Windows Vista

Here is a tip for you Codeplex users out there. If you are using the Visual Studio and the Team Foundation source control then you are prompted for username and password every time you open up a project. This dialog does not contain any functionality to store the username and password. If you are often opening projects and/or switching projects entering usernames and passwords can get annoying.

I made some updates to my Windows Search Index Tool so it also displays all the inclusion and exclusion rules and even functionality for adding and removing rules. So now you can easily exclude folders by creating a rule like this: On the Rules tab, click on the Add button. The button should only be enabled if you are running in elevated privileges on Vista. Enter the pattern, like the image shows and choose if it is an inclusion or exclusion rule and hit Add.

Windows Search is a great for indexing your files and is included in Windows Vista by default (version 3). Version 4 is available for download from the Microsoft site. I recently had some problems when my index suddenly was corrupt and I had to restart indexing all files, which takes a long time if you are using your computer and do not want it to interfere with your work. Somehow it started working again but I have not been able to get it to index up all my files, there are always files left to index.

Everybody has something to say about Windows Vista, good and bad. Most often I hear complaints and especially on the User Account Control. Today the Swedish IDG website had an article about the 10 most annoying things with Vista and how to solve them, and of course one of them was about the poor UAC. I must say, and I have been using Vista since before RTM, and only found the UAC annoying during the first few days, when installing the machine. Since then I barely notices it – and if I do, I know why and I can feel more safe using my machine.

Once upon a time Microsoft decided to give the users of Windows Vista the opportunity to buy an extra expensive version – called Vista Ultimate. Buyers of this version would eventually get some nice and exclusive content and applications to their sweet new operating system. Microsoft did deliver some nice enhancements such as animated backgrounds and new sound schemes – certainly worth the extra cost. As time went on people waited for the real Ultimate Extra to be delivered…

It’s summer and time for some vacation, finally. This year has been hard work so far – and I don’t expect it to get lighter this upcoming autumn and winter. I’ve had fun though! Microsoft SharePoint has really been one thing occupying my work – it feels like everyone is not just looking at SharePoint, they want to use it now! We have a couple of cases that is really interesting and I hope that I have convinced them and proposed a nice solution.

Microsoft recently released the Origami Experience 2.0 for Windows Vista, download it here. This is an update to the Microsoft UMPC interface. The Origami Experience is designed for small screens with touch-capabilities, but after just trying it out on my laptop with Vista Ultimate I figured – some of these features would fit into the Media Center interface perfectly. There are a lot to say about the Windows Media Center interface, I think it is quite good – needs some fixes though; why are films divided in three categories – Videos, Recorded TV and DVD’s? The media features in the interface are quite good, but in our family we have a Media Center in our living room and we quite often use it to browse the Internet or run other programs. That’s where I can see a great marriage between the Media Center and Origami interfaces.

Yes, you heard it right - now you can install Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 on Windows Vista! No need for a Windows Server 2003/2008 or virtual machines, remote debugging or any other weird workarounds! Jonas Nilsson of Bamboo Solutions has come up with a way to allow you to install WSS onto a Vista x86/x64 machine using a special installer file. The post contains detailed instructions on how to install WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007 on any Windows Vista machine with IIS7.

Author, editor and blogger, Ed Bott is currently publishing a series called Fixing Windows Vista, which contains really nice information and instructions on how to get the most out of your Vista machine. Currently three parts has been published: Fixing Windows Vista, one machine at a time Ed Bott shows how to install a clean Vista with the latest drivers (which is the most important thing on any Vista system) on a Sony Vaio.

Two new sound schemes (glass and pearl)…c’mon you could do better than this in a year and a half… And a whole bunch of language packs. This time not announced as an extra but the details still tags them as Vista Ultimate content (but just not extra…)

Recently my laptop (DELL XPS m1210) has been really sluggish and I have had several BSOD’s when I have been working with it. I try to keep it pretty optimized and up to date so it will behave nice. I think I’ve read most of the optimize Vista articles and posts and I always keep track on which processes and services running and how much memory is used etc etc.

I have several time stumbled upon clients who complain that their hyper linked Office documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) opens up in the web browser, Internet Explorer, instead of in their respectively Office application. In SharePoint document libraries these problems are solved using a special JavaScript that fires up the correct application, but today I had a client complaining about this problem when having Office documents linked in a Wiki. So I dug up some information from the Microsoft Knowledge Base on this matter and though I should share it (or at least have it written down for future reference).

The Release Notes for Windows Vista Service Pack 1 just appeared on the Microsoft Downloads Site. And just after this Microsoft posted a Media Alert: Microsoft Releases Windows Vista Service Pack 1, Windows Server 2008 to Manufacturing. Finally! Vista Service Pack 1 will be available “to customers in March” and Windows Server 2008 will “be available […] on March 1”. When will it be available on Microsoft Downloads or for MSDN/TechNet Subscribers? Update: The Windows Vista Team Blog has detailed timings for Vista SP1

Will Windows Vista Service Pack 1 be released to the web tonight? Let’s see how the download servers will handle this… Update (later this day): No need for any download servers…we will have to wait a month and a half before it will be available. Sigh…

Finally there is a possible workaround for the missing icons in the Vista Notification Area, see my post from march 2007. The workaround is documented in KB945011 - “System icons may not appear in the notification area on a Windows Vista-based computer until you restart the computer”. It’s the network, power and volume icons in the notification area that suffers from this problem. The KB article pins down the cause due to heavy processing on a Vista based machine during the first startup and that it typically not reoccur after the first reboot. This is because of the “welcome sequence” in Vista that initializes services and applications for the first time.

The year of 2007 is about to come to an end, and it has been a really exciting year. First of all I’ve had a great year with my family; my daughters turned four and one years old during 2007 and it’s so wonderful having them around giving me energy. My wife has been home with them the whole year and next year I will take a few months of parental leave and give them my full attention.

Remote Debugging is a great feature to use, especially when you work with virtual machines. It allows you to develop and debug locally but have the code running on another machine, virtual or physical. Microsoft SharePoint can’t be installed on a Windows Vista or XP workstation, but needs to be installed on Windows Server 2003 or 2008, so the general recommendations has been for developers to have either Windows Server as their main OS or have a virtual machine with Windows Server. None of these work that well; either you have problems debugging your components and you have to rely on traces or message boxes or you have to have a virtual machine with a full development environment, which will not resemble a production machine.

For the last year I have had really annoying security troubles when working with documents in SharePoint (2003 or 2007, WSS or MOSS) on my Windows Vista machine with Office 2007. Every time I have opened up a document for editing the Office applications have asked me to log in to access the document. I have been able to press Cancel three times, but then the document is opened up in read-only mode. The problem has not occurred on any Windows XP installations. I have seen this problem on several computers with Vista. There have been several reported workarounds, of which none has worked for me.

Neowin.net has posted a picture of suggestions of features for future versions of Windows, gathered from the Windows Early Feedback program. The list contains the top 61 suggestions which is to be presented to the Windows 7 team. I think it’s great that Microsoft tries to listen to the community, but a lot of these suggestions should have been in Windows by now or earlier! Just take a look at these few examples:

When using BitLocker or encrypting your file system with EFS on Windows Vista, you will be using certificates and/or passwords. If these certificates or passwords are lost the chance that you loose the information and data on the disks that are protected is very likely. The certificates can of course be backed up on removable media or similar. But storing these kind of crucial information bits on a remote location is of course the best way and you should do that. You can store it in any kind of web-storage such as SkyDrive, but the best way is to use a service called the Digital Locker by Microsoft.

Finally the Windows Vista Ultimate Extras team released the remaining 19 language packs for Windows Vista Ultimate. The language packs allows Vista Ultimate users to easily switch between different languages in the Vista user interface. The language packs are maybe not the most exciting feature for Windows Vista and I believe that this should not just be an exclusive add-on for high-end users (the ones who buy the, as of today, very expensive Ultimate version) of Vista. This feature should be a part of all Vista editions, maybe with an additional minor charge for each language pack.

Yesterday I wrote about Internet Explorer 7 starting to behave like mad when reading feeds with the built-in Feeds functionality. This morning when reading my feeds I specifically studied the usage of GDI Objects in the Task Manager, and these are my findings: GDI Objects Action 1.656 After started IE7 and watched first feed 6.037 After reading about 20 different feeds, in the same IE7 tab 811 Browsed to a non-feed site in the same tab

Internet Explorer 7 has great RSS reader features based on the Windows RSS Platform but I have seen it degrade over the last few months as my number of subscribed feeds and new posts has increased. Every morning when I get to the office I have a few hundred of unread items to go through, see sample statistics from msfeedicon to the right. I have a pretty modern Dell XPS m1210 machine with 2 GB of memory and as I start reading these feeds Windows starts to trash and finally totally goes nuts. Just watch the images below, which I will guide you through.

The Microsoft SharePoint blog has a new post called “Known issue: Office 2007 on Windows Vista prompts for user credentials when opening documents in a SharePoint 2007 site”. The article is a result of many reported support cases on this issue and contains a few possible (I repeat possible) workarounds. We have had this problem ourselves and on several customers. In some cases these workarounds really work, but most of the times not. And the problem is not only with SharePoint 2007, we also see it for SharePoint 2003 installations so I think it’s more related to Vista, and its new security features, than SharePoint (the problem does not appear on Windows XP with IE7).

Microsoft has released three more updates for Windows Vista mainly targeting performance, stability and reliability, one thing that Microsoft and Vista currently lacks. Service Pack 1 is in beta, but will not be ready for launch for several months, but to get get back some credibility for Windows Vista and to get the sales back on track I think Microsoft will continuously release these kind of updates. And of course they will get a wider target area for testing them.

Barry Goffe, Director of Windows Vista Ultimate, has now responded to the last days of angry posts on the non-existing upcoming Extras for Windows Vista Ultimate. In his post he announces that Windows DreamScene now is officially released. I really hope that this is not a release that has been forced out from the Redmond buildings, due to the complaints, but instead something that actually works smooth. The language packs are still on delay - let them wait until they are ready, but keep us informed (not only when you are forced to!).

The summer is now officially over and there has not been any Windows Vista Ultimate Extras as promised! In July, the Ultimate team the Ultimate Team directory promised us a that the remaining language packs and DreamScene would be released, so far no trace of them! Windows Vista Ultimate with the Ultimate Extras was a smart way to get consumers to pay a whole lot of extra money, about 60% more than the Home Premium version, to get nothing! Yes, there has been some extras released, but that was like 8 months ago! Since then we have seen some language packs removed and a technical preview of DreamScene.

If so, then you have the chance of winning a grand prize by Microsoft. Microsoft has announced a Windows Media Center - Ultimate Install Contest in which they are looking for the best (finest and most creative) installation of Windows Vista Ultimate Media Center. If it is you, then send in your submission before November 1st, 2007 (for where to send the stuff, look at the link above). The winner will be announced at Electronic House (EH) Expo Fall 2007.

Windows Vista contains nice functionality for reporting problems on your machine to Microsoft and to retrieve solutions for your problems using the Problem Reports and Solutions feature. To take advantage of this feature and to report problems or check for solutions you have to either enable the functionality, default behaviour, or do it manually. To access the Problem Reports and Solutions center open up the Control Panel and navigate to System and Maintenance and then click on Problem Reports and Solutions. You will see a list of all your problems that has a solutions or if there are more information on any of your reported problems.

Windows Vista is currently suffering from some major issues with performance and reliability when for example resuming from standby, when you are using graphic intensive applications (read playing games :-) or when you are copying files (especially over a network). As of today Microsoft has two new updates for Windows Vista targets some performance and reliability issues. Update for Windows Vista (KB938194) This one covers some cases when Vista stops responding due to display driver problems as well as some other stuff.

istartedsomething dug up something interesting from the Steve Ballmer presentation at the Microsoft Show and Tell 2007. It’s a roadmap for Microsoft products for the fiscal year of 08 and beyond! Some things caught my attention: Expression Studio V2 - there will be a new version of the Expression series pretty soon Microsoft Tellme - this can be really cool. Windows Server 2008 Update Release and Service Pack 1 - wonder what nice stuff they have in the pipeline for these releases… Microsoft Surface - it will be a real product and is not just a showcase! It’s worth browsing through the whole PowerPoint by Steve Ballmer.

Microsoft Windows Vista has a whole lot of new and exciting stuff and some things that may be disturbing (at least when you’re starting with Vista), like the new structure of the folders; X:\Documents and Settings has been shortened down to X:\Users which is good but then everything you are used to are changed (well almost anyway), My Documents is now called just Documents and this folder does not longer contains for example My Music, which is moved to a new location, one step up, with the new name Music.

It has been awfully quiet from the Windows Vista Ultimate Extras team; no new Extras, no new hints on upcoming Extras…no nothing… Yesterday we finally got some good news, nothing exciting really but a sign of life from the Extras team. Their current plan is to ship the remaining lanugage packs and a non-beta release of DreamScene, but not until they all meet the quality requirements. There are nothing said about the upcoming extras, only that they “plan to ship a collection” of extras “over the next couple of years”.

I found an update to the Microsoft XPS Essentials Pack on Microsoft Download Center today. It does not look like an update but on Vista you will get an Windows Update (.msu) package and when I run it it says that it does not apply to my machine. The download link points to the same link that the Essentials Pack was available on before, but it has a new published date (6/19/2007).

Yet another It sucks post! Yesterday I installed the Apple Safari browser on my Windows Vista machine. I thought that it would be nice to use the fastest web browser in the universe to do some application/site compatibility testing without having to have a Mac OS/X system. Yes it is a beta, so I won’t complain about all the bugs and rendering problems (it might of course be the sites I’m testing but in some cases I don’t think so) - I will instead complain on the ugly look and appearance of it.

Windows Home Server, WHS, is a great addition to the Windows Server family, a product that I have wanted to have for a really long time. It will really help me connect my machines at home and provide great features to the connected home and make me share my digital media easier between Media Centers, laptops etc. I have hoped that I could turn my current Media Center, a quite powerful machine, into a Home Server later this year once it is time to build my own new Media Center. I would like to make a clean install of Windows Home Server on that old (2 1/2 years) machine after picking WHS up from my local store.

My favorite Windows Explorer replacement has finally been released in it’s 7th version. Total Commander, which much remainds of the classic old Norton Commander, is a fast and intuitive file and folder manager by Christian Ghisler. It performs much faster than Explorer and has nice built-in features such as packing (ZIP, RAR…), FTP support, multi-renaming, quick-access to common directories… you name it! Version 7 contains a number of new features and fixes, read more about them in my previous post on the subject or on the Total Commander home page.

I previously blogged about the lack of Office 2007 file format support in Windows Mobile 6. Today Jason Langridge revealed that you will not longer need any third party application for this - but instead Microsoft will provide an update to Microsoft Office Mobile 2007 with support for the new Office 2007 file formats (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx). A free update will be available for Windows Mobile 6 and 5 devices and all new shipped devices will have it in the ROM, all starting in Q3 of 2007.

This part of the Dissecting XPS series will focus on some XML Paper Specification tools that are available as of today. The success of XPS, vs PDF and others, are really depending on the number of supported devices, operating systems and tools. Right now the XPS support is limitied in applications outside the Microsoft Windows sphere, but there are plans for other operating systems. (Maybe Silverlight will boost this with the CoreCLR).

I initially had some trouble installing Microsoft Silverlight on Windows Vista. It all installed perfectly without any warnings (not during setup nor in the Windows logs), but I could not get the Silverlight 1.0 beta applications to run. I guess that it had something to do with having installed WPF/E betas installed. To get it to work this is what I did… 1: Start a command prompt using elvated privilegies Click the Start button, enter “command”, right click Command Prompt and select Run as administrator and the click Continue in the User Account Control dialog.

I have been running Windows Vista for a few months now and I discover new bugs (and features) every other day. Vista does not seem so stable as it should be. It’s no big blue screens or major application crashes but small annoying stuff like not persisting settings and stuff like that. I earlier wrote about changing the start menu power button, this changed setting reverts to it’s original state about every third boot and then goes back to my changed state on the next boot! I have also written about that icons disappear from the notification area once in a while.

If you have an Ahanix computer case (in my case an MCE 302-SA) with a Samsung VFD and have upgraded your HTPC system to Windows Vista you may have found out that the VFD does not work nor does the drivers available from the Ahanix web site. But to your rescue there is FrontView for MCE by Media Center Magic. FrontView is an alternative to the default drivers for numerous LCD and VFD displays (CrystalFontz, Samsung, SilverStone etc) optimized for Media Center experience and with a highly customizable interface.

Yesterday NVIDIA released a new set of beta drivers for Microsoft Windows Vista, v 158.18. The drivers supports the GeForce 6, 7 and 8 series (not the mobile ones). Apart from a number of bug fixes and improvements (to the NVIDIA Control Panel, improved WMV playback quality and 3D performance) the new interesting feature is the PureVideo HD support. But there are numerous things for NVIDIA to fix, jus read the Release Notes.

Microsoft has released version 1.0 of the XML Paper Specification Essentials Pack. The pack is available for Windows Vista or Windows XP and Windows 2003 Server (both 32 bit and 64 bit versions is available). XPS Essentials Pack contains An XPS viewer called XPS Viewer EP - for reading XPS files An XPS Document writer - for printing to an XPS file Filters for previewing (IPreview) and searching (IFilter) XPS files Windows Shell handlers, for Windows Explorer integration and thumbnails Note: On Windows Vista Internet Explorer will still be the default viewer for XPS files. Just right click any XPS file and choose Open With and then Choose Default Program. In the dialog choose the XPS viewer you want to use as default.

The Start menu has dramatically changed in Windows Vista and one of the changes are how you choose to shut down, log of or put your computer to sleep. By default the two buttons in the start menu can be used to put your computer to sleep and to log you off. If you really want to turn your computer off you can press the right-arrow button and get a menu where you can shut down, restart etc. Windows XP also has two buttons but instead of having a sleep button it has a shut down button.

This part in the Dissecting XPS series will take off were we ended part 3, by looking into how the actual content is marked up. The content is contained in the FixedPage element and it is marked up by three different elements the Path element which specified a geometry filled with a brush the Glyphs element which represents text the Canvas element which groups elements together The Path element The Path element is used to specify a geometry shape and optionally fill it using a brush. This XPS markup code creates the triangle shown on the right.

Microsoft has decided to make the Expression Blend and Expression Web products available for all MSDN Premium subscribers. This is great news for all developers, and a great enhancement to the MSDN subscription. The Expression Design application will not be included in the MSDN subscription and neither will Expression Media. I surely can understand why Media is not in but I think that Design should be included. Blend will help developers making nice WPF applications and Web will help out when making nice websites, but there is great need for nice graphics on a website and therefore I think Design should be included in the MSDN subscription.

I will in a number of posts try to explain the XML Paper Specification document format, XPS format, that has been developed by Microsoft. I think the XPS initiative is nice from a developer and ISV perspective, since creating and reading XPS documents is easy and supported from various environments. This series of XPS articles will start off with an introduction to the XML Paper Specification and then continue with general support and competitors and then of course some nice introduction on how to use XPS in applications.

Numerous times my Windows Vista has been missing icons in the Notification Area (when did Microsoft stop calling it System Tray?). The icons that has been missing is normally Network, Volume and Power. In Windows Vista you can easily enable these three notification icons, as well as the Clock, in the Taskbar and Start Menu Properties dialog, accessible by right-clicking the Start icon and selecting properties. But the problem is that I can’t enable these icons when they disappear after starting Vista - they are disabled.

Windows Update now contains the Windows DreamScene Content Pack for Windows Vista Ultimate users. Windows DreamScene is still only released as a preview version, but the big interest for the Vista Ultimate extension made the Ultimate Extras Team to release the content pack ahead of schedule.

About a week ago the released Windows Vista Ultimate Extras was updated and re-released on Windows Update with no information on the updates. The reason for the updates of BitLocker tools and Texas Hold’em game was bug fixes, localization issues and parental control issues. The information is now available in the Microsoft Knowledge Base, in these articles Windows Vista Secure Online Key Backup release information (932926) The Hold ‘Em game for Windows Vista Ultimate is available from Windows Update (932925)

Visual Studio 2005 has now been updated with full support for Windows Vista. It’s an update to Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 and fixes a number of issues when running VS 2005 on Vista. If you have the beta of the update (KB929470) then uninstall it before installing the final update.

NVIDIA is continuing thier path to a great driver for Windows Vista. A week ago they released ForceWare 100.65 which is a WHQL certified driver, it does not contain anything revolutionary but is stable (that’s pretty good enough right now). Yesterday NVIDIA took another step forward with a beta of ForceWare 101.41 which is the driver we all have been waiting for since the launch of Vista, four months ago! Performance is better, flat panel scaling is fixed, reduced flickering when using Aero and lots of more stuff. In a few weeks we should expect a non-beta.

Previewing files and attachments in Microsoft Outlook 2007 is one of the new killer features that makes my, and hopefully yours, life easier. When installing Outlook 2007 you will get preview functionality for the standard Microsoft applications and images. Previewing files is also integrated into the Windows Vista Explorer. Tim Heuer (mr double-snake error) has together with Foxit software created a PDF previewer. The PDF Preview Handler is easy to set up and is incredible fast in rendering PDF documents for preview.

Today Windows Update with Windows Ultimate Extras contained new or updated versions of the Hold Em Poker Game and BitLocker and EFS Enhancements. If you check the versions of the files you can see that it’s some kind of update: Hold Em Poker Game New version: 6.0.6000.17034 Previous version: 6.0.6000.17015 But the BitLocker secure key backup utility have the same version, 6.0.6000.16442, but have a different size on the file 1.11 Mb (updated) vs 1.10 Mb (previous).

The last few days I’ve had trouble with the Windows RSS platform and Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista Ultimate. The feeds are updating fine but the notification has been troublesome, for example the feed folders never updated the number of unread items in the folder even though there were unread items in feeds in the folder, look at the image below.

Aaron Brethorst has published part two of his UAC and manifests series, this time he shows us how to embed the manifest into a managed application using Visual Studio 2005.

Aaron Brethorst has written a nice tutorial on how to create an UAC aware manifest for you Windows Vista applications by creating a .manifest file. He will follow up this article with information on how to embedd the manifest into a managed executable file.

I previously wrote about that Microsoft is using PDF documents as downloads for product information on microsoft.com, instead of their own XPS format. Yesterday I was happy to see that the Virtual PC site contained a Technical Overview document available for download in XPS format, of course with references to the XPS viewer download and a “What is XPS?” link, and there are no PDF download available. I decided to check back on the some other pages on microsoft.com and found out that there are now not only PDF downloads but also XPS downloads on some. For example the Desktop Optimization Pack page, which previously only had a PDF data sheet download now also have an alternative XPS download.

 NVIDIA has released a new beta of the ForceWare Graphics Drivers Release 100 (100.64) for Windows Vista (32 bit and 64 bit), which is one step forward in their new official plans for a functional Windows Vista driver. According to the Release Notes there are still a lot of missing features, a lot of known issues and only a few small fixes, since the 97.46 WHQL driver. If you experience any kind of problems please go to the newly established Vista Quality Assurance program by NVIDIA and report any problems with the NVIDIA drivers. Please submit any kind of NVIDIA related problems you have on Windows Vista so we can get working drivers for Windows Vista.

Windows DreamScene is now available from Windows Update. It’s a technical preview of the Ultimate Extra application and at a first glance it looks nice. To enable the animated background Personalize your Desktop Background and in the Location drop-down choose Windows DreamScene Content or any other folder that contains your animated backgrounds, see image below. The Location drop-down even contains, by default, your Videos folders so you can test one of the Sample Videos provided with Windows Vista.

NVIDIA has been struggling with the drivers for Windows Vista and this has not gone unnoticable and they are even facing a possible class action. NVIDIA has now publicly released their plans for the ForceWare drivers for Vista. In short here is what we can expect: February - new WHQL certified drivers, probably not anything fancy or new about this one, big thing is that they will probably work fine March - new drivers with new features. TV output and HDTV support including overscan - finally!!! April - new drivers that targets DirectX 10 SLI support and support for H.264 decoding. May - new drivers again, what will be in them is not announced Let’s hope they can keep this time schedule - they are already late…

Windows Vista contains a performance booster functionality called ReadyBoost which really can improve the performance of your Windows Vista system. In fact, ReadyBoost, is one of the top five Windows Vista features according to Ed Bott. In short ReadyBoost caches programs on a flash drive to speed up your Vista, reports are that a program that previously started in 10 seconds will now start in 2-4 seconds. Almost all articles I have read on this subject says that you should use an USB-stick as your ReadyBoost flash drive, but it will work with any kind of flash drive, like an SD-card.

Microsoft Windows Vista contains new common dialogs, such as the Save As and Open dialogs, which have a new sidebar navigation to the left. The navigation can show the folder tree or your Favorite Links. Windows XP had a similar concept, but not as customizable as in Windows Vista. If you are like me and like to have your files organized and have easy access to them you can customize the Favorite Links really easy. All the links in the Favorite Links sidebar is plain old shortcuts (.lnk files) which are located in the Links folder of the Users directory, to be precise: %USERPROFILE%\Links\, for example c:\Users\wictor\Links\.

Virtual PC and Virtual Server uses Virtual Hard Disk which may be dynamically sized, that is they don’t occupy the whole size of the disk on the host system. But they may take up much more than the guest operating system reports. I will show you how to reduce the size of you dynamically expanding virtual disk, using the tools provided with Virtual PC 2007 beta 2 (it’s the same on VPC 2004).

NVIDIA has released ForceWare Release 100 as a beta for Windows Vista, mainly to support the 8800 graphics cards but it works with all the 6/7/8 series. The Release 100 contains an updated NVIDIA Control Panel which contains new functions for scaling the display so finally I can use 100% of my plasma screen. So far it has been working fine, except for when you once have made your settings do not enter the Control Panel again cause it will the revert to default or faulty settings!

The day is finally here and Windows Vista is available for the consumer market and the commercials are everywhere. In Sweden we hade the annual Grammis awards, the Swedish music industry price, this evening and it was broadcasted on TV. The awards was sponsored by Microsoft and of course it had the standard sponsored by stuff in every commercial break (I’m glad I watched it on Vista Media Center with 30 minutes delay so I could skip those :-). The Vista marketing team had also managed to sneak in some really cool Vista branding when the nominees for each category was presented.

msfeedicon is now released at version 2.0 and is a major update to the previous versions. msfeedicon is a plugin to the Windows RSS platform and Internet Explorer 7 Feeds and appears as an icon in the Windows XP/Vista system tray and displays when you have unread posts in your subscribed feeds. Whenever there is new posts in a feed msfeedicon will show an alert window with direct access to unread posts. No more need to have the Feeds Favorites Center visible in Internet Explorer nor Internet Explorer open to see when your feeds are updated.

Here comes yet another update to the msfeedicon utility, version 1.4. The msfeedicon utility is a free notification icon for the Windows RSS platform, that comes with Internet Explorer 7. The utility will show whenever one of your feeds have been updated and gives you easy access to view the feed. All this so you do not have to waste space on your screen with the Internet Explorer 7 Feeds task pane or some Windows Vista Sidebar gadget.

When trying to install the latest NVIDIA ForceWare (97.46) drivers for Windows Vista RTM I ran into some troubles. First of all I downloaded English version which should be installed on a english Windows Vista Ultimate. This did not work at all. The setup exited and said nothing has changed - do you want to reboot? Then Windows Vista popped up an error dialog stating that I needed to download a fix for Age of Empires - duh!

Finally, NVIDIA WHQL ForceWare Release 95, version 97.46, is available for Windows Vista RTM (build 6000). It’s available for download at the NVIDIA website (x86 and x64). I have not yet tested it but the Release Notes states that support for overscan/underscan is not implemented in this release - not good, this is what I was expecting from this release, there are multiple things in the control panel not yet implemented (as they were in Windows XP). There are some bugs fixed and I hope the flickering when switching from the Desktop to Media Center is gone.

Microsoft has launched a special site for Windows Vista Ultimate, windowsultimate.com. The site will contain the Ultimate Extras (not available until public launch in late january), recommended Vista Ultimate Links and hardware and some Team blogs. Announced extras so far are: DreamScene - animated background in Windows Vista Enhancements to BitLocker and EFS Texas Hold’em poker game

Microsoft yesterday released the second beta of the Microsoft XML Paper Specification Essentials Pack 1.0 (build 5715). The pack contains the following: XML Paper Specification (XPS) Viewer XPS metadata and thumbnail handlers for Windows Explorer XPS rich-preview provider XPS IFilter You need Windows XP SP2 or later and the Microsoft Core XML Services 6.0 to be installed on your system.

Today I start my two weeks vacation and I thought I should summarize this year. The year of 2006 has been characterized, for me, as the year of Betas and Technology Previews. I have been trying to involve myself as much as possible in the all the goodies flowing out of Redmond. Microsoft has released numerous amount of new applications and upgrades. Internet Explorer 7 The new version of Internet Explorer is the application this year that will have most impact in the short run on users. More standardized and a slicker interface with support of for example blogs.

 Here is a small tip to all of you that have DVD movies on your hard drives, like me. I have copied most of our kids DVD’s to the hard drives so there is no need to change DVD every fifth minute and as all of you with kids know - they are not that gentle to the DVD discs nor the cradle of the player.

It has gone several weeks since the launch of Windows Vista and I am still waiting for a non-beta release of the NVIDIA ForceWare drivers! What are you guys doing? Are you waiting for the release to the general public in January? On the NVIDIA website only drivers for RC2, from october 17th, are available. These drivers do not contain the functionality to fine tune my plasma TV, nor does the standard drivers in Vista, like it can be done in Windows XP.

Microsoft has now released the first Service Pack for Visual Studio 2005 and the Team Foundation Server. The Service Pack comes in several versions, depending on which version of Visual Studio 2005 you have. Here are the downloads: Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite SP1, this updates Standard, Professional and the Team Editions Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server SP1 Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions SP1 What I look forward is that the Service Pack addresses theses issues:

The Panel is a site, by Microsoft, with projects focused on the Windows Vista Presentation Foundation and XAML. The site will feature applications and source code for these techniques to show how you can design and implement nice applications for Windows and Live Gadgets. Currently there are some Live Gadgets available as well as a nice 3D RSS Reader called UniveRSS. Feeds are displayed as rotating boxes in a “galaxy” in which you can move around. The feeds are retrieved from your Internet Explorer 7 feeds. Register and download it to try it out.

Since Internet Explorer 7 is on Windows Update and installed as a high-priority update a lot of users have Internet Explorer 7 installed or you are using the brand new Windows Vista, but how do you do when you are a web application developer and have to test it on Internet Explorer 6. Yes, Internet Explorer 6 will be with us for a long time. You have three options: Have a secondary machine stand by with Internet Explorer 6. An easy but expensive solution.

My favorite Windows Explorer replacement Total Commander is in beta for version 7.0. Total Commander is a great tool for managing files and folders and totally replaces the Windows Explorer for me since it is so much faster in managing files and folders in just one simple window. Version 7.0 contains mostly a nicer interface but includes some highlights such as: Show the drive names in the tabs Alternating background colors on files and folders Nicer overwrite dialog with thumbnail preview Run as administrator when privileges are insufficient I have been a huge fan of the application since I first discovered it years ago (when it was called Windows Commander). When DOS was the primary interface of the PC I used the ASCII based Norton Commander for DOS.

No big deal, but I thought this was funny… The monthly Microsoft partner toolkit arrived today and it included a Partner Demo Readiness Toolkit with Windows Vista RC1 and Office 2007 beta. Okey, RTM has not been available that long, but at least RC2 or some other intermediate build would have been more appropriate :-)

After years and months and weeks of waiting it was time to finally install Windows Vista RTM. I downloaded the ISO image from MSDN and burned it on a DVD, the download was fast but it took me hours of retries to get my hands on the license key, I guess the license servers was overloaded with requests. After making one of my hard drives ready I started the installation. This will take me an hour or so maximum I thought after reading all about the new and fast installation and of my experiences with installing the release candidates on Virtual PC’s. All went pretty fine, except that it felt soooo slow, until Vista started the installation. It took minutes between the different screens.

Bink.nu has the story that Windows Vista RTM is now available for download on MSDN Subscriptions as well as on TechNet. Downloading right now with good speed (500 KB/sec) but the request for the product keys seems to have some problems, probably high demand right now.

This is a question that I have asked myself, collegaues and clients now for a while. Next week Vista will be available on MSDN Subscriptions and TechNet and I guess that everyone will be there to download it - me too! I have been running the different betas and release candidates for a while and have waited long for this RTM. I will not install it on my main work laptop, since I have to use Visual Studio.NET 2003 for a while more, and there are no support for Vista and VS.NET 2003. Vista will instead be installed on a Virtual PC so I can test it there. If I get the time I will do the opposite; XP on a Virtual PC with and Vista as host.

Office 2007 is now available on MSDN Subscriber Downloads and on TechNet, after a weekend of updates on the sites. Vista is not yet ready for download, but Maria Johansson says it will be available by Friday the 17th.

The MSDN Subscriber Downloads site will be unavailable this friday “…from 7:00PM to 9:00PM Pacific time on Friday, November 10, 2006,for planned maintenance and upgrades. Both downloads and product keys will be unavailable…” I guess that they are making an update to handle the heavy download request for all the RTM:ed products this week such as Office System 2007 and Vista.

A few months ago I saw a video from Microsoft Live Labs in which they presented something called Photosynth; an advanced image collection viewer that combined the images into a 3D view in which you could zoom in and out and walk around it. I really loved the application I saw as a demo. Today the team behind Photosynth announced a Technology Preview of the application as an ActiveX control which works really nice!

Aaron Brethorst, Program Manager for the Visual Studio - IDE team informed me about a new article on MSDN that explains the Visual Studio Support on Windows Vista. The FAQ contains good answers to the common questions on why there is no Visual Studio.NET 2003 support and how to run Visual Studio 2005 with elevated privileges. There are several questions and workarounds worth reading. I’m still considering wating for the non-beta version of the Visual Studio 2005 SP1 before migrating to Windows Vista.

“It’s time!”, says it all from Jim Allchin. The long wait is over for Windows Vista.

The Microsoft.NET Framework 3.0, or just .NET 3.0, has been released by Microsoft as well as the Visual Studio 2005 extensions for .NET 3.0 and the .NET 3.0 SDK. The downloads are available for Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Vista where applicable. The .NET 3.0 is .NET 2.0 extended with new technologies such as Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation and Windows CardSpace.

The first CTP of the Visual Studio 2005 SDK 4.0 is released to Visual Studio Industry Partners. The release contains Sandcastle, updated setup and improved Vista/UAC support. Note: the download is only available to the VSIP members.

To view XPS files, if you do not have Windows Vista or Microsoft.NET Framework 3.0, you can download the Microsoft XML Paper Specification Essentials Pack Version 1.0. The download contains an XPS Reader, very much like the Adobe PDF reader and an XPS Document writer, which allow you to print to XPS files. There are other goodies in this pack such as: an XPS IFilter that will help you index XPS files, with Windows Desktop Search for example Windows shell handlers for thumbnail views in Windows Explorer The pack requires Windows 2000, 2003 or XP with the latest service packs and Microsoft Core XML Services 6.0. It’s still a beta, but worth a shot.

The Windows Vista blog announces the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack, a desktop solution that will help Windows desktop users tune their applications and operating systems. It will include applications and features that will enhance: desktop deployment application comaptibility diagnostics and repair This pack is a result of Microsoft aquiring a handful of nice companies, such as the great Winternals. You can read all about it at the Desktop Optimization Pack site. When I first read through that page something caught my attention:

The Task Manager in Windows Vista (RC2) has improved somewhat since Windows XP. There are some really nice new features that makes the Task Manager more useful. First of all the Processes tab has been split into two: Processes and Services. This will makes it more easier to find the processes in the lists and the lists has also been improved with descriptions of the processes. On the Services tab you will also find a shortcut to the Services Management Console.

Windows Vista will be released later this year to partners and volume license customers and in the beginning of 2007 to the masses. A successful release of a software product such as Windows Vista requires that a lot of consultants use it and can recommend it to the companies. The last few days it has come out in the open that Windows Vista will not support Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 until the first service pack is released, during the first half of 2007, and even then it will be compatibility issues. Visual Studio.NET 2002 and 2003 will definitley not be supported on the Windows Vista platform!

The Windows Vista team has listened to the community (read my previous post on this) and included the option to mute the startup sound of Windows Vista. And also there are a new build (post RC1) out for Windows Vista available for download for a limited time, but beware the build is not that thorouglhy tested as the RC1.

There has been a lot of discussions around the net on the non-customizable and non-removable Windows Vista startup sound. Robert Scoble has a post that explains why the Vista team decided to design it like that. My personal opinion, like Roberts, is that I would like to decide for myself if I wan’t a startup sound when I turn my computer on. For example; at home I have Windows XP Media Center which would benefit from having that sound, it lets me calibrate the volume before I put on a movie and it makes me aware of when the machine is up and running.

The posts are everywhere that Internet Explorer 7 RC1 is out, and I’m not late to test it out. The download of 15 Mb was fast and the installation was easy; it did uninstall the previous beta of IE7, rebooted and installed the RC1. The first think I noticed was that I think it is still a slow-starter, when you open it as the first application after the first boot (it may be my hogging Dell Inspirion 9100?)

Scott Dart (Program Manager) has a good blog post on Metadata and the Windows Vista Photo Gallery. An interesting article on how Windows Vista Photo Gallery reads and handles the metadata in photos. Since I am a Media Center freak with a lots of digital photos I really hope that Media Center uses the most of this metadata, as I wrote in previous posts; here and here.

Ok, this may not be new to a lot of you or you have never even thought about it - me neither until a few days ago when I was happily unpacking our brand new Dell PowerEdge 2950. I assemled it fast and inserted the Dell OpenManage Server Assistant CD and followed the instructions to install it, this is usually the fastest method and involves so little interaction, everything went fine and it started configuring the RAID and copying files. But after an hour or so I checked it and it was complete at 42%, and I thought lets eat lunch and give it some more time. When I got back it was still stuck at 42%. I rebooted and took the same procedure - and it stalled at 42 again.

A few days ago I complained about not being able to categorize photos in Vista Media Center using metadata. I was using the 5384 (beta 2) build! But in the most recent builds there are a new pivot called Tags, in which you can watch the photos organized by keywords instead of only by date and folders. The tags can be edited through the Windows Photo Gallery and is persisted in the image.

Microsoft Windows Vista contains Windows Media Center (in Home Premium and Ultimate) which is a great upate from the Windows XP Media Center Edition. Finally the user interface is taking advantage of widescreen and the navigation is faster and smoother. But I think one big thing is still missing in the Media Center interface - editing, sorting and searching pictures using metadata; today you can sort them on date taken! I would find it more useful to search for all images containg images of my family, my vacation in Spain or winter images from our summer house.

For me this second quarter of 2006 has been so interesting with all these beta and CTP products from Microsoft. The summer will be a long wait for the Release Candidates and the autumn a huge and shaky wait for the gold products. Here is a short summary of what i think so far; **Microsoft Expression Graphics Designer**An interesting product which I have big hopes for, I really like, and have just adjusted, to the vector way of doing my graphics.

Ed Bott has put together a nice collection of screenshots and descriptions of functions and the interface of Windows Vista beta 2, in his article Vista Beta 2, up close and personal.. Check it out if you don’t have time to install beta 2…

Microsoft announced at WinHEC 2006 that Windows Vista Beta 2 is available for MSDN and TechNet subscribers. The beta will be more broadly available through the Windows Vista Customer Preview Program in the next few weeks. The timeline is still November 2006 for business and January 2007 for consumers. You can find some more information about the release in this Fact Sheet. Go to the Windows Vista Get Ready site to check if you are ready for Windows Vista. You can find the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor program there to test if your Windows XP supports Vista.