Kristian Kristensen’s Blog

I’ve been doing some WCF development on Vista using Orcas Beta 2 for a project I’m starting. I ran into a couple of issues with this configuration. I wanted to expose a service on an HTTP endpoint, but Vista doesn’t allow this. To enable it you have to add a rule to the HTTP namespace in HTTP.sys in the kernel. Nicholas Allen has a post on what and how to do it.

Second you can run into problems with svcutil.exe because of signing issues. Guy Berstein has the details.

Btw. you can start the WCF Test Client that is used by Visual studio by executing WcfTestClient.exe in a VS Command Prompt.

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I’ve been trying out VMWare Fusion for Mac, which’ll enable me to run Windows on my MacBook. I’ve been using Parallels Desktop for Mac, but apparently Fusion should be much better. So far that assumption holds true. Performance is better, it doesn’t use as many ressoruces, and just generally feels more snappy and integrated. However, I’ve installed Vista in a Virtual Machine, and for some reason it Vista locked my user session. During installation I didn’t specify a password when using the Easy Install feature. So I merrily clicked “log in” and didn’t specify a password. However, apparently a password was set on my user account. Strange and annoying, because I didn’t know what that password was. A Google search revelaed this forum thread: Password for Win Vista. So apparently I’m not the only one experiencing this problem. The last post on the thread yields a solution. If the user account created for you is an administrator, you can create a new administrive account with a password, then log in using this new temp account. From this account you can reset the password on your original account. Works, problem solved, although a bit cumbersome.

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I’ve installed Vista Beta 2 on a seperate partition on my tablet. However, I haven’t been able to get Glass (the transparent windows), which comes with the Aero apperance/theme. That was until I read Scott Forsyth’s blog. He describes some of his difficulties in enabling Blass on Vista Beta 2, and refers to this article on Neowin, that describes how to disable the check that determines if your hardware is good enough for Glass. After following Neowin, and entering the “Visual Apperance” item on the “Personalize” menu in “Control Panel”, I could select “Windows Vista Aero” in the box, and lo and behold I had glass!
I looks great! Really smooth, and Flip 3d (WinKey – Tab) is very cool!

The success didn’t last for long however, apparently my hardware isn’t fast enough, or I used to many system ressources, so Vista disabled Aero/Glass – the DWM process which Aero uses occupied around 150 megabyte of RAM.
But I’ve felt Aero/Glass, and now I cannot go back. I look so forward to the release of Vista.

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I wrote about SuperFetch in a previous post. Recently Brandon LeBlanc from Longhornblogs.com wrote about the rest of the performance booster package that are coming in Vista.

It appears I mixed a couple of technologies, but nevermind, the concept is still mighty cool!

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I found this blog post via Sam Gentile, on how to enable SuperFetch in Windows Vista.

SuperFetch is a new memory scheme that allows Vista to use external memory devices as extensions to the system memory. So you can plug in a USB memory Stick with a gigabyte, and automatically have Vista use this as extra memory, thereby boosting system performance.
I saw Jim Allchin demo it at PDC, and it was very impressive. Good to see these kinds of things coming.

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The newest Community Technology Preview of WinFX has been released. It’s the February version and is complemented by a release of Windows Vista. The latter is only available if you have an MSDN subscription, or an account on Microsoft Connect, however, WinFX is available for download for everybody.

Clemens Vasters has the details, and by the way, congratulations on his new job as Community Relations Manager for WCF at Microsoft

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I wrote in my last post that I had installed Windows Vista, and with that comes Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1. One of the cool features of that is the built in RSS support, so naturally I had to give that a try. The RSS Feeds are discovered correctly and I can subscribe to them, however that’s about it. However, it seems like there’s something missing in order for me to read the feeds or use the built in synchronizer. The following tidbit from Paul Thurrott explains it:

Longhorn Beta 1, due in July, will not include any RSS functionality, however. For access to the RSS APIs and other features, developers will need to wait for the PDC 2005 build, which is due in September.

So I guess I’ll RSS’ing it at and after PDC

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Today I got a hold of Windows Vista Beta 1, and with that in hand I had a project for the evening. I cranked up VMWare Workstation, and created a new Virtual Pc.
The new installation interface for Vista is much simpler than for Windows XP, so theres only a handfull og choices you need to make to install. First obstacle was that Vista didn’t recognize my hard drive or hard drives partitions, and therefore wouldn’t allow me to continue. Quick search on MSN Search revealed the trick:

Press SHIFT-F10 to enter the command line.
…
Execute format c: /fs:ntfs /q to perform a quick NTFS format of the volume.

[Via Bart De Smet]

With that the installation continued to the end.
Given that I’ve installed it in a Virtual PC, you need to install extra VMWare additions to get optimum performance, and recognition of hardware. The VMWare Tools installed without a glitch (enabling higher and better screen resolution), but the network card was still missing a driver. A quick search on MSN Search solved it:

The VMWare AMD PCNet virtual ethernet card is not recognized by Vista. You need to install a driver manually. The driver I used is available under program files\VMWare\VMWare Tools\Drivers\vmxnet\win2k on the VMWare Tools ISO image.

[Via Channel9]

So now I have a fully functioning Windows Vista Beta 1 running on my Tablet. I must say that the performance of it is quote acceptable! Eventhough I run it virtually it’s snappy, and reacts quickly. Vista itself is pretty neat, but it’s obvious that it’s still a beta product and that it’ll take a while before the final version will appear.
It look forward to PDC to see how much of Vista will change…

I guess I’ll have to write some more about Vista in the coming days, however, you should check out Paul Thurrott’s Vista section for great reviews and pictures.

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