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.