With the release of a number of hardware drivers over the last couple of months, I've finally been in a position to upgrade my main dev machine to Vista. Everything has gone remarkably well, with the exception that I was getting very noticeable pauses when listening to audio files in WMP at high CPU loads. Even when I set the priority of WMP up to Highest, the pauses still occurred. I found that the problem was actually the high definition audio codec, and by disabling all enhancements (see screenshot), the pauses have all gone.
The only other problem I'm trying to iron out in a benign crash in explorer.exe that occurs when WMP is minimized to the Taskbar and VS2005 is running under the full admin token. I get a dialog box coming up saying explorer.exe has been terminated and prompting for the selection of a debugger. So far I haven't been able to track down the exact cause...
I do a monthly article for CodeGuru on Visual C++ (
archive here), and
this months article was on the new Crypto API (called Windows Cryptography API: Next Generation (CNG)) in Windows Vista. One of the real benefits of CNG is the support for
National Security Agency (NSA) Suite B algorithms, and the article shows the use of secret exchange through
Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC).
While doing some research for the article, I found a
.NET wrapper for ECC over at Code Project - if you're a .NET developer doing apps that will be deployed on Vista and above, and want to make use on CNG, this wrapper will greatly simplify your interop experiences.