Wednesday, May 31, 2006

TestDriven.NET working on Vista beta 2.. finally!



TestDriven.NET is a
tool that I use religiously.  It is simply indispensable and so when it
failed to work under Vista beta 2 I was about to declare defeat and head back
to Windows 2003.  Thankfully, Jamie (the author of TestDriven.NET) helped
me work out the problem and it turns out it was likely my fault!  So what
happened?



 



Well, I installed Visual Studio .NET 2003 and Visual Studio
2005 before attempting to install TestDriven.NET.  I ran both systems to
make sure they worked and then proceeded to install TD.Net.  After
installing, any attempts to activate the add-in would result in an error
message stating that the CLSID could not be located. 



 



The problem, I think, is that I installed TD.Net as administrator. 
This is easy to understand because Vista’s LUA system is whacked. 
My user is in the admin group but does not have admin rights.  Makes sense? 
Right….  But that’s another post.  Anyway, since the user
you create during Vista install doesn’t have full admin rights, it
becomes easy to right click and run as administrator anything you think may
need admin privs.  I think this is what I did.  This, by itself, is
not enough to wreck the install however.  The other part is that TD.NET,
by default, installs for the current user.  So, when the install was done,
I (as my regular non-admin self) could not load the proper CLSID since it had
been installed as admin.  A quick reinstall of TD.Net, this time
indicating that I wanted it installed for all users, did the trick.



 



Lesson learned?  Remember that the admin user under
Vista is a different user, not you with admin rights.  Also, don’t
run everything as admin.  Be sure you have to run it as admin before you
do.



 



 



Tuesday, May 30, 2006

First impressions of Vista beta 2



Been spending a little time with Vista beta 2 and have, so
far, been pretty pleased.  It’s still a bit early to know if I can
use it for my day-to-day work but I can report that most of what I need to use
is installed and working.  Here’s what I’ve seen so far.



 



Applications I have tried:



·        



·        



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·        



 



The URGE inclusion with Media Player 7 is awesome. 
Within minutes of being up and running in Vista, I was watching videos of the
ACM award winners with my credit card nowhere in sight.



 



At one point during my first day with Vista I used the
Microsoft Update site to download an updated network driver.  As it was
installing, I actively refused to start any other apps knowing that I was about
to reboot my system.  After a bit I became distracted by some emails and
IRC conversations and then noticed that my IRC client had gone offline and that
the music I was streaming from URGE had stopped.  I poked around inside
media player attempting to find out the problem.  In a few moments the
network resumed and assumed it was just some really nasty network
congestion.  And then I saw this dialog:



 





 



The update that was successfully installed was my network
driver.  Yes, yes, I know that Linux has done this for years but it’s
good to see that Vista is  finally capable of this sort of update.



 



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Monday, May 8, 2006

IE7 Win64 instability


Is it just me or is the 64 bit build of IE 7 beta 2 very
unstable?  I've disabled all the non-standard extensions and it still
crashes sporadically and frequently.  It's quite stable on my XP SP2
laptop.  My desktop is running Windows Server 2003 R2 x64.