Strategic Developer | Martin Heller | TAG: Windows Vista

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TAG: Windows Vista

May 15, 2008 | Comments: (0)

InfoWorld recently ran an article by Eric Lai of our sister publication ComputerWorld called Developers explain why they're avoiding Vista. I'm afraid that for me, and probably for most of you, this falls in the "D'oh" department.

The subhead of the article is "Fewer than 1 in 12 programmers is currently writing applications targeting Microsoft's Vista operating system." Again, "D'oh."

If I'm going to develop a product, I want someone to pay for it. That can be the company that wants it, or end users, or both. (OK, I've occasionally been suckered into developing for equity, but the equity never materializes, and I'd better stop here before I say something that would upset IDG's lawyers.)

Here's the current overall Windows market share picture, as tracked by PC Pitstop:

That's not yet a compelling case for writing software that requires Windows Vista: 80% of the total market wouldn't or couldn't run it. I would expect the situation to be worse for business, and it is:

So over 90% of the business market couldn't or wouldn't run a Vista application.

The new technology introduced with Windows Vista is seriously cool, and I'm learning about it all the time. But there has to be a market before I'll devote large chunks of my time to developing for it, unless the technology makes something possible that was previously impossible, or makes something easy that was previously prohibitively time-consuming.

What do you think? Are you developing with Vista technologies?

Posted by Martin Heller on May 15, 2008 11:07 AM

May 13, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Visual Studio 2008 SP1: To beta, or not to beta?

As I mentioned in An old Visual Studio problem rears its ugly head back in February, I've been looking forward to SP1 for Visual Studio 2008 and NET Framework 3.5. Why? These are supposed to fix most of the problems I've been having with Visual Studio, and restore most of the functionality that was cut from the initial 2008 release.

SP1 is out, but only as a first beta-test version. As is true with most beta-test products, there are risks to running it, ranging from a high likelihood of encountering new bugs to a low likelihood of trashing your system to the point where your most effective option is to reinstall Windows from scratch on a newly formatted partition, also known by the woodworking analogy of scraping your drive down to the bare bits.

The list of improvements in this version is impressive. Both Scott Guthrie and Brad Abrams have discussed these in their blogs. Brad does a great job of covering new features; Scott does too, in a slightly different way, and also highlights the known incompatibilities.

Here are the "gotchas", copied from Scott's blog:

1) If you are running Windows Vista you should make sure you have Vista SP1 installed before trying to install .NET 3.5 SP1 Beta. There are some setup issues with .NET 3.5 SP1 when running on the Vista RTM release. These issues will be fixed for the final .NET 3.5 SP1 release - until then please make sure to have Vista SP1 installed before trying to install .NET 3.5 SP1 beta.

2) If you have installed the VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight 2 Beta1 package on your machine, you must uninstall it - as well as uninstall the KB949325 update for VS 2008 - before installing VS 2008 SP1 Beta (otherwise you will get a setup failure). You can find more details on the exact steps to follow here (note: you must uninstall two separate things). It is fine to have the Silverlight 2 runtime on your machine with .NET 3.5 SP1 - the component that needs to be uninstalled is the VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight 2 package. We will release an updated VS 2008 Tools for Silverlight package in a few weeks that works with the VS 2008 SP1 beta.

3) There is a change in behavior in the .NET 3.5 SP1 beta that causes a problem with the shipping versions of Expression Blend. This behavior change is being reverted for the final .NET 3.5 SP1 release, at which time all versions of Blend will have no problems running. Until then, you need to download this recently updated version of Blend 2.5 to work around this issue.

I wouldn't install this version on my primary development system, but I might install it on a secondary development system after doing a full back-up.

To beta, or not to beta? Maybe both.

Posted by Martin Heller on May 13, 2008 11:37 AM

April 24, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Going over to the dark side

A note from daughter #2, who had a choice of a Mac or PC laptop for her Ph.D. program next fall. "SK" is Gerstner Sloan-Kettering Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, and SK largely uses Macs:

I just confirmed with SK that I want a Mac for next year. It's weird, I feel like I am switching over to the dark side or something.

I feel like they should put "Switching from PC to Mac" as one of those huge life changes that you go through that may cause you undue stress when combined with other life changing events.

It's an odd feeling.

I offered to lend her my copy of David Pogue's Switching to the Mac over the summer. Maybe I should also introduce her to Tom Yager. :)

Her decision was influenced by some recent negative experiences with Windows Vista and Word 2007 on her current laptop as well as the institution's obvious preference for Macs.

Posted by Martin Heller on April 24, 2008 02:50 PM

April 12, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Copying audio CDs on Windows Vista for x64

As I blogged last June, I have a Compaq Presario V6305NR laptop, on which I upgraded the operating system from the pre-installed Windows Vista Home Premium to Windows Vista Ultimate for x64 for testing purposes, using my MSDN subscription. I still need to use it for 64-bit testing once or twice a week, so reverting to the pre-installed system is not an option.

I have more use for it at home than at the office, so that's where it lives most of the time, and as a result I use it for my digital music and photos. The other day I needed to rip a track from an archival CD of my choir to post on the choir's Web site, but couldn't: the CD had warped, possibly because of the stick-on label coupled with storage too close to a radiator.

I borrowed a copy of the CD from the president of the choir, and took it home to duplicate so that I could replace my damaged copy. To my surprise, I found that Windows Media Player won't duplicate CDs, even though it will rip and burn them. Being a bit of an audio perfectionist, I didn't want to put up the quality loss from the two conversions, when a straight copy would be lossless.

I tried making an ISO file using ISO Recorder, only to find that ISO Recorder doesn't support image creation from red book audio discs. Frustrated, I went to my office and used the Roxio software that came with an XP desktop there to make the copy I needed.

Then I dug out the box that the V6305NR had come in, and verified that Roxio Creator Basic for Vista was supposed to come with the laptop. I went to the HP support site looking to download a copy, and found only a patch to upgrade to the latest version.

I contacted HP support by email, explained the problem, and asked for a download link to the Creator software. Here's what they said:

Once the retail version of operating system is installed on your notebook the recovery partition or preinstalled applications will no longer support the retail version of operating system installed. The only option available is to purchase the Roxio separately or restore the system to factory settings.

Needless to say, I'm not happy. Paying $80 for software that I already own really sticks in my craw, and as I explained above I can't revert to the factory settings.

Does anybody have a constructive suggestion for me?

Posted by Martin Heller on April 12, 2008 03:51 PM

December 03, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Lies, Damned Lies and Benchmarks, Yet Again

I've noticed (well, who wouldn't?) that Randall Kennedy (RCK) is in a kerfuffle about Nick White, a Microsoft Vista Product Manager, who blogged a relatively mild discussion of "The right time to assess Windows Vista's performance." So, at the risk of antagonizing everyone involved for no benefit whatsoever, let me offer another perspective.

RCK wrote the benchmarks used by www.xpnet.com. Recently that organization compared release candidates of Windows XP SP3 and Windows Vista SP1, and found Vista lacking. That shouldn't really come as a surprise to anyone, but I'm not sure that it's the issue here.

Nick White's blog post points out that Microsoft only publicly benchmarks products once they have been released to manufacturing; that has been true to my knowledge for at least 20 years. When beta testers had to sign a non-disclosure agreement to work with pre-release Microsoft products, one of the key terms of the agreement was always a ban on publishing performance numbers prior to product release.

I can remember lots of products that had performance issues right up to the final release candidate that testers got to see, but were fine when released to manufacturing. So Nick has a point: a release candidate is not the right build to benchmark if you want to understand the performance of an OS. You need to wait for the RTM bits.

RCK commented to Nick's blog in high dudgeon, about being attacked. But was he attacked? Nick never mentioned xpnet or OfficeBench or RCK in his post, so I'd say no.

RCK certainly interpreted the post as an attack. I read the posting more as being a little defensive, but hardly an attack.

Nick talked a lot about Principled Technologies, which did some Vista benchmarks for Microsoft last year, and Nick suggested that their benchmarks had been done properly. I'm not so sure about that: when you know the results your client wants to get, it's easy to pick tests that will produce those results, whether you consciously mean to or not. Given the variance in results between the two sets of benchmarks, I'm not surprised that RCK feels defensive.

As a benchmark writer myself (I'm responsible for the WinTune and PC Pitstop benchmarks), I'm here to tell you that no single set of benchmarks can ever tell the whole story. My benchmarks sure can't, and I've really worked at them over the years; I rather suspect that neither OfficeBench nor the Principled Technologies benchmarks can either.

So can everybody please chill?

Posted by Martin Heller on December 3, 2007 02:40 PM

July 13, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Vista User Account Control, Redux: Script Elevation Power Toys

Randall Kennedy has learned from running Linux that UAC is probably a Good Thing: Enterprise Desktop | InfoWorld | Learning to Live with UAC | July 11, 2007 08:43 AM | By Randall Kennedy.

I came to similar conclusions in March. At the time, I bewailed the lack of a Windows Vista equivalent to su or sudo.

Randall mentions a solution to this in his antepenultimate paragraph: Michael Murgolo's Script Elevation Power Toy, from Technet Magazine's code archive. The article explaining the Script Elevation Power Toys is here.

There are a bunch of PowerToys there, not just one. You not only get the elevate command, you get right-click menu items to run various script types as Administrator, and right-click menu items to open normal and Administrator CMD and PowerShell prompts at folders from Explorer.

The only issue I have with Murgolo's tools is the installation. In an effort to provide granularity, Murgolo made it so that you have to do 9 separate right-click/Install/approve actions to install all the PowerToys. A traditional MSI package that installed all 9 tools would be a welcome addition. It isn't an either/or choice, after all.

Posted by Martin Heller on July 13, 2007 08:15 AM

June 18, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Accessing the 64-bit Registry

I knew there had to be a way for a 32-bit application to access the 64-bit registry on a 64-bit system, and I finally found it. Don't ask me what I think of the way Live Search works on the MSDN site, however: the answer would curl your hair.

What I needed to know is mostly buried in an MSDN article called Accessing an Alternate Registry View, which is in the MSDN tree under MSDN / MSDN Library / Win32 and COM Development / Development Guides /Programming Guide for 64-bit Windows / Running 32-bit Applications.

Normally, a 32-bit application only sees the 32-bit registry, and a 64-bit application sees the whole registry. The 32-bit registry is filed under the Wow6432Node key. Looking under the Wow6432Node key is bad practice, however, since that location may change in the future.

Basically, if an application that wants to scan the whole registry detects that it is running on 64-bit Windows, it needs to scan the registry twice: once to get the 32-bit registry keys, and once to get the 64-bit registry keys. Two flags apply:

Flag name	Value	Description
KEY_WOW64_64KEY	0x0100	Access a 64-bit key from either a 32-bit or 64-bit application.
KEY_WOW64_32KEY	0x0200	Access a 32-bit key from either a 32-bit or 64-bit application.

These flags can be specified in the samDesired parameter of the following registry functions:

Once you have opened a key with one of these flags, subsequent enumeration of the registry continues from the key you opened. Your application does have to be careful to be consistent: if a 32-bit application decides to delete a key that it found using the KEY_WOW64_64KEY flag, it had better use the same flag on the RegDeleteKeyEx call.

By the way, you can simulate the registry view of a 32-bit application for yourself. On a 64-bit system, there are two copies of Regedit. Running "regedit" launches the 64-bit version. Running "c:\Windows\syswow64\regedit.exe –m" lets you launch the 32-bit version. The "-m" flag allows multiple instances of the Registry Editor to be open.

Posted by Martin Heller on June 18, 2007 06:00 AM

June 15, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Help, I know I saved that file!

My oldest daughter emailed me with a Windows Vista/Excel 2007 problem:

I am so frustrated, and maybe you can shed some light on this mystery. For the second time this week, a file that I had saved has disappeared. Today I downloaded results from Survey Monkey, opened them in excel, went to SAVE AS, renamed it and saved as an excel 97 -2003 file (which is compatible with SPSS), then re-coded all my data.
I saved it again multiple times, as I am paranoid about losing work, and then closed it so that I could re-open it with SPSS. Except that it is no where to be found. I looked where I thought saved it, I looked in all my files, I went to recent items, I opened excel to look for it under those recent documents --- i looked everywhere it could be. Nothing. 2 hrs of work, gone.

My first reaction was this note:

Don't panic.
By default, Office 2007 on Vista saves documents in a weird place, <username>\appdata\roaming\. Documents should show up in Recent Items from the Windows menu, however, no matter where they were saved. They should also show up if you use the search window at the bottom of the Windows menu, i.e. to search for "*.xls". They may not show up by default from Excel if you saved them in XLS format, but they will show up if you change the file type that Excel is seeking to All Excel Documents.

Unfortunately, that wasn't quite enough to turn up the missing file. On the other hand, she tried to replicate what she'd done to download, open and save the original file, and saw the file she wanted hiding in a temp directory, but couldn't find a way to open it.

Of course! If she downloaded the original file and opened it directly rather than save it and open it in a separate step, it would be placed in a temp directory, and if she didn't change directories when she saved as XLS, that would also be in a temp directory. Windows Vista, in its infinite wisdom, does not index temp directories, so their contents will not show up in a normal search.

We did finally find the file by going to Search Results in Everywhere, enabling Advanced Search, checking "include non-indexed, hidden, and system files (might be slow)", and looking for "*.xls". It didn't take that long, and she was then able to open the file and save it in her Documents directory.

Posted by Martin Heller on June 15, 2007 06:00 AM

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