Visual Studio 2005 SP1 update for Vista released

A followup to my post about VS2005 SP1 being released this week: VS2005 SP1 for Vista (beta) was released on Wednesday (12/20).

Visual Studio 2005 Issues on Windows Vista

Visual Studio 2005 isn't supported on Vista (until the upcoming VS2005 SP1 for Vista -- the beta was supposed to be released a couple days ago but seems to be M.I.A.). If you want to know what issues to expect in the meantime, you can look at the issues lists for running with normal user permissions and running with elevated administrator permissions.

I expect that the VS2005 SP1 page should be updated with a live link when the Vista beta is actually released.

Security Warnings in Vista... and XP

I posted yesterday about a security warning in Windows Vista when I tried to run Notepad2, which I had copied into the system32 directory. I had already figured out that it didn't really have anything to do with Notepad2 specifically, and it turns out that this behavior is not limited to Windows Vista either. It exists in Windows XP as well (Thanks to Florian for the info), and I would assume the same goes for Windows Server 2003. I'm a bit surprised I haven't encountered this before, in all this time using XP, but I guess it isn't often that I copy files into the system32 directory from a network drive. I just tested it out on XP Pro (I had to see it for myself) and it's the same as I saw in Vista, except that when I clicked "unblock" on the properties page in XP, it really did unblock it.

Security Warnings in Vista

Yesterday I posted about putting shortcuts to applications such as Notepad2 in the SendTo menu. After I got mine set up, I noticed that Vista kept giving me a security prompt every time I opened Notepad2 (from the SendTo menu or any other way).



I unchecked "Always ask..." each time, but Windows continued to give me the same warning EVERY time I ran it. Other unsigned applications ran without this warning, so I knew it wasn't a global digitally-signed-only restriction in Vista. I had copied the Notepad2 executable to c:\windows\system32, so I thought that maybe Vista required all system32 exes to be signed. When I looked at the exe properties there, I saw this: This file came from another computer and might be blocked to help protect this computer.



I had "installed" Notepad2 by dragging the exe directly from my mapped network drive where I store all of my applications, downloads, installers, etc. Vista was trying to protect me from this foreign executable, and all I had to do was click the handy "Unblock" button, right?

Wrong. Each time I clicked Unblock > Apply > OK, it was re-blocked the next time I viewed the file properties. I made sure the ReadOnly and System attributes were not set on that file.

I dragged the exe to my desktop and checked the properties on that copy of the file, and there I was able to unblock it in the file properties. When I moved the exe from my desktop back into system32, it remained unblocked, and Vista no longer prompts me with that security message for Notepad2.

I'll probably be installing many of my most-used apps from my mapped drive or a USB flash drive, so I'll probably run into this again for any of those exes that I directly copy (if they don't have a setup process). I guess it's easy enough to copy them to one location on the Vista machine and unblock them before moving them to the path where I REALLY want them... but let me know if you find an easier way around this.

[edited 2006.12.17 to add:] I had originally emailed the brains behind Notepad2 (Florian Balmer) to request a digitally signed executable in the next update, and he was kind enough to email me back today. I'm excited to learn that he is still working on Notepad2 development. I don't know what else could be done to make it any better than it is today, but I'm looking forward to finding out. No word on whether the next version will be digitally signed, but it doesn't sound like it's really necessary anyway, as long as you "install" it properly.

If you aren't already using Notepad2, you can get it here. It's the best Notepad replacement (with text highlighting and so much more) I've ever seen, and it's free.

Visual Studio 2005 SP1

Chris posted earlier today that Visual Studio 2005 SP1 has been released. We hoped that this might be the service pack that will fix Vista's support for VS2005, but alas, it's not.

This is the service pack for Team Suite, Professional, and Standard editions. SP1 for Express editions is a separate download.

According to Somasegar's blog post, they also released the beta VS2005 SP1 for Vista today, but the link on Microsoft's site is dead now. Maybe it'll be posted/reposted soon, for those of you willing to install a beta service pack. :)

SendTo in Vista

I've set up Windows Vista on one of my notebooks, and I ran into a speedbump today setting up the SendTo context menu.

In case you're not familiar with the SendTo menu:
It's one of the context menu options when you right-click a file in Explorer, and by default it contains a few locations that you can send the selected file to: Desktop as shortcut, Mail Recipient, a CD/DVD burner if you have one, etc. You can also create shortcuts to other folders or applications, to move/copy the file to a folder or open it in a particular application/editor. I always add a shortcut to Notepad2 (regular Notepad works too) so that if I want to open a text file that may not have the default .txt extension, I can right-click it and "SendTo > Notepad2".



It's a lot easier than messing with the "Open With > Browse" feature when you're in a hurry or if you don't want to permanently change a file association. This is the equivalent of opening the application with the filename as a parameter (such as ">Notepad2.exe file.log").

In Windows XP, 2000, and 2003, the SendTo menu is located at c:\Documents and Settings\[user]\SendTo. I expected to find it at a similar location such as c:\Users\[user]\SendTo on Vista, but the developers decided to be sneaky and move it. (Because every change in a new version of software is made by malicious developers who sit around scheming up ways to make the users' lives more miserable, right? At least that's the way ONE user feels, and he decided to send us some blazing emails telling us so this week. But that's another story.) In Vista, the SendTo folder is located at:
C:\Users\[user]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\SendTo.

If you use the SendTo menu the way I do, hopefully this will save you a bit of time searching for it in Vista. If you don't, ... well, you should. It's great for Notepad2/Notepad, Reflector (for you .NET developers), and any other handy app/editor that you use often.

Still Sick of Christmas

I recently posted about how I'm sick of Christmas already, and why.

Myrtle Beach Online ran a story on Monday about a woman who started decorating October 1 and now has 52 Christmas trees in her home. (Terri, if you're reading this: just because she does it, that doesn't make it ok. Six is plenty.)

I'm very disappointed and frightened that they let people like this roam free among normal people.

Tools

I found a couple of cool (and free!) development-related tools last week that I thought were worth sharing. The first one is actually a small suite of tools, SlickEdit Gadgets (for Visual Studio 2005). There are 5 gadgets included: Editor gadgets, Command Spy, File Explorer, Data Object Analyzer, and SLOC Report.

I'm a huge fan of keyboard shortcuts, so the main reason I installed this add-in was for the Command Spy. This little utility watches your actions in the Visual Studio IDE and shows the associated keyboard shortcuts for those actions. If you have to keep grabbing the mouse to get to a command buried in the menu system, this can easily show you the key binding (if there is one) and save you some time in the future.



The SLOC Report (Solution Lines Of Code?) generates a pie chart showing the breakdown of the lines in the selected code file(s), project, or entire solution. Not exactly a productivity breakthrough, but it's cool to see what your project is made of.



I haven't really used the other gadgets much, but you can read more about them on the site.

Paint.NET is an image editing app similar to Paint, PhotoShop, PaintShop, etc., written in the .NET framework. I know, it's not really a development tool, but it's great for some of the quick image-editing tasks I occasionally have to do related to development (website images, UI images and icons, etc). It covers all the functionality of MSPaint, and quite a few of the tools and effects in PhotoShop and PaintShop -- it even supports layers. I don't really get into image editing unless I have to, and even then, it's usually small stuff like cropping and resizing where PhotoShop would be considered overkill. Paint.NET is a great lightweight tool for these situations.

Visual Studio 2005 Select Area

Page shared this great tip with me many months ago, and I completely forgot about it until today when I needed to use it.

In Visual Studio 2005, you can select a rectangular area of text without selecting the entire lines (default multi-line select behavior). If you hold down the ALT key when you select text, you can draw a rectangle spanning multiple lines. It may not be an everyday-useful feature, but there are certainly times when it comes in handy. In my case today (and in the example in my screenshots) I wanted to move several lines of comments over.

As we all know, the default select behavior looks like this:


But I wanted to select the comments (ALT-select):


And tab them over some more (TAB the selection):


I know my screenshot example here is pretty basic, but my real-world use today was about 10 lines of aligned comments like this, and a couple of keystrokes and a wave of the mouse was much faster than individually tabbing each line. I'm sure there are several other operations you can perform on a selection like this, but the ones that come to mind are tabbing and copying. This works well for situations where you have aligned comments (like my example), formatted text, etc. in your code. Let me know if you find any other handy uses for this feature. Thanks to Page for sharing this tip!

A Warm Welcome

I've been slack about posting recently, so this is going to be old news to those of you who read Chris Reeder's and/or Dean Lisenby's blogs.

Monday was Chris Reeder's first day at ACS, and since we had some time on our hands and mischief in our hearts on Friday, we decided to extend a warm welcome to our new employee. It started off innocently, as Dean was trying to track down a decent chair for his then-empty cubicle, and escalated to the point that we were looking for trashed hardware, duct tape, and all kinds of other crap.




We often do this sort of thing to employees who go on a long vacation (hey, if you have the nerve to go on a honeymoon cruise and leave us to pick up your slack at the office, you should EXPECT to come back to find your 7x7x5-ft cubicle filled to the top with packing peanuts... but I'll save THAT story and pictures for another post). This is the first time we've done anything to a brand new guy, and we didn't quite go "all-out" this time.

Anyway, Chris, we hope you feel welcomed to your new home, complete with metal folding chair and an ancient PC held together by hopes, dreams, and duct tape.

Don't even think about taking a vacation.

Sick of Christmas

Well, we're just wrapping up Thanksgiving, and I'm already sick of Christmas. This season of joy, goodwill, and cheer (which now means commercialism, theft, and greed) seems to be starting earlier each year. People have been putting up Christmas decorations for weeks now -- some houses in my neighborhood skipped straight from Halloween pumpkins to Christmas snowmen. I guess they couldn't find an appropriately tacky 7-foot inflatable turkey to stick in their front lawn for the month in between.

I've been told that radio stations have been playing Christmas music for the last couple of weeks. The Hallmark channel (and probably many others) has been playing a lot of cheesy made-for-TV Christmas specials for the last few days. I know this only because I'm visiting my family for Thanksgiving, and my mom and sister insist on watching every one of these holiday-themed abominations -- nevermind the fact that it's not even December yet.

My family already thinks I'm a "Scrooge" because I'm always sick of the holiday season long before Christmas even gets here. I don't even put up a tree in my house because I get so many trees and holly and bows and lights shoved in my face every time I drive down the street or see a commercial on TV. Is it really just me, or has this holiday gotten out of hand since the wonderful days of my youth when Christmas actually meant something, and was something to look forward to rather than something to drag out for as many weeks as possible? Don't get me wrong; I'm all about the idea of Christmas, and the true meaning behind it, but I think that we as a culture have destroyed it by focusing on all the wrong aspects of the holiday.

SQL cluster instance difficulties

Today I've been working to install a third SQL instance in an existing SQL 2005 failover cluster on Windows Server 2003. I went through the setup process several times, and each time it failed with this message:

Setup failed to start on the remote machine. Check the Task scheduler event log on the remote machine.

I tried running the setup from the other node.
I tried rebooting each node.
I tried clicking the mouse button harder on the last step.

Each time, I got the same error. Then, eventually, I gave up and asked my friend Google what I should do. Google replied with this link.

In a nutshell, it says that the problem was my open RDP connection to the other cluster node during setup. Sounds like madness to me, but I was frustrated, so I closed the other RDP connection and tried it anyway.

It worked.

So far, I'm just happy to get this instance up and running, so I haven't spent much time digging deeper to find out why an RDP connection has anything to do with installing another clustered SQL instance. If I had to guess, I'd say it probably has everything to do with the fact that a user is logged in to the server, and nothing to do with the detail that the user is connected via RDP. I know my curiosity will get the best of me and I'll have to search for an explanation soon, but if you happen to know, please leave a comment and share it!

Royale Noir theme for XP

I've been using the Royale Windows XP theme (the one that comes with XP Media Center Edition) on all my XP (MCE and Pro) machines for a while now. I just found (via Digg) that there's another variation of the Royale theme available -- Royale Noir. In classic Digg fashion, it's sensationalized as a "hidden XP theme." Whatever its history is, it looks cool. I haven't bothered to dig up screenshots to compare, but it looks very much like the black theme that will come with Vista.

You can download the theme here. I just took the RAR version available from multiple links/mirrors from the Digg article, and re-compressed it as ZIP for those of you who don't have PowerArchiver/WinRAR/etc. The installation instructions (which, by the way, are not from me) are included in the zip file.

(By the way -- the background image in my screenshots is my dog Sydney -- and it doesn't come with the theme.)

Lost and Found

When I bought my house last year (1 year and 1 month ago today, come to think of it), I "lost" my GPS receiver in the move. I knew it was in a smallish (baby AT) motherboard box, and I was pretty sure that box was inside another bigger one, and that the whole thing had successfully made the trip from my old apartment to my house.

I enjoy geocaching and like to use my GPSr on road trips, so I've really missed it. I've torn apart my garage, attic, closets, and everywhere else I could think of looking for it. I thought I had dug through every box in the garage and attic and closets at least twice over the past year, and I was starting to consider buying another one (this time the spiffy color version of the Legend), but I wasn't ready to drop that kind of cheddar (about $250) for something I knew I already had somewhere.

Today my dad called me to ask what model GPSr I had, whether I liked it, etc., because he wanted one for his upcoming camping/hiking trip to Cold Mountain next week (I'm not going this time... that's a different blog post for a different day). Of course this conversation made me miss my GPSr even more, and I was determined to find it today.

So after I got off the phone with him, I walked out into the garage and picked the first box to be ripped apart and thoroughly searched. I moved some junk off the top, opened the top-flaps, and -- there was a smallish motherboard box. With two more motherboard boxes underneath. I didn't want to get my hopes up, because after all, this was the first box, and the closest to the garage door. What are the odds that I had overlooked it for 13 months?? But, like a kid at Christmas, I opened the box, and there was my GPSr!

So the moral of the story is: ok, there's not really a moral to the story. I'm just happy to find my long-lost stuff.

I can't wait until Google is able to index my real stuff. Infinite privacy issues aside, sometimes I could really use a search engine for all my personal belongings.

Graduation

It's official: my dog graduated from Puppy Kindergarten (a.k.a. Basic Dog Obedience) last night. She even got a certificate!

Understanding Code

This is an oldish post from Jeff Atwood's blog (Coding Horror), but I keep coming back to it. In a nutshell, he says that developers spend most of their time understanding code, a significant portion of their time modifying existing code, and the least amount of time writing new code.

I've often found myself rewriting functions, components, classes, etc. that work perfectly fine as they are. I've done it more instinctively than intentionally, and after reading Jeff's post, I realize that I'm really doing it because it's my way of ensuring that I really understand what's going on in the original code.

I do it most often when I'm working with code from another language that I don't know very well, or don't like. By rewriting it in my preferred language (C#), I make sure I know how it works, and I end up with something that I can more easily maintain (since it's in "my" language).

And sometimes I rewrite within the same language -- especially when I'm reworking my own old code -- to refresh my memory about what the function or application does, and to use the spiffy new techniques and optimizations I've learned since I wrote it the first time. It's also very handy for fixing those "what was I thinking when I wrote that?!?" bits of code. You know what I'm talking about: the snippets that compile and run fine, but in an unnecessarily complicated or horribly inefficient way. I like to pat myself on the back when I reduce 5 or so lines of crappy code to one slick statement, conveniently ignoring the fact that it was my own crappy original code.

Ruben's Tube

This video shows a cool demonstration of a Ruben's tube physics experiment. I wish we had gotten to do more demonstrations like that in high school (or college) physics. It makes Winamp/Media Player/[insert preferred media player here] visualizations look even more boring than they already are.



[Edited 2006.10.26: Apparently the video I originally linked to on YouTube has been moved or removed, so I'm updating the video with what appears to be the same video, also hosted on YouTube... We'll see how long this one lasts. If it breaks again, and you really want to see it (believe me, you should), try a Google search for "Ruben's Tube". -jw]

First Entry

I think there's an unwritten rule of blogging that every blog has to start with the obligatory pointless first post -- "hey, I'm blogging now, this is my first post!" Or maybe it's a written rule -- I don't know; I haven't done the legwork to find out.

So anyway, here I am, getting this pointless first post out of the way so I can get on with... other pointless posts.

I'm interested in programming (primarily using the .NET Framework) and music, and I'll probably be writing a little about both here (in addition to any other random subjects that may fall out of my head).