Category: Icetips Blog

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I recently had a situation where a program had a file or a folder locked and I had no idea what program that might be!

I needed to restore a folder from a Macrium backup but I didn't want to just overwrite the folder, so I wanted to rename it.  But I wasn't able to do that because some processes had a folder or file locked in there.

After some search, I found an answer that didn't need any additional software to be installed, but rather use a tool that has been in Windows for several versions.  The Resource Monitor!  The answer can be found on Superuser.com

Run the Resource Monitor, then go to the CPU tab, and expand the "Associated Handles" panel - see the screenshot below.

Click the checkbox next to "Image" at the top of the "Processes" list and it will select all the processes in the list.

The "Associated Handles" will then fill in - it can take a few moments if there are a lot of processes running.

You can then sort and filter the list to narrow it down to what you are looking for, see the screenshot below.

Here I have filtered it to show "C:\" so it will show any files on the C:\ drive that are locked.  I also sorted it by the "Handle Name" so it is easy to find based on the path.

You can also find services, sessions, registry keys etc., so this is a very easy way to find things.  For more powerful options, using Processs Explorer from SysInternals/Microsoft has more options and is also 100% free and certainly an excellent tool along with Process Monitor.

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We will be out of the office for the next couple of weeks or so.  We are helping our daughter move.   We will be driving a lot and may not have a good internet connection most of the time, so please be patient with us getting back to you 🙂

If you need support, please use our support popup on the website or email us at support at icetips.com.

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We are going to be on vacation from today, September 10th to Wednesday, September 21st.  We are attending 50 year anniversary of friends of ours in Dublin, Ireland and are going to spend some time traveling in Ireland and Northern Ireland.

I will post photos, but meanwhile here are a couple of Creative Commons photos from Wikimedia 🙂

Irish countryside

2015-9971 - St Patricks Cathedral Dublin

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I have a website that I like to visit, but I'd like to open it in its own browser window, without any of the toolbars at top, etc. After some digging, I found that Chrome actually has some interesting stuff available for command-line control. So I created a shortcut and used this:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --profile-directory="Default" --new-window --window-size=300,300 --app=
And then the url for the website after --app= Works like a charm, but a long-standing bug in Chrome (reported 7 years ago and, well, not fixed yet 😉 makes the --window-size not work. However with the --profile-directory="Default" it saves the last used size for the window in the user profile and opens in the last used size.
 
In my case, I wanted to open CBC One in Victoria, so my full command line is:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --profile-directory="Default" --new-window --window-size=300,300 --app=http://prod-chrome80-player-popup.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/popup_player_v1.html?station=cbcvictoria&tenant=www.radio.net
 
This opens the radio station up in a popup window (NOT existing Chrome window) and the size is saved.  So I now have a nice little window for my radio station!
 
For those who want to dig deeper (I've not even scratched the surface) here is the official list of command-line arguments for the Chromium project:
 
It's only 52 pages!!!
Since Windows Edge is based on Chromium, this should work for both Chrome and Edge.
Enjoy!

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With larger monitors and more monitors, I have found that it has become increasingly difficult for me to find the mouse cursor on the screens.

I remembered that there used to be some ways to change the cursors and set out to find it.  Turns out it's pretty easy!

Start by going to the Windows Settings app by selecting it from the start menu.

From the Windows Settings app, select "Ease of Access"

On the "Ease of Access" page select the "Cursor and Pointer" option on the left and then you can change the cursor size and color and also the caret thickness.

Since most of the windows I work on have a light background, I chose to use the black cursor and set the size to 3.  You can only see the number for the size when you move the slider, but I found 3 to be a good size for both my 27" 1080p monitors as well as my 32" QHD (2560x1440 pixels)

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SQLite databases came up on one of the newsgroups this week.  I have not used the SQLite driver in Clarion, so I don't have any experience with it - yet.

For many years I have used HeidiSQL with MySQL and MariaDB databases and it works great.  But it can only work with MySQL, MariaDB and MS-SQL.  So I wondered what tools there might be out there to use to browse and work with SQLite databases.  Both are open source and free and both work with Windows, MacOS and Linux.

I found two that looked interesting!

SQLite Database Browser

This program has been around since 2003 and the last release was in April of 2019 so it's being fairly actively developed.  It is available for Windows, MacOS, Linux (several variations) and FreeBSD.  This tool is primarily a database browser and based on the few screenshots I've found it looks a bit limited.

SQLite Studio

This program has also been around since 2007 and the last release was in July 2018.  This program looks like HeidiSQL and you can view data, enter your own queries etc.  It is available for Windows, MacOS and Linux.

In my experience one of the most important tools when dealing with database is a good, solid interface to execute queries and statements.

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It's taken a while, but all our product installs are now compatible with Clarion 11 and available for download!

This process took quite a bit longer than I expected, mostly because this required considerable amount of work for most of the templates to make them look better in Clarion 11.  But I think it was definitely worth it!  While I did not do a lot of design work, what needed to be done was duplicating a lot of code to make it work with both Clarion 10 and older as well as with Clarion 11.

I also took the opportunity to add more standardization to the Setup Builder install scrips as well as my Build Automator scripts to make builds easier in the future.  Same applies to the templates, where for example template headers look exactly the same in all our templates now, and the support tab is now 100% identical everywhere to make it easy to access.

Another task was to change all the templates from using .hlp help files to use .chm help files.  .hlp files are not really supported any more on Windows 10 and the IDE has supported .chm for a few versions now so there is no reason not to use it.  So I decided to pull the plug and change all the templates that had help file access to use .chm files.  This required a minor change also to every HLP link in the templates.

For the first time I did not do any testing with the old IDE, i.e. Clarion 6, apart from making sure the templates registered, since I still have a few Clarion 6 apps that I need to maintain for a while longer, so I still need them to work in the old IDE 😉  But by the end of the year, I will ONLY support the new IDE and generally just the last 3 versions.  So 9.1, 10 and 11 by the end of the year.  Keeping everything backward compatible has limited me in certain visual design aspects.  Clarion 6 is 15 years old  (2003) and Clarion 6.3 is 9 years old (2009) and it's time to let it rest 🙂

Since there have been quite a few changes in both the templates and in the build process, I would really appreciate if you would let me know as soon as possible if you have any problems with the installers - or the templates!

Enjoy 🙂