@ Head : Windows Server 2008

Registered Organization on 64 bit

bill — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 02:15:54 GMT

When I’ve started new Visual Studio projects on my Vista x64 box, the Company field would always show up as “Microsoft”… somewhat presumptuous and definitely annoying. At first I thought the problem was with the templates, but upon inspection they had the correct template parameters, $registeredorganization$. A quick look in my registry and those keys looked right; then it dawned on me. Visual Studio runs as a 32 bit process, not 64, so it effectively looks in :

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion

And that’s the solution. In there RegisteredOrganization was set to “Microsoft”. Changing that to your organization’s name solves the template issue.

Running SQL 2008 Upgrade Advisor

bill — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 13:23:48 GMT

I downloaded the SQL 2008 Upgrade Advisor. When I tried to install it I got this :

It says a “Windows service pack” , yet Windows Update tells me my system is up to date. Well it might help if I read the download’s system requirements ;) What I needed to do was install windows Installer 4.5

Strange it isn’t listed on Windows Update/

Text preview filters for Vista|Windows 2008

bill — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 05:41:20 GMT

I really like the preview pane in explorer in Vista, but it doesn’t have previews for a lot of text based files registered. You can of course write your own or download and install some other preview filters, but personally I find a text preview is all I generally need. So I re-use the existing Text preview handler and apply it to a range of file types including batch files, .bat, xml, .reg files, .vb and .cs files etc. Just copy and run the following .reg file

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.xml\ShellEx\{8895b1c6-b41f-4c1c-a562-0d564250836f}]
@="{1531d583-8375-4d3f-b5fb-d23bbd169f22}"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.reg\ShellEx\{8895b1c6-b41f-4c1c-a562-0d564250836f}]
@="{1531d583-8375-4d3f-b5fb-d23bbd169f22}"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.cmd\ShellEx\{8895b1c6-b41f-4c1c-a562-0d564250836f}]
@="{1531d583-8375-4d3f-b5fb-d23bbd169f22}"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.bat\ShellEx\{8895b1c6-b41f-4c1c-a562-0d564250836f}]
@="{1531d583-8375-4d3f-b5fb-d23bbd169f22}"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.VBS\ShellEx\{8895b1c6-b41f-4c1c-a562-0d564250836f}]
@="{1531d583-8375-4d3f-b5fb-d23bbd169f22}"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.vb\ShellEx\{8895b1c6-b41f-4c1c-a562-0d564250836f}]
@="{1531d583-8375-4d3f-b5fb-d23bbd169f22}"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.vbproj\ShellEx\{8895b1c6-b41f-4c1c-a562-0d564250836f}]
@="{1531d583-8375-4d3f-b5fb-d23bbd169f22}"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.cs\ShellEx\{8895b1c6-b41f-4c1c-a562-0d564250836f}]
@="{1531d583-8375-4d3f-b5fb-d23bbd169f22}"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.csproj\ShellEx\{8895b1c6-b41f-4c1c-a562-0d564250836f}]
@="{1531d583-8375-4d3f-b5fb-d23bbd169f22}"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.sln\ShellEx\{8895b1c6-b41f-4c1c-a562-0d564250836f}]
@="{1531d583-8375-4d3f-b5fb-d23bbd169f22}"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.snippet\ShellEx\{8895b1c6-b41f-4c1c-a562-0d564250836f}]
@="{1531d583-8375-4d3f-b5fb-d23bbd169f22}"

Windows 2008 (and Vista) f'ugly

bill — Sat, 17 May 2008 08:35:19 GMT

I turn off Aero and themes, and all is good except for the start menu shut down and log-off icons which are just incredibly ugly:

Notice the search icon is showed in colour, but the shut down and log-off are some crappy black and white images. What the f is up with that ?

Hyper-V impressions

bill — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 02:42:00 GMT

Over the weekend I switched my main machine to Windows 2008 and started playing with Hyper-V. I updated the RAM and threw in another hard-drive (man that stuff is so cheap at present !). I've got both Vista and Windows 2008 (different drives) on the machine, and even though Windows 2008 and Vista are the same kernel, Windows 2008 feels noticeably faster.. plus it has hyper-V. (note: Vista 32 bit, 2008 is 64 bit so there may be some difference there)

Hyper-V comes with a nice console (a bit like VM Ware <g>). It relies on system level drivers as well as a few services. The services you can turn off until needed, but the drivers you can't. And this causes the first point of angst for me... Sleep gets disabled.

Hyper-V's drivers disable Sleep for the main machine. You can't change this or toggle it which seems incredibly silly. Surely if you aren't running Hyper-V, your system should have it's natural capabilities in tact. At present the only work around is to install and uninstall the Hyper-V role (you don't loose your settings when doing this thankfully !), but this requires a reboot, and a fair few minutes. I really don't understand why the Hyper-V team didn't at least make it switch-able when Hyper-V is not running. Until they fix it, I think they should be made to walk/run to work rather than drive to make up for the carbon credits they are costing the world ;)

The next annoyance was XP had to be XP SP3 for the hyper-V extension to be installed which was required to get the network running. Of course without the network I couldn't download the SP3 onto the virtual machine (VM), nor could I do a network share etc. Hyper-V doesn't have folder sharing like VPC, and doesn't support removable devices like USB keys. So the only option I had was to burn a DVD (or create an ISO and mount that). This just seems incredibly silly. Getting files onto and off a Hyper-V machine is a major pain. It would be nice if it was like a physical machine where you can just plug in a USB drive

Finally, the display adapter for the VMs kind of sucks. It's a "Microsoft VMBus Video Device", which has a whopping 4MB memory ;) Obviously this means Aero doesn't work, and for testing any graphics intensive (or playful) application, Hyper-V won't do the job.

Other than that, hyper-V seems good. For development testing other than graphicic intensive applications, the big deal breaker is disabling sleep