December « 2006 « Tatham Oddie

Archive for December 2006

Fixed the UAC problems with my "Vista and Office 2007 Preview Handler Pack"

Being a good coder I’ve taken my laptop on holidays with me, and decided that tonight would be a good time to tackle the UAC issue with my Vista preview handlers.

The latest (and UAC friendly) version is here:

http://tatham.oddie.com.au/files/PreviewHandlerPackSetup.msi

Basically, I needed to force an escalation prompt. This task itself is pretty easy and well documented, however VS2005 (which I’m using to make my MSIs) isn’t exactly a full featured installer package – it barely knows how to copy files.

In the end I found a really useful blog post by Aaron Stebner that explains how to do just that. He solves the problem using a post-build script that fixes the MSI generated by VS2005.

Unfortunately Aaron’s solution didn’t work straight out of the box as the MSI path wasn’t being passed to the script at all. After beating my head against the wall and retyping the post-build event several times I found this little gem:

The VS2005 macro name has a typo in it!

Written by Tatham Oddie

December 22, 2006 at 22:59

Posted in Uncategorized

Vista and Office 2007 Preview Handler Pack released

with 65 comments

I’m in love with the new preview functionality in Vista and Office 2007, however its usefulness is limited by the small number of file types it will actually preview. Over the weekend, I set out to start fixing this by implementing preview handlers for the files I use every day.

You can download the installer here:

http://tatham.oddie.com.au/files/PreviewHandlerPackSetup.msi

In its latest version (15th Feb 2008) the pack now supports:

ActionScript (.as)
ASPX (.aspx)
C# (.cs)
CSS (.css)
Diff (.diff, .patch)
DOS (.bat, .cmd)
JavaScript (.js)
Ruby (.rb, .rhtml, .rjs) thanks to Ivan Porto Carrero
SQL (.sql)
VB (.vb)

The project is basically just a stitched together set of other people’s work – there wasn’t much left for me to do considering:

95% of the interop code came from Stephen Toub’s excelent article ‘View Data Your Way With Our Managed Preview Handler Framework‘
The code highlighting library used is Lonwas.Highlight written by Thomas Johansen

Right now I’m interested in hearing about the extensions that you most want previewers for. Just add a comment to the bottom of this post and I’ll see what I can do.

Here are some screenshots from Vista: