My Windows Vista Experience – a developer’s story
Author: Richard Costall (MVP, MCSD.NET)
Contents
They say every cloud has a silver lining, but could installing Windows Vista Release
Candidate 1 on my laptop be that ‘silver lining’ or a dark cloud which hangs over,
or just hangs it?
I’d been very pleased with my Dell Inspiron 6400 (60GB HDD and 1.5GB memory), which
I’d bought around 6 months ago. Presentations were becoming more frequent and a
laptop had become a necessity. I had also moved all the NxtGenUG (The Next Generation
User Group) website development environment onto the laptop and was becoming more
and more dependant on it as a machine.
That sinking feeling
Anybody who has been through it knows the feeling you get when you start up your
machine and you get the blue screen of death! You keep restarting it expecting it
to just be okay the next time. Even in safe mode my laptop would not boot, nor would
it let me repair my XP installation. I did have a fairly recent backup but that
was not the problem, it was just the inconvenience. I had around a day and a half
of rework on the NxtGenUG site and a couple of presentations to edit.
The technical services department where I worked ran many diagnostics, all of which
found no issues with the hardware and I was left facing a reinstall. It was that
night I attended a MSDN event down at Thames Valley Park and came across a ‘swag’
table covered with Vista Release Candidate 1 DVD’s – build 5600 – was this fate?
In for a penny
I’d been interested in Windows Vista ever since I had installed the PDC 2003 build
of Longhorn on a spare machine and it had certainly been through a few changes since
then. The glass effect looked excellent, the speech recognition was interesting
and the search looked to make life so much easier. So I decided Windows Vista RC1
it was – out of the case came the DVD and into the drive.
Initially I did an upgrade on the off chance of salvaging the missing code from
the NxtGenUG site. The upgrade rattled through in 45 minutes and there it was, I
had Windows Vista. Not only did I have Windows Vista, but also Glass and even Flip3D!
Some of the code for the NxtGenUG website was missing, maybe I’d been hibernating
my machine too much. I took the brave step of reformatting and performing a clean
install.
I partitioned and formatted the drives and then kicked off the install of Windows
Vista RC1 Another 45 minutes and Glass was back – the machine was also running really
quick. RC1 has got some significant performance gains in it over previous builds.
Cutting the ribbon
The next step was to reinstall office and what better than Office 2007 Beta 2 (again
obtained from a Microsoft MSDN event). The install of Office 2007 Beta 2 on Windows
Vista does require a 490MB download of the Beta 2 Technical refresh. It was a good
job that the wireless ‘just worked’ out of the box on Windows Vista. Office 2007,
The 2007 Microsoft Office System boasts an incredible array of new features. The
first and most obvious is the ribbon bar - a whole new user interface. Many features
in the Office 2003 products were overlooked or just too difficult to find, the ribbon
bar provides a context sensitive menu. You may initially not like the look of it,
but stick with it, you will soon get the hang of using it and you’ll be able to
create better looking, richer documents, PowerPoint presentations and Excel spreadsheets
because of it.
Experimenting with the current Office products (97/2003) is very much a click, look
and then undo experience. With Office 2007 however, you have the ‘Live Preview’,
which changes the document as you hover the mouse over functionality such as changing
a font, the colour of an object or even a theme for a PowerPoint presentation. You
can hover as much as you like until you decide, at which point click and the jobs
done. Give the undo button the day off!
You can also now create really professional looking PowerPoint slides without having
to have a degree in graphic design; bullet points can be banished by being easily
converted into SmartArt
Sound Check… Testing One Two Three
My audio was not working for some reason, and a driver download still didn’t resolve
that. I did discover though that using a headset, allowed me to both record and
receive audio. So maybe it is just the speakers that are missing a trick. I am sure
this will be resolved for release. The headset was to take my Windows Vista experience
to another dimension, but more on that later.
At the time of installing Visual Studio 2005 I hadn’t read all the blogs about compatibility
– I’d assumed Microsoft’s flagship development product would just work. Visual Studio
2005 installed seamlessly onto Windows Vista, so it was time to start it up and
check for compatibility.
If your names not on the list you are not coming in!
Windows Vista has a new security modal know as UAC (User Access Control). I’ve always
wanted to be able to run as a non-administrator on my XP machine, but never really
had the time to go through the pain. With Windows Vista, (via UAC) you get this
experience out of the box. Any task which requires an administrator privilege will
prompt you for the administrator password, even if you are an administrator; you
still need to move up a level to perform such tasks.
Simple tasks such as changing the time on the clock will ask you for permission
to continue. Buttons or applications which require this level of access will usually
be accompanied by the shield icon to highlight the requirement for escalated privileges.
As a web developer, my Visual Studio needs to talk to IIS. This was the first pit
I fell into as Visual Studio told me it could not access the IIS Metabase. To run
an application as an administrator you can right click and select ‘Run as Administrator’.
When you get fed up with forgetting this every time, you can right click on the
application, select properties and then choose the Compatibility tab. Here you will
find a privilege level checkbox for ‘run this program as an administrator’. Yes
you still get the prompt every time, but now I am beginning to feel reassured that
my environment is a lot more secure than it was when running as an administrator
under Windows XP. The visual studio 2005 icon also has the shield overlaid onto
it.
Fig1: The compatibility tab for file properties
With Windows Vista, comes IIS7.0, which also looks radically different to older
versions of Microsoft’s Web Server. I had to install some additional components,
namely the IIS6 management compatibility tools, which I discovered on a blog entry
by Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie.
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/09/19/Tip_2F00_Trick_3A00_-Using-IIS7-on-Vista-with-VS-2005.aspx
I was now able to create a new web-site within IIS, but I could not run it. I found
that I had to change the Application Advanced Settings option to be the Classic
.NET AppPool – Classic ASP.NET! Well I suppose this is Windows Vista.
Fig 2: The Classic .NET AppPool
I could now build and run my web application under Windows Vista, I did this a few
times without any pain and then on the third build – Visual Studio 2005 reported
the following error.
ASP.NET runtime error: Attempted to read or write protected memory.
This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt
I could not get rid of this error without shutting down and restarting Visual Studio
2005. The error would then disappear for a few builds and then return. Yeah, it’s
kind of annoying, but I have previously done a lot of development under beta software
so I am fairly used to the build/shutdown/restart development cycle. This is my
main Windows Vista problem which causes me pain.
One of the great features of ASP.NET 2.0 is pre-compilation, which allows you to
build the web site before deployment. Pre-compiling the site can be performed from
the Visual Studio 2005 command prompt – another application which I needed to run
as an administrator, as this also needs to access the IIS metabase.
Sniff out the RSS feeds
Everywhere you look, you find something that is new under Windows Vista. Internet
Explorer 7 gives us tabbed browsing, improved layout, zoom facility, vastly improved
printing layout and the ability to detect and subscribe to RSS feeds. Adding a simple
tag to your web page allows Internet Explorer 7 (and other browsers) to auto detect
RSS feeds on the site. With the NxtGenUG user group site it was simply a matter
of adding it to the master page.
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="NxtGenUG News" href="RSS/RSSNews.aspx" />
I was able to rework the changes which my laptop had lost, fairly quickly as my
Lacie external hard drive worked wonderfully under Windows Vista and also thanks
to Lutz Roeder’s Reflector for being able to reverse engineer compiled assemblies
back into .NET code. Two days lost development was reworked in an hour and I was
back in business.
Where did my disk space go?
After a period of about 3 weeks with life under Windows Vista I was surprised, and
worried, to see my free disk space on the system drive had dropped from 5.5GB to
900MB. Panic ensued. At this rate I would be out of disk space by the end of the
week – but where had it gone?
Running the disk cleanup tool yielded the solution; The Windows Vista error reporting
system had queued up all my Visual Studio errors for submission and was holding
over 4GB of disk space. A quick analysis determined the best option was to delete
these files as sending 4GB over wireless was not a great idea.
Fig3: The Error reporting usage down to a respectable 73MB
Hopefully Windows Vista will have some intelligence over how much free space it
will use to hold error reporting information and also that the storage location
is configurable by the user.
Start Listening
Fig 4: Speech Recognition takes a nap.
As I tried to discover why the audio was not working, I connected up my USB headset,
through which both output and input of sound worked correctly. Speech Recognition
in Windows Vista is a pleasure to work with, sure it doesn’t always get it right,
but I was able to sit back and work with applications, such as Notepad, Purble Place
(a new Windows Vista game for children), Word 2007 and use the new Search facility
without any prior training.
Search is another great addition to Windows Vista. It’s baked into the operating
system and is context sensitive. Search within the control panel will return information
on control panel activities, such as adding users or updating device drivers. Search
from the start button will search emails, RSS feeds, documents, media and applications.
Tags can be added to your images and videos, and when used in conjunction with the
speech recognition I was able to view my images by saying “Start, Florida, Img_2176”
and then “next” to advance through all the pictures.
If the speech recogniser ever gets confused about which application to run the user
is prompted with a dialog box. For example consider “Run Explorer” as a command.
Fig5: Speech recognition – pick a program
Conclusion
There is a lot to Windows Vista and each time I use it I find something new. My
only real annoyances are the errors that Visual Studio 2005 generates when building
my web application and the resultant disk space consuming memory dump.
I no longer use Start and All Programs to find applications. I just type in the
first few letters of the application, hit return and away we go. My desktop is no
longer cluttered up with those hard to find applications, documents and shortcuts.
Search finds all those for me.
Talking to my laptop could be seen as the first stage of madness. Perhaps I should
have done the whole article, and not just this last paragraph using speech recognition.
A sign of a good operating system is not wanting to return to an older version.
So will I be reinstalling XP on my laptop – No way! Leave my new friend alone.
Stop Listening.
About Richard Costall
Richard Costall (MVP, MCSD.NET) has over 19 years development experience and works
for 1st Software, a Microsoft Gold Partner, and the UK's leading software solution
for Financial Adviser and Intermediaries, designing and implementing IFA applications
in the financial services sector. Previously specializing in VB, XML/XSLT, COM,
ASP and MSMQ, Richard now lives and breathes the awesome world of .Net and in particular
ASP.NET (including 2.0) Richard spent 5 1/2 years as the Midlands regional coordinator
for VBUG (Visual Basic User Group) before co-founding NxtGenUG, the innovative UK
user group for Microsoft Technologies. Richard has written articles for publications
such as ASP.NET Pro and International Developer Magazines and also co-authered the
Apress title Professional MSMQ. He speaks a local user groups, Microsoft Conferences/Product
launches, TechED and the hugely successful DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper Events. When
not in .Net land, Richard enjoys relaxing at home with his wife and two sons, playing
on the XBOX 360 or ultimately jetting off to Walt Disney World, Florida, for a trip
on the Tower of Terror.
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