Win8 M3 (7989) findings relevant to Managed .net & WPF/SL developers

Hallelujah, full support for common blending modes! Lots of blur and shadow effects, too. Nifty.

 

Ehhh, I just noticed that SystemSettings.exe has a PE section called ".imrsiv", this is insane . Mr. bored_neo can you tell what that is?

 

Unfortunately I'm out of town until sometime next week and I don't have a Win8 build handy.

Does it contain code or data? Strange name indeed, if it was called .winrt or something similar then it wouldn't have been very suprising but immersive? Why something that's just a fancy UI after all would need its own PE section

 

the '.imrsiv' section is empty as far as I can see, and this section is not seen in any other exe, so maybe nothing just some trick specific to this app.

 

well, the Protogon (MNTFS/Minstore) is an interesting piece of the puzzle, for sure.
but as for now I haven't seen any 'correlation' between 'Windows.Storage.*' and Protogon,
most of the Windows.Storage.* are wrappers around standard file operations in Shell32, there are also some
'Pickers' stuff that might be part of the new 'immersive' platform, that supports 'in-application' sharing features,
but as far as I can see, there are no obvious new functionality that requires specific file system to support,
especially, there is no database-like or query-based features, so I doubt it has anything to do with Protogon.
the only interesting part might be 'Windows.Storage.ApplicationData*' classes implemented in Windows.Storage.ApplicationData.dll,
the ApplicationData might support some kind of versioning with 'Version' property and 'SetVersion' method,
but again there is no direct correlation between this and Protogon to be seen yet. may be someone can find more ?

BTW: the 'M' in 'MNTFS' might be 'Modern' or something but there is also an 'M' in 'Minstore', who knows ?

C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\Modules\Volume\Volume.cmdletDefinition.xml

Code:

            <!-- FileSystem -->
            <Parameter ParameterName="FileSystem">
              <Type PSType="System.String" />
              <CmdletParameterMetadata>
                <ValidateNotNull />
                <ValidateNotNullOrEmpty />
                <ValidateSet>
                  <AllowedValue>FAT</AllowedValue>
                  <AllowedValue>FAT32</AllowedValue>
                  <AllowedValue>exFAT</AllowedValue>
                  <AllowedValue>NTFS</AllowedValue>
                  <AllowedValue>MNTFS</AllowedValue>
                </ValidateSet>
              </CmdletParameterMetadata>
            </Parameter>

 

I would go towards Modern, as that seems to be the mantra for Windows 8. MoSh - Modern Shell etc

 

Yeah, I see. It's a 0 initialized data section (bss) with a size of 4! Given that I'm looking at a 64 bit build you can't even put a pointer in 4 bytes, just an integer or something smaller. Weird.

 

Might be a boolean value: To be immersive or not to be.

 

Windows.Graphics.Imaging is just a wrapper around Windows Imaging Codecs (WIC) and that one had support for JpegXR (aka HD Photo) for some time now...

 

I don't know much about Silverlight, but WPF had excellent JPEG XR support from its first version on, no need for P/Invoke here. WPF supports all image formats for which a WIC codec is installed. The WIC implementation may not be perfectly compliant to the JPEG XR standard, however, because they did some changes to the format before it got standardized and WIC already had support for the format initally known as "Windows Media Photo". The corresponding classes in the System.Windows.Media.Imaging namespace are therefore called WmpBitmapDecoder and WmpBitmapEncoder.

What I find more interesting is the fact that they did include JPEG XR in the LivePhotoAndVideoPickerPhotoFormat enum next to JPEG and PNG, as it shows that Microsoft is still committed to the format.

 

That's likely related to the IInspectable interface:

[ComImport, WindowsRuntimeImport, InterfaceType(ComInterfaceType.InterfaceIsIUnknown), Guid("AF86E2E0-B12D-4c6a-9C5A-D7AA65101E90")]
internal interface IInspectable
{
void GetIids(out uint iidCount, out IntPtr iids);
string GetRuntimeClassName();
int GetTrustLevel();
}

 

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maybe we can use the StartAppcontainer.exe/LaunchLowbox.exe in 7959 /Bin/IDW/ to test the appcontainerexe produced by csc.
RunAsPackage.exe/TestAppLaunch.exe are interesting too.