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WPF controls not showing after windows update

After updating windows to version 1803 none of the WPF applications on a laptop (Intel hd 500 GPU) work properly anymore (start with a blank window or don't show the GUI at all). I've made a simple test app that only shows one button and it results in an empty window. If I turn off the hardware rendering (according to Software rendering mode - WPF), the application works as expected.
I've tried several versions of the GPU driver including the generic MS one, latest one, latest one recommended by the laptop manufacturer, older ones but all with the same result. The recovery point to the previous version is not available anymore.
The laptop is barely running existing applications so setting the registry not to use the hardware rendering for all the .net applications is not an option due to performance degradation.
Has anyone experienced anything similar, are any other solutions to solving this?
Thanks,
Tomislav

The issue happens because I'm using the laptop with the lid down (I connect remotely to it). This seems to put the GPU to sleep/power down state which messes up the applications that use GPU acceleration. Interestingly desktop and some applications run normally.
Adding a fake display solved the issue (https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-X-Series-Laptops/Working-with-closed-lid/td-p/1623610, https://superuser.com/questions/1271344/fake-montitor-for-teamviewer-on-laptop-with-closed-lid).

I have also had this issue and have found that if you uninstall and delete the Intel Display Adapter, then let Windows automatically find the default, this issue is resolved.

Reading Serial Port pins in C#

I have a device connected to my computer via RS232 to USB. This device hold times for eight tanning beds. I want to get the data from the pins on the serial port to see how it is connecting with the device, to see how the times are being displayed. I am hoping to do this is C#, but I'm not sure exactly where I need to start. I have thought about probing the pins on an oscilloscope, but that seems very tedious. Any thoughts?

I just ran in to this my self. If you are not using a 64 bit version of windows I would recommend using PortMon, save the log file, then do offline parsing of your log file. There are libraries that let you hook in to the stream via code but I think using PortMon you may not even need to write any code at all and you may be able to just figure out the protocol by visual inspection.
If you are using a 64 bit version of windows your choices are severely limited. I could not find a free program that was compatible with windows 7 x64, The only program I heard that works (but I did not buy it and the free version did not work) is Serial Port Monitor by HHD.
You can also try running the software in XP Mode to get the 32 bit monitoring programs running, it worked for me.

Mobile or PDA on which I can have IDE (integrated development environment) like Visual Studio, Net-beans

I just like to code when i travel,but i can't carry my laptop while travelling so i thought of a mobile in which i can create apps in C#, .NET or Java but for that i need an IDE,Compiler,etc.
Basically I am looking for a phone / mobile / PDA (far more handy than a net-book or a laptop) in which i can code the way i can do it normally in Visual Studio installed in a machine.
So are there any such devices ?

Let's take a look at what you need to overcome to get this to work.
1) oomph
Smart phones are designed to give you the ability to stay in touch, and have a rich experience on the move, but within the confines of a device that can be put in your pocket. Storage isn't really an issue these days, but processing power on small devices are. Sure we can run calendar, 3D games (though nowhere near the complexity of what you'll see on a fully-fledged operating system), fart-applications and plug-ins for you-tube so we can watch idiots break their ballsacks on railings, but there's a reason you don't see a fully-fledged rich-desktop application, or Grand Theft Auto IV on these devices. Oomph. Now bring in the Visual Studio development environment (and database server, if that is what you're application is doing), with potentially 100s of source files in your language of choice. Assuming we put a severly cut-down version of your IDE on to your pda, I hope you brought some spare batteries or the power-cord because you're going to need it.
2) input
It's probably not difficult to change your predictive text input to cover all the keywords of your chosen language so that you don't end up typing pubic instead of public. Once we've solved that we then need to go through the agonizing process of the fact that computer code contains a lot of symbols and identifiers, meaning we'd have to switch our input mode every other word or two to facilitate it:
for(int i(0); i < _vector.length(); i++)
Takes a few seconds on a keyboard. Probably about one train journey on your PDA. To solve this, we must assume the PDA has the facility for an external keyboard to prevent suicide.
3) display
Ok, we've solved our oomph problems with a power-chord and/or 50 batteries and we've plugged in our external keyboard. We're ready to code!! We'll have to adjust the font-size on the display so that we can get more than 20 lines of code (vertically) or 10 (horizontally). I enjoy my comfort when I code, so I don't want to be squinting at a small screen as I type on my plug-in keyboard. I'd have to prop it up against some books or something (so I don't have to hold the PDA and the keyboard). Now I can't see what i am doing. So, I need a bigger display.
4) Target code
What platform are you targeting? Remember the PDA is designed to run software for the PDA in question. You won't be able to write fully-fledged win32 applications on Windows Mobile 7. There are differences in the API. What if it's a web app you're developing? We're going to have to add a web server to the phone too, unless that is deployed elsewhere and we can rely on an internet connection to upload the changed files to.
Have we solved the problem? Did we get more oomph? A keyboard? A bigger display? Yes we did.
It's a laptop.

It's impractical, as Moo-Juice mentioned. However, you could try using online compilers that work through web browsers, such as Compilr.com. Perhaps this could work well enough through a mobile device's web browser. This way you could write snippets of code and verify that it compiles. Otherwise, you'll be stuck getting a netbook or laptop.

Use a VNC client or Remote Desktop client or something.
Obviously your experience will not be very good on a phone/PDA, but I also don't have an IDE installed on my laptop -- I just use remote desktop (and a wireless modem if I'm desperately bored and can't find wifi).

Getting started with writing a desktop app that talks to an iPhone

I'm thinking of writing an app to selectively transfer photos/music to and from my iPhone, mostly for fun and personal convenience. However, I'm stuck at the very beginning -- where do I look to find information on how to do this?
Pretty much every link I see talks about developing applications that run on the iPhone, but nothing about desktop app for interfacing with an iPhone.
I'm on Windows (no access to a Mac, but I'll take suggestions for that for when I eventually acquire one), and I'm most familiar with C#, but other languages are definitely an option.
Can anybody offer me a few pointers on getting started? Thanks.
Edit: to clarify further, I don't need information on how to write applications that run ON the iphone. There are plenty of resources out for that. :) What I'm looking for it some pointers on how to "talk" to an iPhone or an iPod through the USB cord, if that's even possible.
Edit #2: I found libmobiledevice library that effectively does what I'm talking about on Linux. I don't think I'm too keen on attempting to port it over to Windows, though. :)

I found what I was looking for: SharePodLib. Thanks, everyone.

I recommend and have used the following options:
Option 1:
Run a small and light webserver in the iPhone and of course, use HTTP to transfer. I recommend mongoose websever, i've tried it with very simple and very heavy load. Also here, you can find an actual drag and drop project to deploy this webserver in the iPhone.
Option 2:
Use something like Bonjour, this is something very useful if you want the "smart" discovery of your device in the network, maybe for opportunistic peer discovery. You can check here and here, to understand how to get bonjour to run in the iPhone and use it to exploit discovery and sharing.
Hope it helps!!

Unfortunately, there's no no way to sync an iPhone app with a Mac app over USB, at least in the current SDK. As already stated, you'll have to either sync over HTTP or use the local network. You might want to check out ZSync, a Cocoa library for bonjour syncing (I haven't used it, and it's in early development stages, but it looks interesting).

Unfortunately there is no officially sanctioned method to do what you describe. In Apple's view the only application that should have visibility of that information is iTunes. There are applications out there that appear to be able to do this, but I suspect they have reverse engineered the USB protocol and are thus open to being locked out if the protocol changes.

Force windows video driver reload. Is it possible at all?

Some drivers use parameters written in the registry to configure themselves when they get loaded at boot time.
I can modify those values and then reboot, but I would like to know if it is possible to force the driver reload, making the changes effective without rebooting.
Specifically, I am talking about the video driver (nvidia).
I read somewhere, that calling through pINvoke() [User32.ll]::ChangeDisplaySettings() with a 640x480x8bits resolution,(which is so low that it should not be supported by a modern driver) will force windows to load the "Standard VGA driver", and making another call with the current resolution will load the nvidia driver again.
This does not work though. At least in Windows 7, even if the low res is not displayed as "supported" the system reduces the screen to a little square in the center of the screen, showing the low res wihtout unloading the nvidia driver.
So, is there any .NET/Win32 API, service to restart, or any way at all to force a video driver reload?
Perhaps programatically disabling the device (as you could do from the Device Manager) and reenabling it again?
Any idea?
Thanks a lot.

I finally did it. Following the idea of disabling/reenabling the device actually worked.
Of course the problem is that disabling your video card device from the Device Manager could not be a great idea, as maybe you are not able to reenable it again.
Doing it programatically, does not appear so unsafe though. In theory, asuming that the app has successfully disabled the device, reenabling it should not pose a problem.
I found here, in stackoverflow a fantastic class to accomplish this, thanks to Justin Grant.
The video driver reloads itself as the video device is reenabled.
Hope it helps someone.

It depends on the driver. If it was written to support stopping and restarting then it is possible; otherwise, you're out of luck. If you find the name of the service you can do "sc stop [name]" followed by "sc start [name]". Win32 equivalent is OpenService/ControlService.