New Stuff
Resources for Your Developer Toolbox
Marnie Hutcheson
Contents
Clean Up Your Registry
Registry Medic 3.0, released by Iomatic, allows you to clean up your registry, improves PC performance, protects your machine from Trojans, and gets rid of those annoying start-up program artifacts that can be so hard to remove.
Registry Medic 3.0 uses an "intelligent" engine to scan your registry for invalid entries. By clicking a button you can repair or remove registry entries that refer to a file or folder that has been moved or deleted. You can back up and restore your registry on a one-time basis or on a regular schedule.
It's risky to interfere with the registry on this scale, so I backed up everything before I attempted to run the free trial version of this program (the trial will remove five defunct registry entries). It found 536 invalid registry entries—quite impressive. I am happy to report that I tried it on several PCs that were really running slowly, and most of them showed a definite performance improvement.
A couple of things did cause a bit of concern when I ran the program for the first time. First, Registry Medic 3.0 prompts you to back up your registry before it does any clean-up operations, but it doesn't give you a confirmation that it saved the registry, or tell you where it put it, or what it was called. So I was glad that I had used RegEdit to back up my registry before I started.
Also, several of the machines reported errors closing objects and DLL files when I rebooted the systems after having Registry Medic 3.0 remove the invalid registry entries and defunct software. These errors at shutdown were a one-time event and so far none of the PCs that were cleaned up have had any major problems. I have had only one app-lication stop running since the clean-up was performed.
Registry Medic 3.0 runs under Windows® 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows NT® 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server™ 2003.
Price: $29.95. A free trial version is available for download.
Synchronize Your Outlook Tasks
SynchPst for Outlook 1.4.7 by Wisco synchronizes your Outlook® e-mail, tasks, journal entries, contacts, notes, distribution lists, and calendar appointments on two or more networks connected without a Microsoft Exchange Server.
You can synchronize Outlook on your laptop as easily as you sync your Pocket PC, by setting up the folders you want to keep updated. You can also share Outlook folders with others. So, for example, you can update your calendar on your laptop when traveling and transfer those changes automatically to the Outlook calendar on your desktop and your co-workers's computers on the network. This is very useful for those who don't have Microsoft Exchange Server in their network.
In addition to the basic version, the professional version lets you save and restore your settings, set the time intervals for synchronization, set filters on your e-mails, tasks, and appointment folders, and exclude private entries from synchronization.
SynchPst supports Outlook 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, and Windows NT 4.0.
Price:Basic is $39.95; Professional is $69.95. A free trial version is available for download.
Convert Apps into Flexible Formats
Thinstall 2.75, from Jiti,converts existing applications into a format that can be run on any computer without file system or registry modifications, and without making any changes to your source code. It works with binary EXE, DLL and data files, integrates into your current process, and is compatible with almost all available libraries, tools, and installers.
Thinstall applications are deployed and run as a single EXE file, eliminating dependencies on outside files and registry keys. No more DLL Hell. You just put the EXE on a network drive and users can run it directly without installation. You simply delete the file to uninstall the application.
Thinstall 2.75 works in three stages. Link Stage binds all application files with the "Virtual Operating System" into a single EXE file. In the Load Stage the virtual operating system decompresses the application into memory and redirects all of its Win32® API calls to pass through the operating system. Finally, in the Run Stage, the program is executed normally with Thinstall performing virtualized file system and registry operations, thus enabling the application to run without installation.
Applications running under the virtual operating system access files from the real system and virtualized environment simultaneously without knowing the difference between the two. Applications think they have been installed, but no changes have been made to the computer.
Thinstall loads almost all 32-bit Windows-based applications and COM files without requiring any source changes. Applications based on the Microsoft® .NET Framework and Visual Basic® that are compressed with Thinstall can run without requiring that the Framework or Visual Basic are installed on the machine.
In addition Thinstall 2.75 adds anti-virus protection and obfuscation technology which generates unique secure EXEs for each customer. You can protect your documents and applications against viruses and eliminate "false positives" that occur due to mistakes from anti-virus software.
Price: $1,475 for a single license. Free 30-day trial available.
Add 3-D to Your Presentations
Tired of the same old PowerPoint® presentation templates? OfficeFX 1.3 from Instant Effects will really wake them up for you with impressive 3-D backgrounds and foregrounds that move in a variety of interesting (even amazing) ways through your presentation, without disturbing your content. OfficeFX 1.3 features a number of advances in video textures and uses DirectX® 9.0 shaders and geometry deformation to increase its capabilities, so you can display images and videos across your slides.
This sophisticated capability requires a powerful PC with a very recent and capable 3-D graphics card.
You start by creating your PowerPoint presentation as usual, then click the OfficeFX button on the PowerPoint toolbar and a new window opens with the OfficeFX theme interface. After selecting a theme, you can alter it by modifying materials, shading, and lighting effects. Finally, you can choose from a variety of animations, interactions, and transitions that supplement your presentation without affecting your text formatting and placement. FXPre-view lets you view the presentation as you're making your changes to it.
Price: $149, for a single license, including 14 FXThemes
Solving Simultaneous Equations
TK Solver 5.0 Premium, by Universal Technical Systems Inc., is a rules-based programming environment that lets you set up and solve one or more equations simultaneously. This new release allows you to harness TK Solver 5.0 in your Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and use it to solve problems without writing any code or equations. You can also package the Excel solutions that you create and then distribute them freely to others.
Instead of a project, TK Solver 5.0 uses a model as the organizational container. A model can contain rules (equations), variables, functions, lists, units (for conversions), tables of values, comments, and plots. TK Solver 5.0 comes with many library and sample models to help you get started, or you can create your own.
You can export your models to Excel from TK Solver 5.0, or you can import from them directly into Excel using the TK Solver tool bar functions in Excel. The TK Solver 5.0 equations and model are plugged into the worksheet for you. The output values, plots and dynamic model elements all update automatically with their new values as soon as the user moves the cursor out of an input cell. Users can interact with your solution in Excel by changing inputs and viewing the updated outputs.
TK Solver 5.0 Premium runs on Windows 2000 and Windows XP. It comes with a full set of animated screenshot-based tutorials and tons of library and sample models.
TK Solver is powered by a DLL called rulemaster that integrates with Visual Basic, VBScript, and all of the Visual Studio® .NET-supported languages such as C#.
Price: $599.00 per desktop.
The Bookshelf
Office 2003 XML by Evan Lenz, Mary McRae, and Simon St. Laurent (O' Reilly, 2004) examines how the various products in the Office suite both produce and consume XML. The book covers the diverse set of XML tools in Office, exploring how XML is supported in Word, Excel, and Access. Developers learn how they can connect Office to other systems, and power users learn to create and analyze XML documents using familiar Office tools.
The book covers both the user interface side, creating interfaces so that users can comfortably (and even unknowingly) work with XML, and the back end, exposing Office information to other processes. It also looks at Microsoft InfoPath and how it fits with the rest of Office. Finally, the appendices introduce various XML technologies that may be useful in working with Office, including XSLT, W3C XML Schema, RELAX NG, and SOAP.
Price: $39.95, 576 pages.
All prices were confirmed at press time and are subject to change.
Send your New Stuff to newstuff@microsoft.com.
Marnie Hutcheson is president of Internet Development Associates (Ideva), a firm in Ocala, Florida, that specializes in Internet and intranet Web application design and development. She has published technical papers and books on various computing topics. You can reach her at
marnie@ideva.com.