.NET From India

Vista Drivers

One of my fellow MVP pointed to this Vista Drivers Page that has links to Vista compatible drivers for most of the common devices.

If you are installing Vista on your older machine, then this is a very useful resource and saves a lot of time you will spend searching for drivers. especially you built your machine over time, adding components over time.

"Fiji" - Vista SP1

One of my fellow MVPs forwarded a link to a post on the planned Vista SP1. This is supposedly already under the works and MS is looking at early TAP participants. I am not suprised, since I would have expected that as soon as Vista was RTMed (or near RTMed), the team would have started working on the SP and maybe a few on the next version of Windows too.

SP1 for Vista should be a easy go as quite a few technologies that were not fully completed, just did not RTM with Vista. So they would need a SP1 to get all of those out as soon as they are complete.

VS 2005 on Vista

If you want to run Visual Studio 2005 on Vista, you will need SP1 and an extra patch that is currently called Visual Studio 2005 SP1 Update for Windows Vista.

SP1 is now availabe for download at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/support/vs2005sp1/default.aspx. The beta of the Vista Update is also availabe now and the release version will be available after consumer launch on Jan 30th.

If you run SQL 2005, then do read a related article Microsoft SQL Server 2005 on "Microsoft Windows Server Longhorn" or Microsoft Windows Vista

IRiver Clix

Just got back to Chennai after a week in Seattle(I will write more about this trip on my personal Blog). I now have a new IRiver Clix 2GB and thought I will play around a little bit with it.

As my Vista Install already has WMP 11, which is the recommeded install for the Clix, I went ahead and connected via USB. Suprisingly, my Vista was unable to recognize the device and asked for a driver and I was unable to find one anywhere. According to all documentation, this is supposed to work without any drivers..:(

Has anyone got the Clix working ok on Vista RTM?

Vista and Piracy

Got a link to an Information Week article on how Pirates are using the new Key Management Server feature of Vista to activate spoof copies of Vista. KMS is a technology where Enterprises run a local server that can be used to activate a copy of Vista instead of going to a MS server. This was slated to cut the piracy using volume licenses that was rampant with XP, which was the first version where activation was introduced.

I am not suprised that this has happened. I would have expected any software coming out of MS to be hacked and pirated copies being available. But using KMS was suprising, but does look logical, since it makes away with the issue of coming up with a specific key, which MS can add to a black list etc. But I expect, MS will soon enough find a way to blacklist copies activated with this KMS.

Snipping Tool

One of the new tools that ships with Vista is the Snipping tool.

This allows you to take a  snapshot of a particular part of the screen and then save it as a picture. This is available in the programs menu and is installed by default during Vista install.

One of the good things about this tool, is that it is extremely simple to use and once you choose the action you want, it just disappears and you are free to snip the part of the screen you are interested in.

It even has options to have irregular areas of the screen to be captured. Very useful for a blogger, if you want to put up pictures of some application.

The two problems I have found using this tool as of now

• Since it disappers on selecting an option, It is next to impossible to use the tool to get a screen shot of itself
• I was unable to get a shot of a menu with this tool as the menu disappers as soon as I switch to the tool and if I use the keyboard then the tool cancels the snapshot mode.

Windows Mobile Device Center - Gotcha

I wrote a previous post on the Windows Mobile Device Center Beta that is available for Vista. If you are installing it for the first time, there is a small gotcha that can leave you confused. It happed the first time and then since I have just installed Vista RTM and so had to go through installing all of the other software I came across that again. So thought I would write a post on that.

When you install WMDC, the install runs and ends. There is no start menu icon added, nor is there any indication that it has been installed successfully. The only two places I could find some install trail, is the Uninstall Program control panel screen and in the Event viewer where the MSI installer puts in the message of having successfully install WMDC.

Once you connect the first device then WMDC starts the actual full install and configuration and then adds the start menu/desktop icon etc.

So the first time you install, it can be really confusing to find a install suddenly end with no message on whether it is successful or not.

Vista RTM

Got time to Install Vista RTM over the weekend. So now I have moved to Vista fulltime. Initially the only changes from RC2 seem to be mostly look and feel only.

Vista and Broadcom NetXtreme II

Recently we got two Dell PowerEdge 2950 Servers at work and I wanted to run them on the Longhorn server Beta 2. So I went ahead and installed LH Server, but then it could not recongnize the highend NetXtreme II Gigabit network card. None of the drivers shipped by Dell worked. The problem seems to be that these drivers use NDIS client 5 while LH server requires NDIS6. I tried to see if Vista will work, but Vista RC1 still had the same problem. So I was stuck with a server that could not connect to the network.

Then I found a link to a RIS driver at broadcom for Win2K3 (I am unable to find this link now and it looks like the Broadcom site structure has changed). The help said that this was based on a monolithic older architecture and limits access to some of the newer features in the NetXtreme card. So I just gave it a try, setting compatibility and it worked fine. The server is now online and I have full network access!!!

Changes to Vista License

Just read at the Vista Team Blog, that they are removing the only 1 device install rule from the license and allow you to reinstall many times, as long as you have uninstalled the previous copy.