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Adding Hyper-V-less boot entry with PowerShell

Developers often encounter the need to run virtual machines using VirtualBox and Hyper-V-based mobile emulators on the same machine (for example Windows Mobile or Visual Studio Android Emulator). Unfortunately only one of the two can be enabled at once. The easiest solution is to create two boot entries and disable Hyper-V in one of them.

CMD way

The awesome Scott Hanselman provided a quick command line solution in one of his blogposts.

As part of creating a Chocolatey based PowerShell install script for my most used tools after computer reinstall, I wanted to make this automatic and preferably skip the copy-paste step.

PowerShell script

The script is very simple:

First line of the script runs the bcdedit  tool and create a copy of the current boot entry. The result is a string in the following form:

We need to parse out the identifier enclosed between curly brackets. This is just the job for regular expressions on the second line of the script. The matches are stored in the   $matches  variable.

Finally we can use the identifier to modify the boot entry to disable Hyper-V on the third line.

And that’s it! Pretty simple but convenient. You can simply run the script and the new Hyper-V-less boot entry will be created for you automatically. Be sure to run the script with administrator permissions.

You can download the script here.

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Aligning UWP CommandBar content after Anniversary Update

The Universal Windows Platform CommandBar control has a new feature called dynamic overflow since the Anniversary Update. This automatically adjusts the number of presented app bar buttons so that they fit and puts the additional commands in the secondary (overflow) menu. This addition has however inadvertently caused some headaches for developers who use Content property of the  CommandBar  to display additional content – it turns out, that alignment of the content now doesn’t work properly.

The problem

Let’s demonstrate the issue with a simple example.

We would expect, that the content of the CommandBar is aligned to the center of its available area, which indeed was the case before the Anniversary Update.

Since Anniversary 14393 SDK, the HorizontalContentAlignment  property is by default not respected.

The CommandBar does not respect the HorizontalContentAlignment property by default

Cause of the problem

The default control templates are stored in a XAML resource dictionary file on the following path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\DesignTime\CommonConfiguration\Neutral\UAP\10.0.14393.0\Generic\generic.xaml . If you search for the CommandBar  template inside this file, you will find out that it contains a new VisualStateGroup :

As you can see, when dynamic overflow is enabled, sizing of the columns in the main layout Grid of the control changes.

In the default visual state ( DynamicOverflowDisabled ) is the ContentControlColumnDefinition.Width  set to *  (star) and the PrimaryItemsControlColumnDefinition.Width  set to Auto . This means that the app bar buttons on the right take up a certain width and the remaining space is dedicated to the content.

With dynamic overflow enabled, sizing of the columns is flipped. The control lets the primary items column take up as much space as it can (so that the available space can be used for the buttons and the number of displayable buttons can be calculated at runtime) and the content column now gets only the width it actually needs. Whichever alignment you set to the content doesn’t matter. The content will always seem left aligned, because its column is sized just to fit.

Since the Anniversary Update, dynamic overflow of the command bar is enabled by default.

Solution

You can disable dynamic overflow using the IsDynamicOverflowEnabledproperty. Although you have to make sure that the app bar buttons display well on all display sizes, you can also align the content as you please.

Disabling the dynamic overflow feature fixes the content alignment problem

If you want to preserve the dynamic overflow feature, you may just want to put some margin around your content to make sure it looks aligned. Of course, to support multiple different display sizes, you should adjust the margins using Adaptive Triggers.

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Using custom fonts in C# UWP apps

Although the default Windows 10 font – Segoe UI – is certainly very beautiful, you might sometimes want to give your Universal Windows Platform app a bit of uniqueness and personality using a custom font.

You can use almost any .ttf and .otf font file and include it in your application package. .woff and .eot fonts are currently not supported in C# UWP apps (but you can use them in JavaScript UWP apps).

Getting a font

Firstly find a custom font you want to use. There are many fonts you can use for free (even in commercial projects), as well as many fonts you can purchase.

Google Fonts and Font Squirrel are both great collections of countless free fonts to choose from.

After you choose the font you like, download its .ttf or .otf file and add it into your UWP app project as a Content file.

Ensure that the font is added with the Content Build Action
Ensure that the font is added with the Content Build Action

Setting the font in XAML

Each text control in XAML has a FontFamily property, which you can use to set the font. For the preinstalled fonts it is sufficient to just use the font name itself. For custom fonts we have to be more specific:

[FontFilePath] is the relative path to the font file in the project. In case you have an ArimaMadurai-Black.ttf font in the Assets/Fonts folder of your project, you will use /Assets/Fonts/ArimaMadurai-Black.ttf as the path.

[FontName] is the name of the font. Here things are a little tricky. Some fonts require the font name to include the type suffix (font weight, italics) and some don’t. You might need to use trial end error to find out which form is requested. The XAML designer should reflect the change immediately.

Using the property window

There is an alternative to manually setting the font family in XAML – using the XAML properties window. Select a text-based control and then expand the Text settings group in the property manager. Using the font dropdown, you can select not only from the installed fonts, but also from the custom fonts you have added into your project (these should be on top of the list).

Choosing a font in the properties window

Note that the properties window always adds the font type suffix to the FontFamily value. In case the font doesn’t display correctly when you apply the setting, remove the font type manually.

Setting font family in code

Changing the font family in code is as easy as creating an instance of the Windows.UI.Xaml.Media.FontFamily class with the same value as in XAML passed to the constructor.

DirectWrite fonts

Windows 10 added XAML integration of DirectWrite downloadable fonts. With this feature you can set the font family of your text controls to a font that is not currently installed on the device and DirectWrite will download the font on-demand in the background. Before the font is downloaded, a fallback font will be displayed instead. Also, it should be able to download just the portions of the font that you need, which is beneficial for large fonts that support languages like Chinese, Japanese or Korean. The downloaded fonts are stored in a system font cache, so that they can be reused by any app.

This feature seems pretty neat, but it is unfortunately completely undocumented. The only resource regarding this functionality seems to be the XamlCloudFontIntegration sample in the Windows Universal Samples repository on Github. The sample contains three fonts that can be downloaded by DirectWrite and also a PowerShell script that lets you clear the system font cache.

You can see and try out the sample code for this post on my GitHub.