If, like me, you are stuck with the old and decrepit version of Windows that is Vista SP1 at work then you may be interested in Service Pack 2 which became available on the MS Download site today. Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2 and Windows Vista Service Pack 2 - Five Language Standalone (KB948465) Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2 and Windows Vista Service Pack 2 - Five Language Standalone for x64-based systems (KB948465) I am not saying that I would rather have XP, but even with my work development...
Windows 7 RC (Release Candidate) is out and the incredible thing is that Microsoft has provided this operating system (OS) for free to the entire world. They will only let you download the OS for a limited time – so if you are thinking of getting it – you should be getting your hands on a copy of it as quick as you can. Microsoft is offering both a 32bit or a 64bit version that you can download. This is NOT the final version of the OS though – that is something to be aware of. If you install this...
Good news for us all is that the RC build of the much-anticipated Windows 7 is going to be made available to MSDN and TechNet subscribers on April 30. For the rest of the world, you won’t have long to wait, as the Windows 7 RC will be available on May 5th as I previously reported on my Twitter account. For those that are not aware, RC means Release Candidate, as this is the pre-final version of the operating system and it is supposed to include everything that will be in the final shipping version...
Problem: Recently, when I was trying to run an InfoPath form (.xsn file) as different user from a client vista machine, which doesn't have the SQL server database access which the InfoPath form needs. The problem is more specific to InfoPath (as it allows only two types of authentication to SQL Server through InfoPath (NT and SQL User).So when you design InfoPath form to use NT access which is not a SQL User, it must run InfoPath natively as the NT user who have access rights on SQL User. But if...
About two years ago I talked about a very common problem in Windows Vista where the network, volume, and power icons in the system tray disappear. In that post, I provide a solution which involves editing the registry. Several people posted comments that provide slightly more automated ways to make the registry changes through a batch/command file and through a registry file. Jump ahead to today and Microsoft has a Fix it solution for this problem. Fix this problem Technorati Tags: Fix it,Vista,System...
I have installed Windows 7 on “bare metal” on one of my machines. This was a laptop that I work with and it was a very easy install. First off, it was the quickest OS install that I have ever experienced. You can tell that Microsoft spent some significant time working on the performance and quality of the install and bravo to the team that worked on that feature! I also used the 64-bit version of the operating system. More and more people are turning to 64-bit and it is really starting to be the...
User interface is so important, and shouldn’t lightly be sacrified for functionality. There’s always another way to approach things if you think about it hard enough. I’m only on the second sentence and I’m already getting off topic. :) Vista Media Center has some obvious improvements over the previous Media Center Edition, but for some reason they leave out simple yet big impact features. This is a list of a few things that I am missing. Automatic “jump-back” when finishing a fast-forward. After...
Up until now the only avenue for your average Vista user for support was to trawl the MSDN Forums, Technet Forums and the Support site for some elusive piece of information that is buried among all that technical BS that we teckies like to call help. All that has now changed with the addition of the Answers forum! This will be a no nonsense, non technical forum for real users to get real answers. The forum will follow the format that he user sees in the control panel of Vista so here are the topics:...
Windows Vista Service Pack 2 Beta is now available for public download on MSDN and TechNet. This is a combined update for Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista Service Pack 1. This will be the first service pack for Windows Server 2008 since it shipped and includes a lot of performance improvements for WS08. Did you notice that I specifically said Windows Vista Service Pack 1? That’s correct, if you want to install this service pack on Vista, you must first have SP1 installed. That means that SP2...
If you have followed my blog for a while you know that there were a number of graphic issues I had to begin with. In a change of event I am noticing lately that there are features of the Windows Explorer that are coming in handy. The first thing was the rating system for images. Many times I have heard the Lightroom experience described and its star rating system. From the day I started using Vista I noticed that it had similar capabilities, but it wasn’t clear how to use it beyond a single file....
O.k., I'll admit, the first time that I used windows Vista backup, I was very underwhelmed, but it's grown on me, and now I'm a huge fan. On Monday, I received a new hard drive from Dell. It's bigger and doesn't make strange clicking and stalling noises like the old drive did. :) I was pretty certain that the old drive was going to go. To swap out the drives, I plugged in a USB drive with sufficient capacity and did a windows backup complete pc backup. Once that was finished, I plopped in the new...
Not sure how many people have seen this, but Microsoft gathered a bunch of Vista nay-sayers together and showed them Windows "Mojave"; the codenamed latest release of Windows. What the people didn't know was that they were actually experiencing Windows Vista! Amazingly, when asked prior to the "Mojave" demonstration what rating they would give Vista, almost all gave poor ratings. After seeing "Mojave", 94% gave it a higher rating than Vista and nobody rated it worse that Vista - they were simply...
I noticed on Windows update that there were new Windows Ultimate Extras. I got excited for about 1/10th of a second. Then I notice that it is Sound Schemes. Huh? After like a year between releasing anything it's sound schemes? I think MS should finally admit that Ultimate Extras aren't a value add. There has been nothing so far that couldn't have been delivered as freeware. Nothing so far has had any significant value to warrant being exclusive for Ultimate. It was a neat idea, but maybe it's time...
I have just built a new PC, nothing super special, but pretty nifty. I have gone for a core 2 duo E8200 2.66Ghz with the new Wolfdale 45nm architecture (w'eva!), 4GB corsair ram, Nvidia 8600GT Gfx, WD Raptor 150GB drive and a Gigabyte board. I have read bits here and there about overclocking, but have never really been bothered to take to much of a look into it. Seeing I had some time this week and I had been prompted by a mate to do so I though I would. I started taking a look around the web and...
Here is a software suggestion for those of you out there that enjoy doing digital photography and save to RAW format. I am using Photoshop Elements and was getting annoyed having to open all of my files individually in the editor to weed out the unacceptable ones. The Windows Image viewer wouldn't read the RAW files, so what do you do? The answer, as always, is Google for a free solution. It turns out that most of the major manufacturers of digital cameras are now putting out CODEC files so that...
I believe it was Joe Levi who was running into vista vs. Visual Studio 2005 memory issues while compiling our latest build of www.lifetime.com . We both run Vista as our development environment (We watched all the sessions at mix07 and vista looked like it worked fine with Visual Studio 2005 + 2 hours of patches). We did some MSDN surfing and found a way to clear the memory within Windows Vista ( basically it kills all idle running applications). Here is how: Create a shortcut: Add Location of Shortcut:...
Phishing attacks are nothing new and you can usually spot them in your email with half of your brain tied behind your back. You've seen them - bad grammar, syntax and spelling. The obvious links to knock-off URLs. The pleas from Nigerian-Kings-in-hiding. Today in my GMail I received a note from Hallmark that I was the recipient of a e-card. Now, Valentines Day was a week ago so this seemed suspicious, but my mother is not above sending these cute little e-cards every once in a while so I took a look....
Not much hoopla this year over the one year anniversary of Vista. In fact, when I was part of the Microsoft Foots program last year which allowed me to talk to customers at a popular Best Buy in Orlando, FL there was no excitement with customers when I showed them all the new features of Vista along with the new version of Microsoft Office 2007. I often wonder if Vista will ever get accepted at all. Sure all new notebooks have Vista installed on it but what about those PC's that could upgrade to...
The Question is why and the answer is: Please be better than Vista! Notice how much it still looks like Vista however you would have to expect that. Start Menu PowerShell Display Properties Control Panel Desktop Welcome Center System Tray. LiveJournal Tags: Windows 7, Windows Milestone1, mikedopp, mikedopp.com, Leaked, Screenshots, happiness, Windows, Vista BuzzNet Tags: Windows 7, Windows Milestone1, mikedopp, mikedopp.com, Leaked, Screenshots, happiness, Windows, Vista Flickr Tags: Windows 7, Windows...
So I was surfing Youtube for my latest and greatest music videos when I got the urge to see if anyone had posted some interesting videos on Rockband. Rock Band Drums on the PC. To my suprise I found this dude had put together an app to use your drums that are included with the Rockband game on you pc. This is so cool. I can now play the drums record my session and share it with the world via Youtube or your favorite video site. Another great how to get windows xp to recognize your usb drumset head...
Recently, I installed Vista SP1 RC Public Availability Programme (here) and I was initially disappointed as on inspection it was business as usual I couldn't find any differences and I was left wondering what was all that about then? I even took the time to do timings to do a before and after on times that was important to me such as timings in a DirectX games and none of them have changed, I even re-run them again and not one difference. So what I wanted from Vista SP1 was better performance in...
Technorati Tags: Vista,games,NVidia,drivers I have two machines, one is my laptop that I use for WPF development and other development work. It runs Vista and I can't say that I've ever had a problem with it, except when running games. I like a lot of new features of Vista and recommend it to people regularly. My other machine is strictly a gaming machine and today I'm removing Vista from it. Why? Not because of some arcane reason, but because the Nvidia drivers for non-8000 series video cards are...
USB + Drivers + Vista + x64 + "New Hardware Found" Install + KB941600 = Total USB Destruction... To completely screw up your USB ports/drivers in Vista x64, simply INSTALL this update through Windows Update. It will, in fact, give you plenty of problems including the extremely annoying "New Hardware Found" dialog on every boot. Some may have found a "Hotfix" called KB937187. But the power of KB941600 is overwhelming and very destructive and not even KB937187 can stop it. Update Destruction for Windows...
(click to larger view) Oh Zune, I want to love you, but you make it so difficult some times. Well most of the time my Zune is great. The device is solid (now that my battery isn't draining even when I turn it off with the firmware from 2 days ago) and the marketplace has a great selection. The podcast features are getting there (it would be nice to mark as played from the device) but I have been having some major problems for the past few days. When I got my MacBook Pro, one of the first applications...
46,732 Days and 15 Hours later I should have a 50mb file transferred, according to Vista. Does anyone else think there should be a condition in the time remaining procedure that says: if(timeRemaining.Days > 100){ throw new SomethingIsMessedUpBigTimeWithThisMethodException(timeRemaining, "Developers Name Here");} Technorati tags: Vista, Messages...
I had spotted these updates last night in a post by Robert McLaws and decided, what the heck, I'll give it a go... I had no trouble installing the updates, but they do take a while and require a reboot, but when Vista started again I could see that it was running faster than the normal fresh boot. Now, I am running vista on my Laptop, which is old, not very old, but old none the less. It is of the Dell flavor and has only 1GB (upgraded) of RAM and a 64MB Graphics card. It can be Sloooow. Now, thanks...
I have not had much time to blog over the last week so I thought I should write this to get my head round what I have been up to. I have been busy at work with documenting deployment procedures and requirements, an application deployment, Managing production applications and reading email. I have been busy at home with my baby girl who was born last month. On top of all this I have been seriously looking at contract work, and I have been involved in discussions with one of the program managers for...
As you may have seen from my previous post, I have just installed VS2008B2 onto my old work computer, well it is now time to hit my Vista laptop with it: I just tried to install Visual Studio 2008 Team Suit on my Vista laptop, but it failed on the first hurdle; installing the .NET Framework 3.5 Beta 2 After an hour of searching the web for answers and trying about three different options, finding about ten more, and getting increasingly frustrated, I gave up for a while... On my second attempt I...
For a long time now I've never been able to use several applications, including Windows Live Writer (which is hugely improved over its initial beta release, btw), FeedGhost, FireFox (after it updated itself one day), and even the new beta of Safari for Windows. I always got the error "The operation has timed out" from these applications. I was never able to reproduce it myself in C#, nor did any other network related appliations or the IPWorks components that I work with so often produce the problem....
Microsoft has just announced Surface. Just at first glance, this appears to be something that could change everything. I am curious about a couple of things. 1) Will it really be cost effective enough that we will be able to have a coffee table (See the Power video) that sorts our pictures and 2) How in the world is this going to run on top of Vistazilla? If they could really do that bar trick with the bubbles and stuff... dang. Pretty impressive. Link to Microsoft Surface Technorati Tags: Microsoft...
I'm having trouble installing .NET Compact Framework 2.0 Service Pack 1 on my PPC6700. I want to play with the new version of NavXS, but when I try to download the framework from here, the installer tells me: Any ideas on how to load the framework on my PPC? I haven't been able to find a cab file anywhere. Is it a Vista thing? Technorati tags: NavXS, Compact Framework, Vista...
Typing mailto: in the search box in the Vista start menu will open a new mail message in Outlook. It is much faster for me to hit the Win key on my keyboard and type mailto: than it is for me to hunt through the 15 open applications, find Outlook and click "New". Plus I don't have to transition between my mouse and keyboard. It's really not a new Vista thing since you could have typed WinKey + R, then mailto: before, but it's still cool. Technorati tags: Vista, mailto:...
A good friend and ex-colleague of mine seems to have been bitten by an evil bug causing him to devote his free time to creating a tool that will report all hidden shares on a remote machine. The tool is available for download here. Your colleagues in your lan thought they could hide their party photos and mp3s from you, but not any more. Link: http://projectdistributor.net/Releases/Release.aspx?releaseId=413 Technorati tags: Hidden Shares, Tool, winnt, windows, xp, vista, win2k, share, reveal Cross-posted...
Former GWBer and now MSFTy Brandon Paddock has released an app for Windows Vista that gives you the shortcut ability of Windows Desktop Search (formerly MSN Desktop Search) on the Vista Search box which is nested in the start menu. Go check it out. Brandon you are 'The Man'. First all those uber tips for WDS and now Start++. As a matter of fact, I find myself using WDS more for the shortcut ability rather than for the search functionality. Link: http://brandonlive.com/category/startplusplus/ Technorati...
The MonthCalendar control is wider on Vista for some reason. The control is 227 pixels wide instead of 182 pixels on XP. If you have a form that only hosts this control, use this code to make it look better in Vista: private void FormDateSelector_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { if (Environment.OSVersion.Version.Major == 6) { this.Width = 227; } } Technorati tags: .NET, Vista, MonthCalendar...
Well, its about time: The WMDC is out of beta and is available to download. WMDC is the replacement for ActiveSync on Vista and I would have expected it to be available for the business release of Vista. Up until now users have had to make do with the beta version that was originally released for Vista RC1, and I can tell you it was a little flaky in places. Not anything really problematic, just the usual beta unfinishedness, though it was usable. I was very happy to get my Windows Alert this morning...
Kyle blogs about his issues (and resolution) with installing Adobe Reader 8 on his Vista machine. For more of his thoughts on Vista and how Access 2007 sucks, see this post. Technorati tags: Vista, Adobe, Kyle Archer...
This code will load the MapInfo.Application object into a listbox and display the sample US County data. It assumes your form has a listbox called listBox1 and a "using System.Reflection;". It also works in Vista! string mapName = "C:\\Program Files\\MapInfo\\Professional\\DATA\\Map_Data\\Namerca\\USA\\Usa_Maps\\US_CNTY.TAB"; System.Type oType = System.Type.GetTypeFromProgID("MapInfo.Application"); object o = System.Activator.CreateInstance(oType); oType.InvokeMember("do",...
I picked up a SanDisk 4gb usb key this weekend hoping to take advantage of the Vista ReadyBoost feature. I plugged it in, selected ReadyBoost and waited for greatness. I'm still waiting, it doesn't seem to be speeding up my system, but I haven't really been pushing it too hard either. Tom Archer has a great post about ReadyBoost, but I didn't see an answer to "at what performance level does ReadyBoost make a noticeable difference?" Technorati tags: SanDisk, ReadyBoost, Vista, Tom Archer...
Virtual PC 2007 runs so well on Vista. VPC 2004 always worked, but it was buggy and slow. VPC 2007 is clean and crisp. You can still sign up for the beta here. Technorati tags: Virtual PC, Vista...
notepad.exe, *cough*sucks*cough*. But what do you expect? Its obviously supposed to be very limited, but its a little too limited for the year 2007 IMO. Fortunately Matt Berther showed me how to replace notepad on Vista with Notepad2, which rocks. Now when I view source in IE I actually get something I can read. Technorati : Vista, notepad, notepad2...
I installed Vista on my main development computer today and am proud to report my score: .score, { font-weight:bold; font-decoration:none; font-size: x-large; cursor: hand; background-image: url(http://www.shareyourscore.com:80/images/button-green.png); color: #ffffff; font-family: verdana, arial; width: 80px; height: 80px; background-position: center center; vertical-align: middle; background-repeat: no-repeat; text-align: center; } 2.6 Honestly, I'm just happy to have glass, unlike my laptop. P.S....
A week out of the blogosphere feels good - and a refreshing way to recharge the batteries! Of course, now I have to wade through 700+ news items. I have not removed my laptop from its bag since December 22nd. It was hard at times, but I made it. I noticed a lot of people are getting their blogs in a knot over Microsoft giving out some review laptops loaded with Windows Vista Ultimate to select bloggers. I wasnt selected so it is hard for me to be anything but envious. On the other hand, I find it...
Had issues debugging a web application on Vista, it kept complaining that Integrated Authentication was necessary. So goggled around and came across this post on Rick's Strahl's blog, and decided to install VS2005 SP1. The VS2005 SP1 setup experience in my case was horrible. it ended up being a memory hog brought the machine down to near halt, and that was just the setup initialization. I would advise folks to run the setup overnight if all they got is 1GB of Ram on their Vista boxes/notebook. So...
Try WinKey + X on your Vista laptop for this bad boy: Handy software, awful name. Technorati tags: Windows Mobility Center, Vista...
As I posted yesterday, Zune finally released its Windows Vista compatible client. I had called Zune support two times previously and had gotten credible support. However, this was terrible. After gleefully downloading the new update, I would launch ZuneSetup and then I would be told "No Zune Software Updates Available." I rebooted, tried it a couple of times again, always getting the same result. I am running Windows Vista RTM Enterprise edition. After totally stumping the level one technician who...
When remotely connecting to a computer that is not running Vista, you will get a message saying that it cannot verify the identify of the computer you want to connect to like this: To automatically override this warning, change the Authentication options like this: 1) Open Remote Desktop Connection2) Click "Options"3) Click "Advanced"4) Select "Always connect, even if authentication fails" from the Authentication options drop down box. Technorati tags: Vista, Remote Desktop Connection, Authentication...
Yeah, had a struggle late night, and have come to the conclusion that Vista doesnt like my notebook(Dell Inspiron 6400). To be precise it prefers me to stick with Windows XP Home Edition, and is reluctant to upgrade it. The compatibility report was fine, the only Hardware complaints were - to Upgrade my Bios - i.e. got to A.11 from A.8 The software complaints were - Nero - which I can do without for the time being - McAfee Internet Suite - OMG, no compatibilty with McAfee, allright I'll give Avast...
Rolvin Pagunsan talks about some new Win key combinations. My favorites are Win-Space (show sidebar) and Win-Number to launch applications in your quick launch toolbar. Like Win-3 to launch VS 2005 since that is the 3rd application in my quick launch toolbar. Technorati tags: Vista, Short cut keys, Rolvin Pagunsan, DevPinoy...
With the help of this post, I am now listening, downloading, and syncing my Zune and the Zune Marketplace on Vista. Amazing to see these two products working together. I have the following apps running at the same time with no performance issues I used to have on XP: Word 2007 open (writing my portion of a book) Couple IE windows Virtual PC 2007 with 1024MB allocated to a running machine (Windows 2003 and SharePoint 2007) Outlook 2007 Zune player listening to Blue October (amazing CD!) Windows Live...