Visual Studio 2010

Having an MSDN subscription I’ve been lucky enough to get Visual Studio 2010 a couple of days early. I’ve installed it happily on my Vista installation (main dev box) and it runs faster (IMHO) than VS2008 does, so I’m dead chuffed!

I then tried installing it on my Win 7 installation (dev laptop), but the damn things always bombs out with the following dialog when the progress bar completes

on this screen

I’ve tried disabling Anti Virus (AVG), removing the external HD it was running from and running it locally, I’ve tried running it from the local HD in CloneDrive as opposed to from the external HD, I’ve tried removing CloneDrive and I’ve even copied the contents of the ISO to a local folder and run it that way. But still no joy.

I thought I’d be smart and check the event logs, but nope, they just said it had completed successfully :P Oddly enough Professional works...

Ah well, if anyone else has any ideas as to why this might have happened I’m open to suggestions :)

Live Messenger and Windows 7

I installed Live Writer today so i didn’t need to be online to blog, especially now that I’m writing the WF 4.0 stuff and could well be commuting again soon.

As part of the Live Writer you get a whole host of tools you can also I install, most of which I passed on except for the Office tools and Messenger. I’m glad I did!

The new messenger has disappeared from the system tray and now lives full time in the Task Bar. Here’s the new icon:

and when I become busy, the little green circle goes red.

As you’d expect with apps designed for Windows 7 it has a new menu that you can open from the Task Bar. This is basically all the options you had on the menu from the System Tray.

The final change I really liked, is a change in how the conversations are organised. It's now grouped by the speaker, so if you're doing all the talking, your bits are all grouped together.

I know it’s a lot of little changes, but somehow it improved the whole experience :) It’s also nice to see apps beginning to move away from living in the System Tray, as I think far too many apps end up living in the System Tray.

Windows 7 and Visual Studio 2008

I've now been using Windows 7 Beta since release to MSDN subscribers, and am pretty chuffed with it. The new Taskbar is a joy to use, and the whole thing is very stable :)

I've only one niggle with it and that is that when I'm trying to add 3rd party controls to Visual Studio via the browse assemblies dialog, VS2008 has a think, throws a silent fit and disappears. This doesnt happen when adding references.

Has anyone else had experience of this? I shall do some digging and see if I can isolate it a bit more :)

Windows 7 a month and a half in

I've now been playing with Windows 7 on my Dev laptop for the last month and a half and can't complain. I was initially a little dubious at putting an Alpha on a live box, but I've had no problems.

So what has this given me over Vista? At this stage, no huge UI differences apart from my new friend the Lighthouse down in the system tray

This rather natty little chap hides notifications and the up arrow to it's left hides icons, so you no longer have icons a mile long and continual notifications poppng up. You have the ability to decide which icons are displayed in the system tray or hidden behind the up arrow, as well as to what level notifications are displays. Top stuff :)

Another cool feature is you can now connect to WiFi networks that don't broadcast their name, which you couldn't do with XP or Vista (AFAIK).

And lastly we've got the ability to mount Virtual HDs, which means I've been able to share drives between the Virtual PC and the actual box when I've needed to.

Apart from that a lot of the cool new features aren't available until the Beta, but you can use the Blue Badge unlocking feature to get at unfinsihed versions. A friend did it on a virtual machine, but the features weren't that stable so I gave it a miss.

I've also installed AVG Anti Virus and haven't had any problems with it, shame on you McAfee!

Windows 7, Skype and McAfee

Today I tried reinstalling McAfee anti virus to be told that Windows 7 isn't supported by it, that was a quick and easy trial.

Additonally I ran into another incompatibility, Skype starts up quite happily and then quits after a random time period. As always no logs, or event entries :P

UPDATE 9th Jan 2009

I just tried Mcafee on the Beta build of Windows 7, and unsurprisingly it didn't work either :)

Windows 7 and Windows Update

So I've been trying to figure out why Windows Update refuses to work on my Laptop, which was the cause of the whole VHD mouting issue.

So first off, why can't it connect to the internet? What else was effected by this problem? Did this affect all programs? Well no, first off Firefox, IE, Outlook and Skype were connecting quite happily. But Live Messenger wasn't. This implied to me that it was down to some sort of configuration, as why would somethings get out onto the internet as opposed to others?

I opened up McAfee Security centre, but this opened in a white window and didn't do anything else. That was odd, so I checked Windows Firewall and this was on too. So in theory Windows Firewall should be controlling connections in and out, and is configured by default to include rules for both Messenger and Update. I turned Windows Firewall off and tried update and messenger again. Still no joy. Odd, ok so lets uninstall McAffe. One uninstallation and restart later and I'm connecting to Windows Update and Messenger.

So it looks like McAfee being installed before the upgrade had upset things somehow. I'll try reinstalling McAfee later on in the week and report back if it breaks again.

Windows 7 and the VHD mounting bug

As previously posted, I've upgraded my Dev laptop to run Windows 7 M3. The main reason for this was that I wanted to be able to mount Virtual Hard Disks as actual drives. But after the upgrade from Vista I was getting an error message whenever I tried to mount a VHD:


I contacted the Windows 7 team and they were intrigued. It turns out that it isn't actually a problem with the VHD functionality, but instead a driver hasn't been installed correctly from Windows Update. The guys were saying it looked very much like the installation had begun for this driver, then stopped and cancelled for some reason.

So they got me to check out my Device Manager and I was missing the Microsoft VHD driver under Storage Devices, but had 2 unknown devices under base devices. I was instructed to delete said unknowns and try mounting another VHD. This time a new Device appeared under Base Devices called Microsoft ISO VHD something (I forget the last bit, it was another acronym). Ok so this is an improvement but still not right, according to the Microsoft guys. So next we updated the driver for this new device manually, as Windows Update wasn't connecting for some reason. After going to Disk Drives and selecting the only compatible device, a Microsoft VHD driver, we installed it and hey presto I now have the rather sexy functionality of being able to mount VHDs :)

One point to note, is that VHDs do not stay mounted after a restart or shutdown of the system.

So thanks to the guys over on the Windows 7 team, you rock! :)

Windows 7 and WF 4.0

I've now had Windows 7 on my box since Sunday and although i don't have some of the nicer features coming in the Beta (the improved Taskbar and dockable Apps) I'm enjoying the features I've got to play with.

I've hit a problem with the Virtual Hard Disk mounting, where every time I try mounting a VHD file I get told that no provider is available. Here's a piccy of the image.


I've contacted the Windows 7 team (who are VERY helpful) and have identified that is was a problem with my upgrade from Vista as a driver didn't install properly. I haven't got the solution yet, as I'm currently helping the team understand why the installation didn't work. Once we know why it failed, I'll get the solution and I'll post if here. So if you've upgraded from Vista and VHD mounting isn't working and you're getting the same message as me, stay tuned as the solution will be up soon!

So on Windows 7 I'm running the VPC of the WF 4.0. I've run the first 3 labs so far and it's looking damn good. Labs 1 to 3 are:

1. Your first workflow
2. DB interaction
3. Your first WCF hosted Workflow

The new WPF designer is a lot friendlier to use than the original. I particular like that:

You now longer have to jump to code in order to setup variables in the Workflow


And Arguments :)


You can set variables on the activities (a lot friendlier than continually using the Properties pane)


and of course being a WPF based designer, you can now zoom in :)


I've found a few issues so far which I'm about to email in, but here they are in case you're interested in such things:

1. Error messages for activties aren't modal

2. Doing HOL 3, adding Rule called "If DiscountPoints <>

1. Misspelt variable in condition
2. Corrected spelling
3. Finished setting up rest of rule
4. Noticed the error provider against the "Condition" stating the "Name 'DiscountPoint' is not declared".
5. This was odd as I had corrected this on the activity
6. Clicked the property, click a different property. The incorrect value from condition was then used to update the condition on the activity
7. Correct in the property, click out and the activity was updated3. No feedback from interaction with bread crumbs on WF designer.

3. I would expect highlighting of the word I'm over, or something to show it can be used.

4. WCFTestClient freezes at approx 50% when adding a service that contains an error

5. Compiler didn't pick up error in Assign activity when a variable that didn't exist was used

Whats next? Well I'll be looking at doing a project and putting the walkthough on this blog and looking at writing a session on WF 4.0. Maybe even a comparison with 3.0/3.5 :) Stay tuned for my further adventures in WF and possibly dates for a WF 4.0 session!

Regions and PDC Hard Disks

I've just started to get my teeth into the Hard Disks we were given at PDC. So the obvious first port of call is the Wf 4.0 stuff I saw demoed.

Virtual Image runs up, good stuff. Put the password in, nope. Hmmm, maybe the caps is on, try again, nope. Realise I'm using a Virtual Image setup for Americans, so try the " key, and we're in :)

I'm pleased to say all the Virtual Labs are included on the Virtual Image, so will be cracking through them and posting stuff about it here :)

I've also installed the M3 release of Windows 7 on my laptop as the main operating system. I know, brave or stupid, you decide ;) The main reason is that I want to take advantage of the ability to mount VHD as actual drives. I'll report back on my progress with that too...