Windows 7

Installing Windows 7 from a USB drive

Laurent Bugnion — Fri, 01 May 2009 23:20:51 GMT

Yesterday, Windows 7 RC (release candidate) was published on MSDN, so the subscribers are currently downloading it. I have been using Windows 7 since October 2008, when it was pre-released during the PDC conference. Then I moved to the beta when it was released, and have been using it as my main system since then. I almost never had to go back to Vista (which I kept installed on another partition of my main laptop, just in case).

By a funny coincidence, though, Win7 beta stopped working for me last night, after a nasty crash that aparently corrupted the user profile. This would be possible to fix, but I decided what the heck, all my data is safe anyway (I have a 3rd partition for data, plus back everything up to Mozy) so it's not like I really need to go back into Win7 beta, especially since the RC is almost there.

So now I am eager to install. The bits are currently being downloaded, and I have a couple of hours to kill while waiting. So why not study an alternative way to install Win7 to a PC? At the last MIX, I remember I heard someone mention that you don't need a DVD to install Win7. A simple UBS stick is enough, provided it is big enough to hold the 2.5 GB data contained in the Win7 ISO file. Well it so happens that we got a free 4GB USB stick at MIX, so here we go, perfect conditions for the test :)

I searched online, and found this gem of a video, by Dennis Chung, one of the DPE in Singapore, that shows in details how to do that.

To make it even easier, here are the steps:

Preparing the USB stick

Plug the USB stick in a USB port, and make sure that you don't have any data you need on it. The data will be erased.
Open a command line console
Type Diskpart
Type List Disk
Type Select Disk N where N is the number corresponding to your USB disk. This should be easy to find based on the size of the disk.
Type clean
Type create partition primary
Type active
Type format fs=fat32 quick
Type assign

After this is done, you should see the USB disk appear in Windows Explorer in the list of mounted drives:

Copying the files

Then, you need to mount the ISO file as a virtual DVD drive. For this, you will need a 3rd party tool. Personally, I like VirtualCloneDrive. Simply copy all the content of the ISO file (mounted through VirtualCloneDrive) to your USB stick.

Booting

In order to boot from the USB stick, you need to modify the boot order in the BIOS of your computer. Accessing the BIOS menu depends on your machine. On my Alienware M15X, I need to press XXXX while the machine is starting up. This gives me access to the BIOS options, where I can select the boot sequence. If the USB stick is found, the laptop will boot from there.

Note: To speed up the boot sequence, revert the setting to always boot from the hard disk after you are done installing Windows 7.

With this done, you should now see your Windows 7 installer starting up and leading you through the installation process. Have fun!!

The #techdays presentations screencasts are online (French only)

Laurent Bugnion — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 05:21:17 GMT

Update: The German version of the presentation is online too.

I was just notified that the screencast for the session I gave at TechDays in Geneva a few weeks ago is now online. You can see this presentation (in French) at

http://www.microsoft.com/switzerland/msdn/fr/techdays/Presentations.aspx

The slides are also available at this URL. Have fun!!

Posting the source code for #techdays (Switzerland) talks

Laurent Bugnion — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 10:07:39 GMT

Update:

I updated the installation instructions to make it clearer that you need the WPF toolkit and SQL Server express before you can run the application.

TechDays Switzerland is always a very nice venue, and this year in Geneva and in Bern were no exceptions. For me it was a special occasion, because I gave the same talk in French in Geneva, and in German in Bern, and I had never done this before. I think it went well. Altogether approximately 450 people saw this talk. I think I will possibly reuse it later this year at other occasions, because it is a good one.

The topic was "WPF today and tomorrow" and the abstract was:

Entwicklung von WPF Applikationen – heute und morgen

Im Rahmen dieser Session werden Best Practices zur Entwicklung der Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) erörtert. Wir erstellen Lookless-Controls und gestalten sie entsprechend. Ausserdem werden moderne Präsentationsmodelle, die den Designer-Developer-Workflow erleichtern sollen, sowie im .NET-Framework und im WPF-Toolkit erstellte Controls vorgestellt. Mithilfe von Visual Studio und Expression Blend üben wir uns in der Erstellung von Anwendungen.
Ein weiterer in dieser Session behandelter Aspekt ist die künftige Entwicklung der WPF. Mit der bevorstehenden Einführung von .NET 4 wird die WPF weiter an Flexibilität und Leistungsstärke gewinnen. Pixel-Shader, Ergänzungen an der XAML-Sprache, die Multi-Touch-Technologie, neue Controls und andere Erweiterungen – all dies führt uns zu einer neuartigen User Experience und zu neuen Möglichkeiten der Interaktion (Think Minority Report!).

Windows Presentation Foundation: aujourd'hui et demain

Cette session passe en revue les pratiques de développement utilisées avec Windows Presentation Foundation de nos jours. Nous construirons une application de business connectée à une banque de données, utiliserons les nouveaux contrôles « Line of Business » (Datagrid, Ribbon) et utiliserons Visual Studio et Blend pour rendre nos applications plus belles.
Ensuite, nous parlerons du future de WPF. Avec .NET 4 qui arrive, WPF sera aussi plus puissant et flexible. Pixel shaders, les additions au langage XAML, les applications à touche multiple (mulittouch) et d’autres additions nous rapprocherons de l’expérience utilisateur du futur (telles que dans « Minority Report »).

Slides

The slides for the sessions should be available on the TechDays website soon (www.techdays.ch) as well as a recording of the session. In the mean time, I uploaded the slides here.

TechDays Switzerland 2009

View more presentations from lbugnion.

Video

I showed a small video about pixel shaders in this talk. The video is available for download here.

Source code

Here is the source code of the "Line of Business" application we built together. As a reminder, it is inspired by a "hands on lab" put together by the DPE team at Microsoft Switzerland. This lab can be downloaded here.

To run the application, you must first install the following:

Install SQL Server Express
Extract the Northwind database to C:\temp.
Install the WPF Toolkit.
Source code for the LOB application.

IdentityMine releases Gesture Engine for advanced multitouch development

Laurent Bugnion — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 05:56:52 GMT

Multitouch is going to be the next big thing. Natural User Interfaces (NUI) are going to change the way we use client applications soon. You think it's not true? See the iPhone hype. This is not a very good phone, feature wise. It is lacking very basic features. But being able to control your phone using multiple fingers was a real killer feature.

Apple is not the only one working on that, of course. Firms like Perceptive Pixel or Oblong have been exploring this space for a very long time. (watch these videos by the way they are amazing).

More recently, Microsoft released the Surface computing device, which is also using multitouch. Multiple users can use multiple fingers to control the device. Build in Windows Presentation Foundation, these application get input from the Surface device input API and transforms can be applied to the elements on the screen according to the fingers movements (or Gestures). The mapping of the finger movements to mathematical transforms can be complex and tedious.

Similarly, Windows 7 ( the next operating system developed by Microsoft, currently in beta) supports multitouch input natively. This opens the door to a new generation of devices (cheaper than a Surface, for example the HP Touchsmart) will bring multitouch computing to the masses, and not just on phone devices.

This just calls for a higher level API allowing to easily integrate complex gestures into an application. Like every technology developed by IdentityMine, this was developed with the developer-designer workflow in mind and will facilitate the development of rich, natural user interfaces.

The whole story is available here. We are all very excited about this major step and personally, I cannot wait to develop using this package. Congratulations to the team who did an amazing work developing this!

Windows 7 beta 1 install experience

Laurent Bugnion — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 01:16:10 GMT

I've been an avid user of Windows 7 pre beta ever since we got a build at the PDC conference in Los Angeles in October 2008. I installed it in dual boot on my work laptop, as explained here. There were a few minor kinks that forced me to keep Vista on this machine. The most annoying was that it was impossible to debug Silverlight on that build. Well, happy to report that this annoying bug is gone now, and I can develop and debug Silverlight on Windows 7 now. Let's see other problems and what happened to them:

Update: Forgot to mention that there is a critical update that must be installed after you install the beta of Win7. Get it here!!

Unsolved (and workarounds):

Unability to mount ISO files without external solution: This is probably the most annoying missing thing in Win7 at the moment. I can't understand why it's not built in the system (Is it to preserve the other vendors, who would pretty much go out of business otherwise? Hard to believe). Unfortunately, it seems that one of the best known ISO mounter, Daemon, cannot be installed on Win7 (at least Not On My Machine (TM)). Through Twitter and other people's experience, I tried another mounter called VirtualCloneDrive. It seems to work better, but it caused some issues on the pre beta (prevented the laptop to shut down or go to sleep properly). These issues seem to have been solved now, but I would be careful with that anyway. If you notice that your PC doesn't shut down properly anymore, and you have VirtualCloneDrive installed, try to remove it and see if it solves the issue.
LiveMesh resets the color scheme: This is actually not a Windows 7 bug, it is a LiveMesh bug as confirmed here. The bug should be solved in a next version of Mesh, which I hope will come out soon as it seems to be ready already.
CA eTrust ITM antivirus doesn't update the definitions: This is the antivirus software that was proposed to me by our IT guys when I installed my work laptop. While it works fine on Vista, it seems to be unable to update the virus definitions on Win7. It already didn't work on the pre beta, and it still doesn't work on the beta 1. I use AVG instead on all my machines, and it works just fine.
Intel drivers still cannot be installed, probably because a low grade programmer thought it would be clever to hard code the operating system check in the setup. The Intel drivers are the only setup that even the Compatibility troubleshooter is unable to install. Honestly, this kind of rookie mistake is really annoying and doesn't make sense. It doesn't affect my day to day work, so I can live with it, but I would get even better performance if I could install these.

Solved

Debugging Silverlight: As mentioned above, the bug that prevented Silverlight debugging in Visual Studio seems to have disappeared. This was also confirmed by some people I talked to at Microsoft. Great news.
Alienware On Screen Display now works fine. For some reason, I couldn't install these drivers in the pre beta. Note that the functionality of the keyboard shortcuts worked (switch bluetooth on, switch WiFi on, stealth mode, volume, mute, disable touch pad, et...) but no indication was displayed on the screen. With the beta, I could install the OSD drivers, and they work. This is a nice touch.

That's all that was not working so far. The Silverlight bug was the most annoying one, and probably the only reason why I still have Vista on this laptop. Since it's solved now, I don't really have a reason to not format the Vista partition and use that space for data. I will still wait a few days, however, to see if everything really works well, and also what others experience. My guess is that Vista will be gone very soon though.

Interestingly, the beta Win7 build gives me a better Windows Experience Index than the pre beta one. The old one was only 5.0, due to a rather slow RAM access. The new one gives me 5.5, with a whooping 7.9 (the maximum note) for the graphics (not surprising since this is what Alienware is really best known for). CPU and HDD are also doing good.

Setting on old PCs

After I saw how well Win7 performed on my new work laptop, I thought I would take the plunge and install it on all my PCs at home. The first in line was my really old, but still working self-built desktop PC (640 MB RAM, 16 GB System HD, 664 Mhz single core, 160 GB data HD). I use this PC for two purposes mostly@ As a file server for videos (TV shows mostly) that my wife and I download from BitTorrent, and as a gaming platform for the kids (5 and 7, so the games are really simple and don't need power). This PC was running Windows XP SP3 and installing Vista on it has never even been an option for me. However, Win7 seems so much smaller and slicker that I thought I'd give it a try.

I had a few issues that I had to solve by looking for drivers online. Keep in mind that this is not a Vista-to-Win7 upgrade, but an XP-to-Win7 upgrade.

The graphic card (Matrox G400) didn't plug-and-play like it did on XP, and I had to install drivers manually. They were easy to find on the Matrox website. I used the XP drivers and installed using the "Compatibility troubleshooter" feature in Win7. I didn't notice any side effect, and was able to set up my display correctly.
The Ethernet card reacted weirdly (Netgear FA311 wired ethernet PCI adapter). It also didn't plug and play, so I installed the XP drivers. The card still couldn't connect however, and I had to change the Network Media setting (in the advanced section of the adapter properties) from AutoSense to 100BaseTx. This issue is not very well documented, but I was lucky to find a comment on Netgear's site that led me to try this. I am no network expert, so can't really explain what happened there, but it works fine now.

Other than these two issues, Win7 installed just fine on this really old machine. My first tests indicated that it works as well as XP did. After installation, I still have about 6GB for programs. I don't think I will go back to XP, and would rather purchase a cheap HDD for the system if it gets full too fast.

The main reason why I wanted Win7 on that old PC is really helpful: Homegroups. Accessing my videos an other files on that server is a simple as a mouse click as soon as the laptop connects to the home network. I will test that more in depth now.

Weird color effect with Windows 7 and LiveMesh

Laurent Bugnion — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 11:56:36 GMT

I’ve been testing Windows 7 in real life conditions for the past few weeks, and am happy to report that I didn’t need to fall back to Vista at all so far. There are a couple of very small details that bug me a little, but I am not even sure if they’re related to Win7, so I just live with them for the moment.

One weird thing, though, is happening when I install Live Mesh on Win7. The color I chose for the Aero glass theme is reset and then all the window chromes appear in a kind of glassy black look. Note that the change only occurs after I open a new Explorer window when Live Mesh is running.

This is the normal look for my Windows Media Player window:

And now the look after the bug kicked in and the color has been reset to null:

The whole chrome appears black now. It’s not just the window chrome, but also the taskbar which now looks black. I tried looking to a place on Microsoft Connect to report this bug, but couldn’t really find anything. So if anyone has a tip for me, please leave a comment or email me. Thanks!!

One week at IdentityMine

Laurent Bugnion — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 09:00:44 GMT

Today is the end of my very first week at IdentityMine. Let me just say that it was really great. In the same week I worked on a proposal for a client (maybe our very first project in the new European IdentityMine, crossing fingers) and prepared a presentation for next week. I'll be flying to Vienna, Austria on Wednesday morning and will go back home on Friday evening. I will demo various technologies that IdentityMine is working on, and I am really looking forward to that experience.

Next week is going to be very busy again. I didn't have time to work on anything much this week, but I have a good idea for a series of blog posts I want to write, studying MVVM pattern in Silverlight (a hot topic these days in the WPF Disciple group). I have also given quite a lot of thoughts to Silverlight/WPF compatibility, especially since the new VisualStateManager in WPF makes it possible to use that cool component with (almost) the same syntax in WPF and SL.

I have also been testing Windows 7 in very real conditions lately. I found a few bugs which make it impossible to switch completely yet. For example,. for some reason I just cannot seem to debug Silverlight applications, or to run Silverlight application from Blend. WPF seems to work fine though. I will report these bug to the corresponding teams at Microsoft, but I didn't have time yet. Also, Windows Media Player just hangs sometimes and I must kill it in the Task Manager, then restart it and the it works fine. Finally, I seem to have a codec issue, and some video files (the minority) are not working. Most are working though.

On the other hand, many things are working much better than in Vista. Bluetooth is one of these things. It's amazing how much better it is in Windows 7. I have a bluetooth headset, for instance. As soon as I switch it on, and switch bluetooth on on the laptop, the headset connects instantly and I can listen to music or watch videos. Same thing for my new Nokia E71. Switch bluetooth on and it is recognized by the Nokia PC suite immediately, and then I can start exchanging files etc.

Talking of that, the new Nokia E71 is fantastic. I am getting my cheese moved quite a lot (Symbian is really quite different from Palm OS or Windows Mobile but it's nice to learn new things anyway. The device is loaded with features, and you can add new applications. Just before, my wife talked with her mom for 45 minutes for 86 euro cents! Did I mention her mom lives in Malaysia and we're in Switzerland? Well, she just placed the call from my mobile using my Skype Out credit, from an application named Fring. Setting the application up was a breeze and I can use it for MSN, ICQ, Skype (even call computers too for free, which will be great when I am traveling) etc...I will probably write more about that later. The really cool thing is that I can set the device to use WiFi at home and GPRS/3G/3.5G when WiFi is not available, which is a real money saver.

So all in all, it has been a really busy but great week. I am looking forward to the coming weeks and I am sure it will be XMas really fast!

Silverlight on Windows Update (Windows 7)

Laurent Bugnion — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 00:56:28 GMT

Still busy setting up my Windows 7 partition. Just noticed that Silverlight was pushed to it through Windows Update. Cool.

Setting my laptop in dual boot with Windows 7

Laurent Bugnion — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 11:19:38 GMT

At the last Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles, the attendees were given a pre-beta version of Windows 7, Vista's successor operating system. I installed it on a virtual machine and was very impressed by the performance of Windows 7. Since I just got my new laptop (Alienware m15x) and have been installing stuff anyway, I thought I would give it a try and install Win7 in dual boot on this machine. This is the report of the experiene.

Partitioning the hard disk

My laptop has a 320GB hard disk. I decided to create 3 partitions: The first one is for Windows Vista (came preinstalled), the second one for Windows 7 and then a last one for data. I like having my data on a separate partition (or a separate hard disk all together). This way, if something happens and I need to reinstall Vista, I don't need to get all my data back from the backup drive. Of course I still do backup :) in case my hard disk fails completely and I must get a new one. Side note: I use Mozy backup to save all my data to Internet, and it works really great. I like it a lot.

To partition the disk, I used Paragon Partition Manager. The good people at Paragon gave me a free license because I am a MVP, but even before that I was using their tool to manage my partitions. I like the simplicity of it, the UI and the way it assists you in what are sometimes scary operations. For more info about Partition Manager, check the Paragon website and give it a try, the trial version is pretty functional. Note that you don't really need this, since Vista has the ability to create and manage partitions. The partitioning went well, it was just quite slow but I ended up with two 55 GB partitions (one for Vista, on for Win7) and a 175 GB partition for the data. Eventually I will probably use only one OS (and I hope it's 7!) so I can just erase the other OS partition and use that for data too.

Setting up Windows 7

This process is really very easy. Simply insert the DVD that we got at PDC, and follow the instructions. Since there is an OS installed already, the setup asks you what you want to do: Upgrade Vista or install Win7 on a free partition.

The laptop was rebooted only once during the setup, and then I was ready to go. When you start the laptop, a screen asks you if you want to boot Windows Vista of Windows 7.

Installing drivers

The first step is to install drivers. In my case, I found all the drivers on Alienware support page, and you don't even need to log on to download them. Note that Win7 supports big resolutions (1920x1200) natively, but the Aero effect is switched off unless you install the display drivers.

I only had two issues so far, one of them I could solve.

The Intel chipset driver refuses to get installed, because "the operating system is not supported". This kind of check is really annoying, since Windows 7 uses the same driver model as Vista, and the drivers should work just fine (all the other Vista drivers work perfectly on Windows 7, thank you very much). I was not able to find a workaround for the moment, not even the compatibility troubleshooter that I describe below worked.
The audio driver also refused to get installed first (Realtek). In that case, however, I was able to use the compatibility troubleshooter. Simply right click on the setup.exe and choose "Troubleshoot compatibility". This starts a wizard that lets you choose to execute the program "as Vista". In that case, this solved the problem completely and I now have all the high definition goodness provided by this audio driver.

Applications

The only problem I got so far is with ISO mounting solutions. I tried two of them:

Daemon: This well known tool to mount ISO images of DVDs simply didn't install on Win7. When you install it, there is a reboot needed, and normally the setup continues after the reboot. In that case however, the setup didn't continue, but restarted from scratch. Here too, the compatibility troubleshooter did not help.
VirtualCloneDrive: It was possible to install and use this tool (after a reboot), but it causes strange behaviors as long as it is installed. The laptop either doesn't go to standby at al, or if it does it is impossible to start any application after it wakes. I tried a few things, but eventually found that uninstalling VirtualCloneDrive after installing the content of the ISO seems to solve the issues I had. So far so good.

So far I only had success with the applications I installed. No instability, no bad behavior, no crash. Nothing to say here.

Conclusion

I am still testing and still have a bunch of apps to instal, but so far I am very impressed by the speed, the stability and the overall slickness of Windows 7. It is fast to start up,fast and smooth to use, and I typically use approximately 30% less RAM than with Vista on the same machine.

Generally speaking, the CPU load is also less, though there are times where background operations slow down, for example when Windows Media Player is building the media library, etc. Still, the OS is really a joy to use at this time, and so far is definitely ripe for a daily use. I will try to work on it exclusively for a while, and see how that goes! In the worst case I can always fall back on Vista, can't I? :)