January 2015 – John Selkirk

Wix: Installing a shortcut to a URL with an icon

For months now an installer that I created using the InternetShortcut tag has been without a nice icon.

I decided to trawl the web and work out how to create a shortcut that could contain an icon.

It turns out you can actually use a standard Wix Shortcut IF you perform a few steps. First you need to define an icon like so:

<Icon Id="Shortcut_Icon.ico" SourceFile="<path to icon>" />

Note: The Id of the icon has a .ico extension. This is important as Wix does not generate a correct shortcut if this is not present.

Then, you need to setup a property which contains the URL you wish to have the shortcut launch:

<Property Id="Shortcut_Url" Value="http://the.url.you.would.like.launched" />

Finally, you need to create a shortcut that uses both the icon and the URL property:

<Shortcut Id="SampleShortcut" Directory="DesktopFolder" Name="Sample" WorkingDirectory="SampleDir" Description="Launches Website." Target="[Shortcut_Url]" Icon="Shortcut_Icon.ico" />

The result is a shortcut that will launch the users default browser to the specified URL.

ArcGIS Runtime for .NET – Observation #1

When coming from the ArcGIS Engine world one of the first things that catches your attention with ArcGIS Runtime for .NET is the fact that you do not need to install it on a client device.

You merely need to include the Runtime files with your application.

This may seem like a small thing but when you are dealing with maintaining software on thousands of client devices it is awesome!!

Not having yet another pre-requisite (and a 500MB+ one at that) really helps deployment.

5k a day

For a few months leading up to the New Year I had thinking about doing 5k a day and not drinking alcohol for the month of January. It seemed like a good way to kick start getting fit again and I had read that a month without any alcohol really helps your body.

So, on the 1st January, my wife and I started doing 5k every day. Notice I didn’t say running 5k as it was nowhere near that!

Now that we half way through the challenge and I have a handle on it I’ve decided to write this blog post.

Firstly, starting on the 1st Jan was a REALLY bad idea. Not only was the night before busy but we still had things we wanted to do on New Year’s Day.

Next, 31 days of doing 5k a day takes time and focus. There are many things that can get in the way of you spending up to an hour getting the task done.

At this point though we are half way done and my times have went from around 60 mins to 43 minutes. This is mainly due to picking up the distance that I am jogging and my goal it to be jogging at least half the distance by the time this challenge is all said and done.

Map My Fitness (I use map my ride) applications and an iPhone is all I needed to track some good information on how I was doing. I do intend on getting the Apple Watch when it comes out though. Mainly because I want one but it does track your heart rate. Keeping that is the right range would be nice.