There and Back Again : Vista

New Addition to My Toolbox

hdierking — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 06:46:30 GMT

When it comes to creating CDs and DVDs, I pretty much have a singular need - burning ISO images of software. Therefore, I always find myself pretty annoyed with the "everything and the kitchen sink" tools like Nero and Roxio and I've been quite content over the past year using an internal command line tool. Unfortunately, over the last month, I've been encountering all sorts of problems with this tool and as I'm about to pave my workstation for Vista with SP1, I needed to find a good (free) DVD burning tool - and stumbled across this little gem. Bottom line from my experience thus far - it's free, it's simple, and it works as advertised.

Disabling the Annoying Toshiba Menu

hdierking — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 21:25:14 GMT

Do any of you have a Toshiba laptop? I have a Techra M5, and today I finally got annoyed to the point of looking up how to disable this moronic system menu.

Now I can move my mouse again without fear of accidentally bumping the top of the screen.

Windows SDK Integration with VS/VC++

hdierking — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 20:06:34 GMT

Part of my job with MSDN Magazine is looking at the accompanying code samples that we make available for download. A lot of things go into the level of detail that I spend with the code samples (such as how much time I have available, how familiar I am with the particular subject, etc...), but at the very least, I do a spot build to make sure that code at least compiles.

So this morning, I was handed a piece of C++ code by an author that I think very highly of - and in doing a spot-build, I discovered that there were tons of compilation errors. I thought to myself, "doh - I haven't installed the Vista SDK" - so I downloaded and installed the SDK.

Still, no luck.

Then, just before I was about to begin the mindless activity of modifying my env variables, I ran across this post. I ran the VCIntegrate.exe utility, and whala! Worked like a charm!

Really Cool Desktop Backgrounds

hdierking — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 06:05:33 GMT

I'm pretty sure that this is just one of those sites that I missed because I wasn't paying attention. However, I came across it tonight and absolutely love all of the desktop backgrounds that can be downloaded. They even have a bunch of backgrounds for dual and dual widescreen monitors.

Check out http://www.digitalblasphemy.com

XSD.exe Funkiness with Pre-Build Event

hdierking — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 02:31:27 GMT

So I'm currently working on something where my domain ontology is maintained in XSD. In the beginning, it was no big deal to periodically run xsd.exe from the command line when I changed my XSD file. However, as my data types became larger in number, I really wanted to avoid constantly having to manually run the command line tool - so I added a pre-build event task.

"C:\program files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\SDK\v2.0\Bin\xsd.exe" 
  "$(ProjectDir)Schema.xsd" 
  /classes 
  /n:$(ProjectName) 
  /o:"$(ProjectDir)"

Seems reasonable enough. However, when I run it, I get some weird error from xsd.exe about illegal characters in the path. I also notice that xsd actually changed my output path from "Pub.Domain" to "Pub_Domain" - What?!? I wish I could say that I knew why it does this - a friend suggested that this may be Vista-related? At any rate, if anyone knows why this is happening, please let me know. In the meantime, this works just fine.

md "c:\hld_temp"
"C:\program files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\SDK\v2.0\Bin\xsd.exe" 
  "$(ProjectDir)Schema.xsd" 
  /classes 
  /n:$(ProjectName) 
  /o:"c:\hld_temp"
xcopy "c:\hld_temp\Schema.cs" "$(ProjectDir)" /Y
rd "c:\hld_temp" /S /Q

Running Vista in VPC 2007

hdierking — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 02:10:37 GMT

I have my Orcas test bench environment setup in VPC 2007 using a Vista base image as the foundation for my Orcas differencing drive. That said, it has been driving me absolutely crazy how slow Vista performs under VPC - so after a quick search, I came across this post from a while back by Ben Armstrong. Just doing step 3 did wonders for me. Vista now performs at level that's more than acceptable for me (by acceptable, I mean that the performance is such that it doesn't compete with Orcas for my attention).

WF Custom Actions - Location Matters!

hdierking — Tue, 29 May 2007 03:47:50 GMT

Firstly, many thanks to Kavita Kamani for helping me figure this one out.

As you may or may not know, Windows Workflow Foundation contains a lightweight, forward-chaining rules engine (by lightweight, I mean to say non-Rete). In WF rules, a rule is defined by a condition, a collection of "then" actions, and a collection of "else" actions. One of the really cool things about the way that the rules engine is structured is that it allows you to create your own custom actions. Why would you want to do this? Quite simply, because within a custom action, you have access to both the validation context and the execution context. Therefore, custom actions in effect provide a means for extending the rules language.

There's only one gotcha to look out for when creating custom actions (there might be more, but here's the one that bit me). If you create the action within the same project that contains the workflow using the action, you will get the following error when you try to call it from within the rules editor.

After beating my head against a wall for a while trying to figure out the problem, I realized that if I moved my custom action to another project and referenced it from the project that contained my workflow, everything worked just fine. Kavita confirmed this behavior and explained that the WF Rule Editor uses CLR types rather than design-time types. As such, as far as the rules editor is concerned, my custom action doesn't exist so long as it is in the same project.

Vista and Wireless Network Security

hdierking — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 20:59:58 GMT

I learned something interesting about Vista yesterday (or part of something interesting – I'm sure that I'm probably missing something). I've been running Vista for quite some time on my work laptop, and it has never been able to connect to my home wireless network. I always just assumed that this was due to some magical security certificate that Microsoft's IT group had installed on my machine that would allow it to connect securely only to the Microsoft wireless network (for the moment, let's forget the fact that I connected to my friend's wireless network using a security key when I was in Germany). However, I recently installed Vista on my wife's laptop and surprise – same problem! After a little digging, I noticed something strange. My wireless access point was set to enable security using WEP/128 bit. When Vista tries to connect to a WEP-secured system, it seems to force all generated keys (from the passphrase) to 64 bit. I couldn't find a way to change WEP settings to 128 bit, so I changed my security settings to use WPA. I don't know what the current trends in wireless security protocols are, but I do know that now all of my Vista machines can connect wirelessly to my network!