Restore Point Creator

· All features that require Windows Vista and newer have been disabled on Windows XP which really doesn’t leave much of the program active. The parts of the program that were completely broken were the Disk Space Usage window (that had a major crash), the Manage System Restore Point Space function (again, completely unsupported on Windows XP which resulted in a crash), and all functionality to delete old restore points have been disabled on Windows XP because Windows XP doesn’t support deleting of restore points.

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· Added an internal log file viewer to the program so you can read the Restore Point Deletion Log File without having to use an external viewer. It has rich text formatting for easy reading inside the program. There is also an option to open the file in an external program.
· Code has been put into place to notify a user that official Windows XP support for the program will end on April 8th, 2014. The message will continue to appear at startup unless the user says to not repeat it. After April 8th, 2014 the program will show a message that the program will no longer support Windows XP at every startup.

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· Fixed a slight bug on the log file viewing window in which scrollbars didn’t appear when they should have. This was due to an inherent bug in the Microsoft .NET Rich Text Control itself and a workaround has been developed to get around the bug.
· Clarified some things regarding the impending April 8th, 2014 notice for Windows XP users.

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· Added a confirmation question to the “Clean Restore Point Deletion Log” button. Fixed some window titles that were not very well worded (bad grammar).

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· More fine-grained control over scheduling the creation of restore points has now been implemented. In the past you could only schedule the creation of restore points on a daily or day-by-day basis. Now you can schedule the creation of restore points so that one is only made every whatever amount of days you want. So if you want one made every two days, then you have that ability now with these new changes.

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· Some code cleanups have been done as well that pertain to the changes that occurred in Build 5. Extra checks for data integrity have been included in the code that reads values from the Registry. Build 5 was more of a public beta than anything else, Build 6 wraps up the changes that happened in Build 5.

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Added the ability to create restore points from the “My Computer” right-click context menu. This is enabled via a checkbox on the main window of the program. This is an option for you to enable if you so wish to do so.

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Extra checks have been put into the program to check for invalid executable file paths in both the “My Computer” right-click context menu items and the scheduled tasks. An invalid executable file path could be caused by any number of things like the user moving the file or renaming the file and not updating the parts of the system that point to that moved or renamed file. Normally this should not happen but if the rare situation were to come up, the program has been instructed to repair the entries.

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This new build features a new, cleaner, more streamlined, and completely redesigned user interface
The most important functions for working with Restore Points are now front and center in the program
These functions include refreshing the list of restore points on the program’s window, deleting individual restore points, and restoring to a specified restore point
The bottom half of the program has been completely cleaned up, it’s no longer there
Functions like log file options, viewing disk space usage, managing restore point space, and scheduling restore points have all been moved to a drop-down menu at the top of the window
Program checkboxes like “Enable My Computer Right-Click Option”, logging deletions of restore points, automatically checking for updates, and confirming the deletion of restore points while manually deleting them from the list have all been moved to another drop-down menu at the top of the program’s window
All of these changes were done in an effort to help clean up and streamline the user interface and only put what you need readily available to you

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Included windows service checking code into the Task Schedule part of this program to repair any possible Windows Task Scheduler Service issues.
Some bugs have been been fixed in the program’s task scheduler in which the “Every” setting wasn’t being deleted when changing the task type from an “Every” to a Weekly type.
Some bugs have been fixed in the invalid task fixer that’s run at startup of the program.

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Fixed more bugs in the routine that checks EXE paths for the “My Computer” right-click context menu entries.

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More user interface cleanups.
About program message changed to include copyright line.

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Restore Point Creator 1.6 Build 6

Includes enhanced update checking logic to include better support for minor updates.
Included a possible fix for scheduled tasks in which tasks weren’t running correctly. More testing will need to be done though. There is a possibility that on certain systems the task would not run because the user that the task was scheduled to run as didn’t have a password. A workaround has been put into place to make the task run as the SYSTEM user.
Fixed a typo in the code that may have prevented scheduled tasks from running properly.

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Includes some more tweaks to the task creation code to set some task settings that may have contributed to tasks not running for some users.

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Fixed an issue in which the program would crash upon execution of the program when attempting to run it under a Standard User on Windows Vista or newer.

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Changed the way that the available disk space line is outputted on the Disk Space Usage window. The old display was confusing, the new display is similar to how the Restore Point Space is displayed. Upgraded to Visual Studio 2012 from version 2010. This is a minor update to Build 8 therefore it is entirely your choice to download and update to it.

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Fixed an issue with the program’s embedded app manifest file.

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Added the ability to delete all restore points that exist on the system (except for the newest).
Added logging to the restore point deletion functions, before only the functions that deleted old restore points had logging enabled in them; now all deletion functions have logging enabled in it.

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Fixed a typo in the “System Restore Point Utilities” drop-down menu. “Deletes All Restore Points” should be “Delete All Restore Points”.

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Fixed a possible issue that may occur if Windows 8 is upgraded to Windows 8.1. There is a possibility that a Registry setting that the program sets on Windows 8/8.1 to fix System Restore to make it function like it did in past versions of Windows was undone during the upgrade of Windows 8 to 8.1. There is a check for this now in the program and if it detects the change was undone, the program re-applies it.

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Moved the About notice and link to the program’s product web site to be sub-items of About.
Added a notice to ask users to donate. Yes, this program will always remain free to use with absolutely no limitations to the use of the program but still donations are welcome. If you click “No” to the message asking you to donate you will never see the program ask again unless of course you uninstall and reinstall the program.
Added more checks throughout the program for file existence.
Custom colors for the bar color chooser on the View Disk Space window is now saved in the program’s user preferences, before this was not the case.
Added a bunch of new descriptive icons throughout the program.
Made it so that the “Delete All Restore Points” option under the utilities menu is hidden if the system is Windows XP.
Moved the “Close after Restore Point is created” checkbox to the Program Options menu.
Added a message box to the Delete All Restore Points function asking you if you really want to do that.
Moved “Delete All Restore Points” and “Delete Old Restore Points” to be sub-items of “Delete Restore Points” in the Utilities drop-down menu.
Put a notice of sorts into the textbox to type in a name for a restore point to type something in that box.
Increased the default width of the main window to make things fit better.
Made it so that the program displays a message while creating and deleting restore points and will notify you that things are being done in the background and that message will not go away until the process is complete. This is much like how the Windows native Restore Point UI works. This window has a four minute timeout to close the window by itself but ordinarily this event shouldn’t occur.
Put some code into the program to write a “last run” file for scheduled tasks, this way you can determine when the last time the task was run.
Fixed a possible regression in which scheduled restore points weren’t being created.
Imported many of the constants from the SRClient.DLL file for improved error checking during the creation of restore points. Now you should get more meaningful error messages other than a success or a failure.
Added additional user privilege checking at startup to make sure that the program is running with system Administrator privileges/rights.
Some more debugging of task scheduler creation code is needed, some users have reported the task scheduler crashing on Windows 7 which I have throughly tested and have come up with nothing conclusive. I have put crash detection code into place to try and narrow down where the problem may be.
Changed the way that crashes are caught when unhandled crashes occur in the proogram, this should make the program catch more unknown crashes.
Windows XP will continue to be supported past the date of April 8th, 2014 but in an extremely limited capability. Scheduled tasks under Windows XP will be completely disabled and any existing scheduled tasks will be automatically deleted by the program. This is because debugging scheduled tasks on Windows XP is proving to be far more difficult than I initially thought it would be. Much of the code that I use to access the Windows Scheduler is provided by a DLL that was written for Window Vista or newer and getting it to work on Windows XP without major hacks is difficult.
Added the ability to change the update channel from beta to stable for future testing.
Fixed an issue in the Restore Point deletion function in which a malformed date string could crash the program, this has been fixed by storing the raw date data from the restore point sub-system in the program’s memory and using that instead of parsing what’s in the list of restore points.
Included some fixes in other areas of the program to help prevent crashes while attempting to parse invalid data.
Fixed several possible Null Reference Exceptions that may occur with the log file writing functions, ordinarily this shouldn’t happen at all but in those very rare occasions (less than .01%) a fix as been put into place.

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Updated the embedded Microsoft.Win32.TaskScheduler.dll that’s used by the program to access the Windows Scheduler.

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Fixed a possible issue in which the “every” variable for the “Every other X days” on the Task Scheduler window could be filled in with invalid data and thus could cause a program crash at a later date.
Fixed the scheduled task EXE path repair routine. Before I was checking to see if the executable path for the scheduled task existed; now I simply change the scheduled task’s executable path regardless of whether or not the executable file exists if it doesn’t match the current process executable path.
Fixed a crash upon loading restore points in which a System.ArgumentException can occur with an error message that states “An item with the same key has already been added”.

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Fixed a crash with creating scheduled restore points.

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Fixed an issue with creating a restore point in which the program said that an error occured but in reality it didn’t. There was a typo in one of the lines of code that resulted in one of the API constants to have an incorrect internal error code number.
Changed behavior of the function that creates restore points using the Jump List Tasks and the right-click options on “My Computer”, before a message box appeared when the task was completed. Now, a message box appears only if the task failed to create a restore point. With this change if you don’t get a message you can assume that things went alright and a restore point was created properly.

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Fixed a very rare crash that could occur if the program was launched immediately after updating the program and the updater/patcher program was still running. This was fixed by searching for instances of updater/patcher program processes and killing it before attempting to delete it.

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