Planet SCM

For the record, I like Windows Vista.  However, for those of us who remember the Vista beta program and even early days of running Windows Vista it wasn’t always fun – largely due to the driver support but there were plenty of bugs to avoid even in the later betas. When I purchased my MSI Wind (OEM rebadged as an Advent 4211 here in the UK) XP was pre-installed.  I remember when I picked up my Wind from the local computer store the salesman tried to sell me on the fact that it came with XP rather than Vista which is not a good sign of Vista’s reputation with consumers.  That said, XP didn’t last long on my Wind before Vista replaced it.  The stock Wind runs a 1.6 Ghz Intel Atom processor on the Intel 945GSE chipset.  As part of the initial batch of Winds, mine happily has the Synaptics touchpad.  One of the many things I like about the Wind is that it is end-user upgradeable, but the only addition I have made was to upgrade it to 2Gb RAM as the stock Western Digital Scorpio 120GB hard drive is a pretty good one for a budget netbook.

Remembering the early days of the Vista beta program, I had to contrast this with the absolute delight that installing and running the PDC build (build 6801) of Windows 7 has been on this diminutive device.  For a start stable drivers for the Wind were all available from Windows Update.  To get them I first had to install the Realtek WiFi driver for Vista by changing the compatibility settings to trick the installer into thinking I was running Vista RTM.  But once I had an internet connection, Windows Update found updated drivers for the graphics card, Wifi, Ethernet and even the SD card reader.  Everything on the device appears to be working, including bluetooth and the built in webcam.

I then ran the “blue-badge” unlock hack from Rafael Rivera Jr because I wanted some of the shiny eye-candy showed off on stage at PDC2008 that is not active in the standard 6801 build.  Note that after running the hack, I had to manually set the security permissions on the following files that the tool modifies to grant the “Users” group read permissions – but this was just because of my hackery and because I want the device to support multiple users, not something that a normal user would have to do.

• \Windows\Explorer.exe
• \Windows\System32\wisptis.exe
• \Windows\System32\ieframe.dll
• \Windows\System32\shell32.dll
• \Windows\System32\stobject.dll
• \Windows\System32\TabletPC.cpl
• \Windows\System32\themecpl.dll
• \Windows\System32\themeui.dll
• \Windows\System32\powercfg.cpl

Then I was up and running, and ready for the ultimate test – leaving the laptop on the kitchen table for my wife to pick up and use.  I warned her that I’d been “messing about” with the laptop – but she logged in, checked her mail (using the shortcut to the Windows Live Mail application in the fancy new taskbar) and did her online banking using IE8 (again from the pinned shortcut in the new taskbar).  All without issues.  Windows 7 = Passed. It is now the official operating system on my netbook.

Resume from standby is noticeably faster in Windows 7, and general system usage is also a lot snappier than Vista on this underpowered device.  Not sure what I think to the new “Libraries” but at first pass I class them as “not too annoying”. 

I am liking many of the new features in Windows 7.  “Aero snaps” (where you can drag a window to the top of the screen to maximize or to the left and right) is good, the new magnification tool (press Win and “+” to zoom in, Win and “-“ to zoom out) will replace ZoomIt as the tool I use during on-stage demos and it was nice to see that the calculator has had a revamp (programmer mode will now be my personal mode of choice for it).

Despite all the additional stuff, what is really nice about Windows 7 is what they have taken away.  The overall experience is just less noisy than before.

I am very excited to see how useable this very early build is and what the later builds, betas and eventual release of Windows 7 will bring.  Windows 7 is looking to be exactly what Microsoft need – it will probably be known as “the release that Vista should have been” which is a little unfair as Vista obviously laid down a lot of the ground work in terms of architecture.  That said, at this early stage it looks like Windows 7 is going to be a very popular release.

I am currently playing with SP1 of VSTS 2008 and TFS 2008 in a Windows Server 2008 VMWare instance I have.   Whenever I created this particular instance I kept the disk space at 16Gb which is normally plenty for these play instances but after installing the service pack of VSTS my disk space was getting low.

I thought I would try extending the size of my virtual disk and it was suprising easy.

1. First, I had to take a fill clone my image to remove the snapshot history.
2. The on the new clone's disk I executed the following command:
   

   "C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Workstation\vmware-vdiskmanager.exe" -x 32Gb win2008-000004-cl1.vmdk

3. This extended the disk size, now I need to extend the size of the partition.  Boot up the virtual Windows 2008 server, right click on "My Computer" and select "Manage".  Go To Storage, Disk Management and then right click on the C: partition and select Extend to extend the partition the the size of the remaining disk.

Tada.  No third party tools (like Partition Magic etc) needed.

sssss

I am currently playing with SP1 of VSTS 2008 and TFS 2008 in a Windows Server 2008 VMWare instance I have.   Whenever I created this particular instance I kept the disk space at 16Gb which is normally plenty for these play instances but after installing the service pack of VSTS my disk space was getting low.

I thought I would try extending the size of my virtual disk and it was suprising easy.

1. First, I had to take a fill clone my image to remove the snapshot history.
2. The on the new clone's disk I executed the following command:
   

   "C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Workstation\vmware-vdiskmanager.exe" -x 32Gb win2008-000004-cl1.vmdk

3. This extended the disk size, now I need to extend the size of the partition.  Boot up the virtual Windows 2008 server, right click on "My Computer" and select "Manage".  Go To Storage, Disk Management and then right click on the C: partition and select Extend to extend the partition the the size of the remaining disk.

Tada.  No third party tools (like Partition Magic etc) needed.

Yesterday, Version 2.0 of the Virtual Machine Additions for Linux were released on the Microsoft Download Center.  Officially, this provides addition support for Virtual Server 2005 SP1, however I have read reports from the beta program suggesting they may also work under Virtual PC (albeit unsupported).  The additions are for RedHat and SuSE based Linux distributions.  I tried converting the supplied RPM files into .DEB files for installation in Ubuntu, but the scripts would then get installed specifically test for being installed on a Debian distribution and fail early.  If I was feeling adventurous I'd remove these checks and see what happened - but my Linux knowledge is a little sketchy so I'll stick with VMWare for now for heavy duty Ubuntu use until I read about someone clever getting them up and running.

Skype seems to have been having trouble this morning.  At first I thought it was a set of Windows Vista Updates I'd applied - but when the problem started affecting my hardware based Skype phone as well my suspicions went to my ISP.  I was thinking that they were doing some traffic shaping or something to Skype traffic.  Finally, after talking with a fellow Skype user (over an old fashioned POTS line) who was also having login problems I figured it must be Skype itself - and turns out it is.  The fault is apparently "software related" and they did some planned maintenance yesterday - coincidence?

Funny how long it took me to realize it was Skype to blame, must show how reliable the service has been so far.  Interestingly, when I called my ISP (Nildram) to ask if they'd did any traffic shaping they said that they did but that VoIP, Skype, and VPN traffic are all prioritized on my line during working hours.  That's actually quite reassuring and makes me like Nildram even more.

Update:  Skype is back up and running, with a few details posted as to what caused the problem.  Interestingly they are spinning it as that the software fault on Skype's servers was triggered by lots of Windows computers rebooting for patch Tuesday - not sure what I think about that.

This took me a while to figure out, so I am writing down here to help me remember later.  It may also be useful if you are playing with Gmail at all (BTW, the spam filtering on Gmail is very good).

To mark all mail as read:-

1. In the search box, type "is:unread"
2. In the select area press "All"
3. A link will appear that says "Select all conversations that match this search", press it
4. From the drop down, select "Mark All as Read".

Took me a while to do something that is usually option away on a context menu in most rich client mail reading applications, but this is mainly because I had thousands of unread mails to mark and so that went off the page.

The Vista Aero interface is awesome - but capturing that beauty has always been hard for me.  All that changed this morning when Jeff Atwood put me on to an awesome tool by Kenny Kerr. Kenny Kerr's Windows Clippings 1.5 is simply the best capture tool for Windows Vista that I have used.  I am probably the last person in the world to hear about it, but on the off-chance that I am the second to last, here are some of the things I like and why you should use it:-

1. It can capture shadows, transparency etc really well.  However, it can magically take out all the cruft that you get from background windows coming through.
2. When you are doing a screen capture - the effect that is used while you are selecting the windows is suitably beautiful for a capture tool that takes such nice pictures.
3. Screen shots are saved in a file name using the window name of the application you were taking a screenshot of.

It does one thing and does it really, really well.  Thanks Jeff for the top tip!  For a little user-guide on how to use Kenny's excellent tool see his post (with pretty pictures) here.

I'm loving Windows Vista RTM.  I'm actually considering moving my main development PC over - just need to be certain that everything I use will work just fine - in the meantime, I'll stick with it running from my Core Duo based Mac Mini.  Today, I stumbled over a great blog from Tim Sneath, a Windows Vista Evangelist.  He has a series of "Windows Vista Secret's" that are well worth subscribing to.  One of the things I've found when using Vista is that my hands can stay on the keyboard much more - making me significantly faster to navigate around the system.  I was particularly please to read his Windows Vista Secret #10: Open and Elevated Command Prompt in Six Keystrokes.

The "trick" in the tip is that if you press Ctrl+Shift+Enter on a command in the search bar, it will run that command with Admin rights - therefore to run a command shell as admin Tim recommends you do "Win key; type cmd; press Ctrl+Shift+Enter; and then hit Alt+C to confirm the elevation prompt". But you can also use the Ctrl+Shift+Enter shortcut to fire up Notepad as admin and then have the ability to edit your hosts file etc.

Personally, I have a shortcut to Cmd that opens it up with Admin rights and a different background colour (called "Admin Console") - that way I can get to an admin console by typing "a" at the search bar and the console is always a different colour so I remember which console is the admin one.  To do that, copy the "Command Prompt" shortcut from the Accessories group in Program Files, rename as "Admin Console" or whatever you want.  Go to the "Shortcut" tab and select "Advanced...", then check the "Run as administrator" box.  Press Ok, and then press Apply.  Finally you can go to the Colors tab and edit the background colour - I use the dark red to signify danger.

On the off chance that you read my blog and not Scott Hanselman's (shame on you) then I wanted to draw your attention to some invaluable registry tweaks he just posted - especially if you've been forced into installing Windows Desktop Search 3.0 to enable Outlook Instant Search - but also if you are a developer.

The first is how to make the normal windows search the default again after installing Windows Desktop Search, the second is how to get the full text search to search through *every* file (such as .cs or .java ones).  The latter tip is one I always do when I build a new Windows box, but the former is a new annoyance I was struggling with.  I can see why the new behaviors are the defaults for "regular" users - but it would have been nice if there was a way to change the defaults in the UI without resorting to regedit...

Just as a follow up to my previous post, I was having trouble switching back into Mac OS X once booted into Vista.  As part of the Boot Camp process, Apple allow you to burn a CD containing the Windows XP Drivers and Utilities.  Included is a handy utility to select the default Startup Disk.  Using various tools, I was able to extract the Control Panel extension and install it into Vista.  However, I was unable to get this to work - even when elevated to Administrator - it would always complain about not being able to get Administrative rights.  Reading around the problem a little I think this may be either a Vista security thing or a driver thing (probably the former).  I think pn XP the utility somehow manages to write a variable into the EFI telling it which boot partition to use - whatever mechanism is trys seems to not be working on my installation - but they again I may have just installed it wrong in my attempt to hack around BootCamps "Drivers for XP" installation program that really doesn't work on Vista.

The alternative is to press the (alt) Option key on startup.  However, I have a cheap Belkin KVM that I'm running this through and it didn't seem to work (think it is something to do with the USB keyboard detection).  Thankfully, this tip came to my rescue, by holding the menu key of my Mac Mini's Apple Remote I got the bootloader screen allowing me to select my OS X partition - nice.  Then I booted straight back into Vista, because I really am loving it :-)

I use VMWare a lot.  Not only do I use it for demonstrations of Teamprise, I also use it for day-to-day development and testing (one of the joys of developing a cross platform product that talks to a Microsoft server product).

I work on a laptop most of the time.  It's a Dell Precision M70 with 2Gb Ram, but the hard drive is only 60Gb (I went for speed rather than size).  When I first started running out of space, I ran up a virtual machine over my USB2.0 connection to an external hard drive.  I'd assumed that this was going to be even slower, but much to my surprise it was noticeably faster.

Jeff Atwood has an excellent post over on his Coding Horrors blog this morning explaining why this is so.

The Single Most Important Virtual Machine Performance Tip

If you use virtual machines at all, you should have the single most important virtual machine performance tip committed to heart by now: always run your virtual machines from a separate physical hard drive

Personally, I have a couple of the Seagate 100Gb 5400rpm USB 2.0 Drives as they strike a nice balance between portability, robustness and capacity.  They are also nearly always available when I pop into Best Buy or PC World.  However, the SmartDisk CrossFire drives look pretty good and I just noticed a 7200rpm, 250Gb one on Amazon for £120.  As Jeff's post explains, going for eSATA looks like the way to go in the future - especially a drive enclosure that supports both eSATA and USB.  However, for the meantime, I'll stick with my USB 2.0 only models as they are very portable and are powered by the USB lead.

Well, the benefits of the Live Writer SDK are already coming true for me.  One of my bug-bears with BlogJet was to copy/paste in code samples was pretty tricky.  I ended up evolving a manual process of visiting the excellent CodeHTMLer site to convert into HTML and then pasting the source into BlogJet source view (when pasting Java code I just to tell that CodeHTMLer it was C# and it usually looks great.

I was over at the CodePlex site this morning and noticed that Alexander Concha Abarca has posted a Syntax Highlighting Plug-in for LiveWriter.

Seems to work ok so far, the actual plug-in is very simple as it re-uses a code high-lighting engine from Wilco Bauwer which supports many languages including all the ones I may want to talk about such as C#, Java, XML, Perl, Ruby, Python, PHP, SQL, Visual Basic, ASP.NET and even Fortran (if I wanted to post my highly fascinating university projects).

On Rob's recommendation, I've installed Windows Live Writer today.  Up until now I've written most of my blog posts in BlogJet - however so far I'm liking Windows Live Writer and may well stick to it.  The thing that I like the most is all the features I use from BlogJet are here (Moveable Type support, image upload, spell checking etc) - but Windows Live Writer also picks up the stylesheets from your blog template and applies them while you are editing - very nice.

The final (and possibly the deal-clincher for me) is the plug-in model and Live Writer SDK.  I love BlogJet, but there were a few things that I wanted it to do that it didn't.  By providing an SDK it means I'll hopefully be able to get Live Writer to do these things.  By providing a plug-in capability they also increase the chance that I won't have to bother :-)

While, there has been plenty of comment on this already, JJ Allaire is on the Live Writer team.  Back in the day, I was a huge fan of Homesite - mainly because it supported the way I created web pages.  You can certainly see the influence in Windows Live Writer - the look and feel is quite similar to Onfolio.

There are a couple of things that would make me like Live Writer more. 

1. Fix the bug that seems to want to try and keep connections alive all the time.  I keep getting an error saying the connection has been dropped.
2. Better HTML code editing support.  I know I'm old school - but I like to dip into my HTML occasionally to do something particular.  Though Live Writer has a "HTML Code" view - it is little more that embedded notepad.  It would be nice to have code highlighting and even nicer to have side-by-side editing (ala Dreamweaver).  Even if full side-by-side is not possible just code highlighting and putting you cursor into the correct place when you go into code view would be great.
3. Auto track-back detection.  Be nice if it would figure out what posts I have linked to and automagically do a trackback.  Most of the time I can't be bothered when I have to figure out the trackback URL manually and paste it in.
4. Squiggly red underline spell check.  (ala Word - spell check as I type)
5. In the Image import - allow *.png along with *.gif and *.jpg. 
6. Allow me to easily control where the images were imported to and what they are called.

But all in all, for an initial beta it is very impressive - especially considering it is free.

I use VMWare a lot.  As we work on a cross-platform client to Team Foundation Server, I not only need to test our client on many operating systems, I also run Team Foundation Server in VMWare to talk to test our client against.  Teamprise Explorer and the Eclipse plug-in use SWT for the UI Layer.  This means that not only is performance great – the client takes on the native look and feel of the host operating system.  However, you do need to test dialogs on those operating systems to make sure they all look ok and size correctly.

Yesterday, I was so busy looking over the Specs of the new Mac Pro that I nearly missed the announcement from VMWare that their Mac-Intel version is on its way.  This means that we can get another one of those shiny Mac Book Pro’s and do a totally stand-alone demonstration of Teamprise talking to a (virtual) Team Foundation Server from Mac, Windows XP, Solaris and Linux all from one laptop.  It will also be a boon for testing as nearly a third of the Teamprise development team work on Macs (both Intel based and PowerPC based G5’s)

Parallels has offered similar functionality on the Mac-Intel platform for a while, however now that VMWare are going to be offering virtualization on the Mac-Intel platform it means that we can re-use our library of VMWare formated virtual PC’s – which will save a lot of setup time.  VMWare are one of those companies that don’t announce things publicly until they are well down the line and pretty solid, so I am hopeful that the beta will be available soon.  If you are interested, you can pre-register for the beta here.  Interestingly (and probably not that surprisingly) Microsoft have announced that they are shelving Virtual PC for the Mac and won’t be unleashing Mac-Intel support on to the public.