Vista

RC1 Rocks!

5 years ago
by reggie in ,

My last post on the less than stellar quality of the SATA drivers notwithstanding, my overall experience with RC1 has been great.  Speed is excellent, stabilty is great, and media center is now working!

I now have a dual-tuner PVR 500 complete with FM tuner working smoothly under RC1 media center.  So far everything I’ve tried to install and run has worked great.  Still trying to get VMWare Server to work but no luck so far.  That’s ok, I’ve got Virtual Server R2 beta 2 to play with.

The next thing is getting drivers installed for my OfficeJet 6110 and Canon S900.

Oh, I almost forgot.  There is one thing that’s not working.  Sync center apparently still does not allow syncing calendar and contacts to PocketPC or Smart Phones.  That particular feature seems to be going backward.  Beta 2 would at least bring up Sync Center and tell me that Outlook was not configured.  Now, Sync Center doesn’t even appear when I plug in my smart phone. 

Aside from not being able to sync my calendar and contacts to my phone, I’m very pleased with my new daily workstation.

And they wonder why we have little faith?

5 years ago
by reggie in ,

So, attempting to use Vista 5472 for daily work has been interesting to say the least.  One example was my attempt to install the latest drop of Testdriven.net.  Sounds simple enough.  Even Vista should be able to handle that.  Hmmm….

After downloading I proceeded to use the Extract All… option to unzip the downloaded file.  Except the binary installer inside the zip always unzipped to about 1 meg in size and would just report “Program too big to fit in memory” when you try and run it.   After repeating the above steps a few times, I googled and installed a free tool named FreeZip.  Freezip integrated into the Explorer and unzipped my download perfectly the first time.

Now I understand that writing unzip utilities is very difficult and requires tremendous resources but one would think that if anyone had the resources to get it done, it would be Microsoft. 

That’s sarcasm for those of you who like fruit on your boxen.

Are they really this dumb?

5 years ago
by reggie in ,

I just got back from spending two weeks attending a couple different Microsoft developer events.  It’s easy to come away from events like these very excited about what products are coming and what technologies we’ll get to work on.  It’s equally easy to come away confused on how so many smart people can be so totally clueless.

I could write volumes on this subject but an example my wife showed me last night shall suffice.  We recently moved one of our other computers upstairs for the kids so she was removing Age of Empires III from her laptop.  The uninstall dialog was classic.  The title bar said “Setup” (a word directly related to installing a product).  The first line said “Uninstalling Age of Empires III”.  The second and last line said something like “Setup is preparing the installation”.  So is it installing or uninstalling?  Yes I know that AoE III came from a different developer but it’s a Microsoft game.

I’ve got about 10 blog posts swirling in my head on this topic right now so you’ll hear more in the coming days and weeks. 

BTW, this post was my first with Live Writer.  So far it looks pretty nice.  It’s a Microsoft product though so when I hit the publish button I’m expecting it to tell me that it can’t save the post because the title ends in a question mark.  :)

Where did the status bar go?

5 years ago
by reggie in ,
Visual Studio 2005 seems to work perfectly under
Vista beta 2 but for some reason it no longer has a status bar.
 
 
Anyone know why this is?

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

5 years ago
by reggie in ,

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.

 

 

Vista 5308 is here!

6 years ago
by reggie in ,

Downloading from MSDN right now!  I hope it’s a bit more stable and I’m
looking forward to playing with the side bar.

Also, anyone know any good Pocket PC RSS sync software?

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