 3 or 4 older incomplete websites scattered across the folder without any sort of structure. And see, the guys wife already payed me for the hosting 6 months in advance and i gotta learn how to work with this pile of trash soon because i am the only one left! The dude had a construction business in the winter which a friend of mine was part of and Long story short, He took out a bunch of loans, Spent it all on his Wifes business, He didnt even have enough money to buy construction supplies for his contract. He BLEW like several hundred thousand dollars in the most irrisponsible way you could even think of. The dude started an actually good business in that area, Had a lot of people interested and almost NO competition (this is like the american equivalent of like outskirts of Oklahoma City i am talking about. Not a lot of people want to do business there...) and the demand for good realestate from the locals is pretty high. AND THE BOUGHT A MERSADES and gave the rest to his wife.... And the thing is he acts as if he dosent give a damn about owing that sum or anything. From what my friend told me, all he did all day was sit with his laptop playing World of Tanks while the guys did all the work.
And THIS! is why i need my own custom windows distro! If by the time i finally get my system configured as i want It usually takes from several months to a year and by that time my system is wrecked from things like failed attempts to flash some olde smarthphone firmware (some processes require you to do... things to your system to make the process of flashing work) and things like that. So my solution became something i am hoping to accomplish now. That is in one swoop, install the most optimized windows, automatically install the neceseary drivers (MS Embedded toolkit has this neat component that can read pretty much any archive of drivers and pull out only the necessary files to function as drivers while leaving the unneded crap like AMD Catalyst or those annoying software that are attached to the driver. Basically, it does all of this on auto and saves me a lot of time and effort. And another neat thing about it is it can also pull all those driver files out of the existing system to be reinstalled in the same manner on a newer installation.
You can also very finely tweak the system update process (you know the only that leaves behind a bunch of crap from the old installation like an extra windows folder?) Basically there is a system of filters and blacklists (havent got to that yet) that tells the installation to leave or delete/replace. Basically you can optimize that process to be much more effective than the normal way. And of course it will add all the software you want it to add without you worrying about it. For this purpose i am trying to completley switch to portable software even on the desktop. They take up less room, arent tied to the system and much easier to work with. Finally the Embedded tookit offers tools to heavily modify parts of the actual windows image. There actually 4 templates right now. "Application compatibility-(pretty much windows7 without the media center and other things that nobody actually uses) Then there is "minimal configuration". Basically its just installs into a black desktop background with a console command window and thats it. The third one is industrial automation which is just the start menu (there isnt even a task bar- just a start button in the corner that goes to some UNIX Sub-System and a few directories with configs and batch files. I havent looked at what the others are like, but its really fun to explore this area of industrial-windows based systems. I still use windows 7 and constantly shamed for it because of how fancy windows 10 is, and the thing is, Windows embedded7 not only is supported for a lot longer than the standard consumer OS they also have integrated compatibility with componints from Later systems. Take Windows embedded 2009 (pretty much industrial windows XP which is still supported until 2021 It has custom shell support, compatibility with drivers and devices ranging from XP to windows 10 (it dosent care all drivers and software are compatible) Also synchronisation (which i dont use) and basically everything short of decent X64 support which is i am afraid has been inherited from the actual windows.
Basically ive actually discovered the embedded platforms (i knew about them for years but i didnt think they were what they turned out to be, thought they are just barebone systems for industrial stuff which is not exactly true) It actually turned to be more of a very modular construction-set platform OS which i think offers more benefits than standard ones if you like to tinker around in them. and basically i am kinda exited to see how far with this i can go because the last time i tried this 3 years ago, i used tools that were created by microsofts preinstallation environment fanatics which only good enough to build clunky live boot systems that are only good for reparing a system. It was like a trial and error conveyer belt. As soon as i figured out how to build something basic and working and collecting around 200 gigs of resourse files, software, and drivers I set up all of my laptops, and tried one combination of key-components after another because nobody really tested or documented most of this stuff. Unfourtunatley every single drive i printed (around 30 flash drives later) all of them BSODed a while after the boot.
Embedded platform however is much more promising in that regard (psst BSOD in these systems can be turned off
) *1
So thats my crazy rant of the day. I am not drunk. Simply catching you up on what it was like for me these past 4 years. And seriously, if any of you guys DO know something concerning my thing up there with the Visual basic and VSstudio17 that can point me in the right direction, that would be awesome.
I also witnessed a weird thing today during the process of moving 1.5 gigs of drivers to the installation directory through a specialized console that is used to build these embedded images. Basically if i tell it to copy to a directory+1 nonexistanr filder, and it asks me. "Right So is this +1(word name of the folder) you typed on the end of the path, should i add an extra directory or make a file?. If you answer "d" at the prompt (directory) it will create the new folder and the 1.5 gigs will be copied to it.
But out of curiosity i decided to try and see what happens if i answer "f"- tell it that its a file? I was honestly expecting some access denied error or a crash even a BSOD. But the prompt tells me that everything is cool and proceeds to copy the 1.5 gigs of driver files into this file it created.??? The process of copying was identical in both the time and the command line output.... Operation Sucess! 9503 files copied! YAY! but all i see is one file about 1mb in size named after that directory i decided turn into a file and no sign of where the 1.5 gigs went. The file itself can be unzipped containing a few files that i havent really checked the origin of yet but. Maybe someone can explain t0o me the dark witchcraft of the command-line. How does 1.5 gigs casually copy itself into nothing? ... (turns out that files contained in that file are just random windows files...)
And this is also the reason i like poking around in operating systems because once in a while i come across something really weird...
(i attached the file if anyone is curious as i am ).
... i should get a girlfriend...
*1- At the risk of possibly suffocating from its own memeory leak and violetley crash, turning off the blue screen feature allows a small window of time for the operatior or the emergency system to quickly save the work or safety end the processes s before whatever would have by now caused a bluescreen would catch up to the rest of the system and violently kill it.
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