Lou Vega

Windows Mobile RampUp track is now available on MSDN

Lou Vega — Fri, 22 May 2009 10:00:17 GMT

Are you interested in learning about Windows Mobile Application Development from the ground up and looking for some easy-to-use content that helps you get started? We have good news for you. We have just launched the MSDN RampUp track for Windows Mobile Application Development on MSDN.

There's a new Windows Mobile RampUp track available on MSDN

Neat feature with Google Translate

Lou Vega — Wed, 20 May 2009 10:56:39 GMT

Maybe I'm late in noticing this, but it was a pretty handy feature so I though I would mention it.

Recently I was working with some obscure scripts that had comments written in another language. Though I had a pretty good idea what the author had intended just by reading the script logic, I wanted to see what the author's comments might have to add.

I fired up Google Translate and having traveled quite a bit I thought I would guess at what the language was. Then I noticed a choice from the drop down list that said "Detect Language" and thought to myself "Now that's a handy feature!".

I pasted my text in and hit "Translate" and Google's translate tool handily detected the source language (Dutch in this case) and spit out the English translation. Nice!

Just a tip for me about SQL Versions...

Lou Vega — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 11:15:44 GMT

Working on a database project today I got the latest drop from a co-worker to test on our deployment machine. The process had gone on without a hitch for the past few months but today the SQL 2005 database backup file he gave me would not restore on the deployment machine...gave an error during the restore saying it was "INCOMPLETE". A quick check of SQL Server versions using MS KB 321185 showed us that he was on SQL 2005 SP3 and I was on SQL 2005 SP2. Thankfully that 2 minutes worth of checking saved lots of time trying to hunt down a problem that wasn't really there. Hopefully this posted here will save someone else time and trouble too.

Get Fit in February Challenge

Lou Vega — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 05:31:30 GMT

Today begins the Get Fit in February Challenge from Facebook. If you haven't already signed up - check it out while the month is still young and compete against over 100 other geeks for an MSDN subscription and other prizes! :)

Here's my first blog entry concerning the challenge. I'm starting the challenge at 210 lbs...yeah I ended up putting on some of what I lost last year after giving up soda completely. I was down to 195 for a while but I guess the holidays and then not really paying attention let things creep back up on me. So one goal for this challenge is to get back to that weight level again.

I'm also starting up the 100 push ups challenge again - and this time have 4 people in my office plus my neighbor joining me on the challenge. My initial test the other night was 43 - I could have probably done more but just was feeling lazy at that point. Either way it's a good starting point because rather than the full 6 week program I'm going to start off at Week 3 and try to complete it during the month of February!

GCNUG Meeting tonight - 6PM @ Blackbaud

Lou Vega — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 12:51:18 GMT

Just a reminder - GCNUG meeting is tonight @ Blackbaud on Daniel Island. If you haven't already registered, do so here:

http://gcnug-jan2009.eventbrite.com/

Not quite a Fail Whale - just stressed :)

Lou Vega — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 01:15:18 GMT

Twitter got stressed.

Windows 7 installed on a physical machine

Lou Vega — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 13:35:42 GMT

Finally got around to installing Windows 7 on a real machine. Starting to test apps to see which issues I may have with stuff I use every day...so far the biggest thing I found is my video driver defaults to the Windows one. Not a big deal since this machine won't be the one I use Windows 7 with in the future for the final release.

I'm actually posting this via Live Writer...I had seen somewhere people had issues with it possibly, but I'm not having issues with it.

As you can see too, my system rating is pretty horrible but this machine will do for testing. I think I'm gonna image my main laptop and test it under that to see what a different score I can get.

Windows 7 BSOD - how to re-create it for yourself

Lou Vega — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 22:42:49 GMT

The BSOD was caused by a driver compatibility problem between Virtual Clone Drive and Windows 7. I had installed Virtual Clone Drive to see if it could be used to mount ISOs in Windows 7, but not only did it not work in Windows 7, it caused the BSOD of my previous blog post.

So if you want to experience it for yourself, download and install Virtual Clone Drive on your Windows 7 box and see what it does. Fixing it is as easy as uninstalling Virtual Clone Drive.

Note to Microsoft - we (geeks) really want an ISO mount utility as part of Windows 7. Please?

Note to Slysoft - Maybe if Microsoft doesn't put it in Windows 7 you guys could make your software compatible with Windows 7. If you make yours compatible with Windows 7, maybe Microsoft will buy it from you and you can all retire early :)

Windows 7 BSOD - some things never change ;)

Lou Vega — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 22:06:51 GMT

After my previous blog posting asking for the old and familiar "Classic" start menu, it seems as if my VPC of Windows 7 has a sense of humor and obliged me with an old familiar BSOD...my first Windows 7 BSOD!

For all the changes to things over the years with the Windows systems, this is one old standby that hasn't changed a bit.

I ended up going into Windows normally but this process was repeatable and the next time I went to shut down my Windows 7 VPC I got the same BSOD. So it looks as if I have found a bug...though I'm not sure what it is.

Here's Windows 7 running in Safe Mode:

Here's a detail screen of the Event Log entries that correspond to the BSOD.

And finally here's a detail view of the Bugcheck details for this error. FWIW I sent those details to Microsoft's error checking online repository and I've saved the memory dump, but I'm not that well versed in going over memory dumps.

The error only cropped up since I installed some software since last night and only happens when I go to shut down the VPC. It stays for a LOOOOONG time on the "Shutting down" screen then BSODs. It's happening over and over again (3x so far) so I'll just start uninstalling software on the Windows 7 VPC until it shuts down cleanly again. FWIW here's the software I've installed on it so far:

JKDefrag, Windows XP Virtual CD ROM Control Panel and Virtual Clone Drive.

Dear Microsoft - Windows 7 feature requests.

Lou Vega — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 21:28:05 GMT

Dear Microsoft,

Please either fix the compatibility issue wizard in Windows 7 or give us the built-in ability to mount an ISO as a virtual CD/DVD. I tweaked the use of your wonderful Virtual CD ROM Control Panel under Vista using the compatibility mode but it's broken under Windows 7.

Also, for old fogeys like me, could you make the option for a "Classic" start menu available again? Or at least give me the option of putting "My Computer" and "Network Places" icons on the desktop. Maybe I missed that option and it's already there.

I really like Windows 7 so far.

Regards,
Lou

P.S. Some of my friends may have features they wanted too. See any comments below this post for other feature requests. Thanks!

Windows 7 - my first impressions

Lou Vega — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 12:00:14 GMT

For those who don't want to go through the long post that follows, here's the short attention span summary.

Windows 7 is a pretty neat. Installs quick, seems to have lots of neat features and I'm looking forward to watching this progress to RTM. Only thing I don't like is the loss of the "classic" start menu option.

</Short Attention Span Summary>

So just like so many other MSDN subscribers yesterday, I raced over to download the Windows 7 Beta that was released. After downloading it I went to set it up on VPC to get an idea of what I was in for before deciding which physical machine I wanted to install it on for testing.

A little about the VPC/Host setup. I have a fairly decent laptop as my primary machine so I ran the VPC image off it. I was able to allocate 2GB of RAM to the VPC image and a 65GB VHD. Things seem to run pretty nice using these settings.

Installation itself was very painless. I started the process and 18 minutes later I was done and logging in for the first time. Not bad at all. I've been installing one version or another of Windows since the Windows 3.11 for Workgroups days and this was by far the best installation experience.

The image above shows what you get upon booting up with the DVD. After clicking next you're presented with the option to begin the installation but something caught my eye with the Help button and I clicked on it. See below for that image.

Seems in it's half-baked beta state help hasn't been updated (not blaming them, I'd save it for later too) and it still references Windows Vista. I tried to keep an eye out throughout the rest of my experience with Windows 7 and didn't see other Vista references, but there may still be some in there. Just an interesting curiosity that I found.

One thing to note with this beta installation is that it will time-bomb. Currently set date is August 1, 2009. My MSDN subscription is currently good until July 1st and I'm hoping I can continue it beyond that to see what interesting bits come as this progresses. Here's a screen shot of the EULA with the time-bomb info.

Since this was a VPC installation I opted for a Custom install. I do have a number of VPCs I maintain for development so eventually I will test upgrades to Windows 7 from Vista, XP, and I think I even have a Windows 98 VPC out there still...though I doubt any physical machine still running Windows 98 would be able to handle Windows 7. Here's a look at the installation options screen.

I had mentioned earlier that I created a 65GB VHD for this install. One thing Windows 7 did to my VHD was automatically create a 200MB Systems Partition as shown below.

The installation part was much more streamlined without so many of those options questions being asked aside from basically time zone info.

As mentioned earlier, after a short sweet install I was presented with the screen to choose my username and name my PC. Since this was a VPC I didn't get creative as some of my fellow geeks did in naming their Windows 7 boxes. I gotta remember to do a Twitter search later to see what other names people ended up calling theirs, but I saw a few interesting ones.

After choosing a name you're prompted to enter a password. I have a few gripes here that are mostly personal rants but bear with me...I know this is beta software so maybe these haven't been put in yet, but if it's not planned, then "Hey Microsoft! Why not consider these two ideas of mine? I'll even give you the assembly I wrote to accomplish one of them!"

In this day and age with so much emphasis still on passwords I think they could have helped out a little by offering 2 more items here on this password screen.

1) They should include a "password strength" meter. They do it online, so many others do it online. Why not do it here too? If not, why not?

2) They should include an option to autogen a random and pronounceable password. I'll post a blog entry later with my program that does just that so you can see what I mean. It was something I originally created years ago (in Javascript no less) for a DoD website I maintained after users complained of the DoD password policies. I've since made it into a .NET assembly and use it for password purposes in other apps.

OK, my mini rant is over. Thank you for flying off the handle with me, and I do hope you'll choose this airline again.

Windows 7 continues it's way through installation/initial setup by asking about auto-protection. One thing I did like that Microsoft did is with Windows 7 it detects that you don't have Anti-Virus installed and suggests that you do so as shown in the screen below.

Nice touch because as crazy as it sounds to most people reading this blog, I'm sure there are folks out there who *still* do not run anti-virus on their machines.

Getting back to my installation/setup experience, one thing that threw me for a loop at first was the mention of "Homegroup" for networking. As a longtime networking person who's been used to seeing Workgroups and domains, I couldn't understand why they had changed the name. Once I read this blog entry, it made more sense in today's market. It still sounds where to say it though.

Finally I was presented with my Windows 7 "Fish" Desktop. A nice looking fish, eh?

Here's a shot of the VPC configuration in Windows 7 Ultimate.

With the installation over and done with (and trust me, it's taken me far longer to write this than the installation took!) I was free to explore around with Windows 7 to see what it gives me.

A couple of notes - I ran a disk defrag program (JK Defrag) on there with no problems, but another older program (Windows XP Virtual CD Driver) didn't work, even with compatibility mode turned on like I had to for Vista (as explained in my blog here). With this being my VPC, I haven't really put it through testing a lot of software I use on a daily basis. That testing will come later as I put it on a physical machine.

One neat feature was the option to provide feedback at nearly every screen and feature. It requires your Windows Live account to process the info and I didn't set that up on my VPC (optionally you can link Online accounts to your Windows user account), but may do that later.

One thing I didn't particularly care for was the auto "phone home" that you can't uncheck in Windows Media player. Maybe that's because this is still beta and it will be allowed in the RTM version...otherwise why would they show it on screen but just gray it out so you can't do anything about it.

How about a nice game of chess? I liked that they included some casual games in Windows 7 with the option of saving game stats (I guess kinda like Xbox but with no achievement unlocks, eh?). Here's some shots of the casual games included.

The games options panel includes game ratings as well as recommended machine ratings. See the next two screens for that info.

It captures stats (you can opt out of this if you want) on the games you play. Kinda neat I think but then again I'm a gamer and have been for years. I'm looking forward to testing this out on a real machine with some other games installed.

One thing that caught my eye in the games was Purble Place. I had no idea what that was about but it seems to be a neat little game for little kids. I'll have to run this by my 3 year old to get his review after I put it on a machine this weekend.

That's the end of my first look into Windows 7. Thanks for reading along. I never did jump in and embrace Vista so I'm hopeful this will be a nice change.

Community-Credit Newsletter

Lou Vega — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 17:39:31 GMT

After a rather crazy 2nd half of 2008 for me personally, I'm putting things back together and getting more involved with the Community-Credit.com newsletter. That said, if you have any interesting geek tidbits, contests, conferences, user group meetings, etc. then drop by Community-Credit.com's discussion forums and plug them in so I can include them in the newsletter. You can also message me on Twitter, or e-mail me. Get out there, get involved, and tell us about it!

Small reflection on changes over the years...

Lou Vega — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 17:33:40 GMT

So of course the big announcement for every .NET Geek this week is Windows 7 availability. As I type this out, I'm downloading it in the background (released already on MSDN) and I hear tomorrow Microsoft will open up downloads to like 3 million people. I heard a tweet or two from folks about how large it is and how long it's taking to download and it got me thinking back to when Sun first released the Java SDK and I downloaded that thing. I don't remember how big it was, but it might as well have been gigabytes (of course it wasn't!) as I was overseas downloading it on a dial-up connection...so I actually paid twice for that download, first to my ISP (I think it was Netcom UK back in those days) and second to British Telecom since there wasn't (isn't still?) free phone calls available over landlines on BT's phone network. I actually started the download at night and let it go overnight...thankfully the download wasn't interrupted and in the morning I had a brand new "toy" to play with as I started down the path of learning Java.

Fast forward to today as my download continues from MSDN (MSDN Download Manager says 3 hours remaining) and it just stuck me as odd how though bandwidth has certainly increased (from the old 28.8 dial-up to broadband now) with the bandwidth growth so has the size of downloads grown. Will things ever equal out? Who knows. I remember about that same time I had bought my first Gigabyte hard drive. Yeah - some may remember when they first came out with those. I bought a 1.6GB hard drive for my computer and a friend commented something to the effect of not needing that much space "What the heck are you going to do with all that space?" he asked. "I got a lot of games I want to install" was my answer at the time...and here I am now looking to set up a 2TB RAID NAS on my home network to safely keep all the family photos, videos, games, and other digital artifacts I've collected over the years...while 1GB flash drives are routinely given away free at trade shows, conferences, etc.

No real point to this post other than just some reflections on my part. Thanks for sharing with me!

The duck...go duck, go!

Lou Vega — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 17:17:19 GMT

I pulled into my driveway after work yesterday and my son immediately starts asking if we could go feed the ducks near one of the ponds in the neighborhood. I had told him yesterday that we could do it and so we grabbed some bread and his wagon and walked down there. My wife and daughter followed (at first, then raced ahead of us) on their bikes.

The pond we picked was along one of two main roads in our neighborhood. Even though the speed limit is 25 and there's a pool and playground near the pond there are still a fair number of cars that really whiz down that road. We have sidewalks and the pond is set off a good distance from the road so we thought we'd be fine as we started to break apart bread and throw it to the hordes of ducks that descended upon our little family.

We had been feeding the ducks for about 10 minutes when we heard a loud "BUMP!". I turned to the road and saw a small white car with a cloud of feathers flying around it. The car's brake lights lit up briefly and then the car continued on its way. I then noticed the small feathered mass in the center of a LOT of feathers in the road...some still swirling around in the breeze created by the car that had just caused this accident. My daughter screamed and started crying saying that the car had just killed that duck. We were easily 150 feet away from it so I couldn't tell if the duck was alive or dead from where I was but I offered to go check for her to see if it was OK. Thankfully my son was too involved in feeding the ducks to have noticed the whole incident.

As I walked closer to the duck I thought it was dead at first. Just a big mess of feathers around this mostly black mass in the road...then as I was about 15 feet away it raised it's head and looked at me. "At least it's alive" I thought, though I then wondered how badly it might be injured. I saw another car coming down the road so I stepped slowly into the road to motion for the driver to move around the duck and as I got closer it started to try to move but looked like it couldn't get up. I told my daughter the duck was still alive but might be hurt pretty bad so she could come see (there wasn't any blood around or visible external injuries) the duck. I tried to get it to move out of the road so that it wouldn't get plowed into again just laying there but it just looked around and wiggled a bit, never trying to move even when I tried to entice it with some bread.

A lot of cars passed by, oddly enough none willing to help or even find out what was going on until one guy in a truck stopped to ask if we needed help. Right about then one of my neighbors who's a police officer came by on his way home. I had explained what happened and how I was trying to get the duck to move and he was getting ready to call animal control when all of a sudden the duck stood up and slowly waddled off the road and back towards the pond. My daughter was real excited to see it move like that and I followed the duck over to the sidewalk where my daughter was. The duck stopped on the grass just off the sidewalk and sat down again. My daughter was still trying to get it to eat and by this time my son had run out of bread so he and my wife walked down to where we were...his 3 year old attention span quickly turned from the ducks to the police car that my neighbor was driving.

My neighbor and I ended up talking for a few more minutes and the duck ended up walking down the small hill toward the water and sat down again. It seemed the duck was fine, though understandably dazed. My wife and daughter raced off on their bikes as my daughter had wanted to tell one of her friends about this "adventure" and my son hopped back in his wagon so I could take him home.

MSDN Southern Fried Road show

Lou Vega — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 12:57:47 GMT

Thanks to everyone in Charleston who came out for that event yesterday! It was a good event, lots of good information and I even got to give a short presentation on Mobile development. Thanks Chad, Brian and Glen for coming down!