Well it was bound to happen.  Everyone in my office had made the switch back, I was the last holdout.  I finally had it with Vista! 

I really wanted to like it, I really did.  It looked sharp... hmm, come to think of it, that's all I can really say about it.  I looked sharp.  But in the end, after installing some updates, it became unstable and I failed to figure out what the cause was.  Even with uninstalling said updates, it still randomly spiked the cpu to 100% for 5 or so minutes at a time, leaving me helpless to do any work.

So, before I left work yesterday I repartinioned my C:\ drive and reinstalled XP.  Up until 11pm last night I was trying to get my machine back to par for work.  I have to admit, after making the switch from XP to Vista then back to XP, I do notice that XP is considerably faster.  I guess making it look "sharp" had it's disadvantages.

Quick note to Microsoft: WTF MAN!  How could you screw up an OS so badly?  I want Vista, but I want it STABLE.  I don't want to have to cross my fingers before installing updates as I had to ever since I installed it.  And yes, I have had to uninstall updates in the past. 

Here's another WTF that Vista threw at me today.  I had to come home early today and decided to work the rest of the day from home.  Now, because I can't undock my laptop because Vista freezes, before I leave each day, I put it to "sleep".  So, first thing I needed to do before I could resume working was to connect to my works VPN.  Now, normally this is not an issue, but sometime (I'd say every 1 out of 4 times) Vista displays "This connection requires an active Internet connection" in the "Connect to a Network" dialog even though, directly below it, it clearly shows that I'm connected via my wireless connection. 



To get around this, simple do the following:

Click on the "Set up a connection or network" link on the above dialog box.



Scroll down the list of connection options and select "Connect to a workplace".



Choose "Yes, I'll choose an existing connection" on the next screen and Vista will connect to the VPN.

Not sure why this happens but I've seen it enough times to warrant this post.

So, this morning I applied a performance & reliability update (KB938979) that is supposed to help with a known Vista hibernation issue.  I haven't put my laptop into hibernation to check it out yet but what I did find is that my volume, network and power icons are gone from the task bar.  The thing that I liked was that these were icons that I could have always displayed by selecting them in the properties dialog.  They wouldn't hide after inactivity, sometimes even after selecting them to show by default.  Well, I opened up the task bar properties and saw the following:

What gives?  Why are the system icons disabled?  I WANT to select them.  I WANT to see them.  I WANT to feel all warm and fuzzy inside knowing that they're there.

All I can say now is that I hope this hibernation issue is resolved.  If not, I'm uninstalling this update crap.

UPDATE: After not finding a resolution for this, I've uninstalled this update.  My system icons are back and that makes me happy.

After installing Vista I found that IE7 would not show Flash content.  Instead, the page I was trying to view would tell me that I needed to install the latest Flash Player (example sites: Google Finance & YouTube).  Clicking on the given link, I found myself at Adobe's site where I would successfully install the latest player.  After successfully installing, I would navigate back to the original page where that had Flash content but I would still see the error message stating that I did not have the latest Flash Player.  Even after rebooting, the error message would not go away nor would the page display the Flash content.

Googling for this problem at first turned up nothing.  People who complained about this were shot down by other users stating things such as "you need to enable Flash content" or "you need to enable javascript" as fixes, which I'm sure was followed by a big "DUH" and ignored from there on out.  Like myself, people having these problems checked all of these settings and indeed all were correct but embedded Flash content would still not play.  These statements usually fell on deaf ears.  That is until I ran across this post on Channel 9.   

The post claimed that to fix the problem all that was needed was to run the following:

C:\windows\system32\Macromed\Flash\FlashUtil9b.exe

Yes, this solved the problem but the poster (joem83) did not elaborate as to why this works but stated simply that "Flash for Vista is still in Beta".  So, if you are currently having Flash problems with IE7 on Vista, run FlashUtil9b.exe to correct the problem.  It works.

While looking into Microsoft's Web Client Software Factory (WCSF) I ran into an odd error installing the Guidance Automation Toolkit on Windows Vista.  The error in question was pretty generic but a quick search found a solution.  



Basically, the GuidanceAutomationToolkit.msi needed to be run as an administrator but you cannot right click an msi and simply select "Run as Administrator".  

The work around is simple:
Create a .cmd file
    install_Gat.cmd
Add a command to execute the .msi in question, and
    msiexec /i fully qualified path the the GuidanceAutomationToolkit.msi file
Run the command file as an administrator.
    save the file, then right click and select "Run as Administrator"

Ok, here's one for ya.

As I'm working this morning, I notice that it's 9:15am (I just look at the clock in the taskbar).  Then, as a little time goes by, I notice that it's still 9:15am.  Looks to me as if the program froze. 

So I double click on the time in the taskbar and what do you know, the clock is working fine but the display in the taskbar is frozen.  No biggie, it finally came back to life little while later but still, it's a rather peculiar screen shot.

Real quick; in order to run the debugger in Visual Studio 2005 on Windows Vista, you need to run the application as an administrator.  For the past few days, I've been doing this by right clicking the Visual Studio shortcut in my start menu and selecting "Run as Administrator".  What I really want is for Windows Vista to remember that I always want to run this program as an administrator.  So after a quick check I found that you can set it in the properties to do just that.

To be sure it works consistently, I changed the properties on the actual application found in: Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE

Only problem I found that I haven't figured out yet (mostly for lack of trying) is that opening a solution file (.sln) directly does not work.  Actually, it doesn't do anything; no prompts or IDE.  But for now, it's one less click. 

Well I've made the switch to Vista Ultimate over the weekend and so starts the fight with Windows to allow all of my programs to get along.  First on my list, Visual Studio 2005!

Installation was a snap, although there are known compatibility issues.  My first problem came when I opened up one of my solutions, a web application, and tried to debug it.  Bam! "Unable to start debugging on the web server".  Ouch, that hurt.

Ok, so I read up a little and find 2 great articles on solving the problem:

Scott Gu's Blog (Tip/Trick: Using IIS7 on Vista with VS 2005) and

Bradley Millington's Blog (Developing Web Applications on Windows Vista with Visual Studio 2005)

I followed both of them but still got the above error.  Don't get me wrong, you DO need to follow their solutions but you also have to do one more thing that neither outlined; change the application pool in IIS7 for the site in question from "DefaultAppPool" to "Classic .NET AppPool".

Here's how:

Open IIS7 and navigate to the Application under "Default Web Site"

Right click the Application and click "Advanced Settings..."

Select "Application Pool"

In the drop down, change to "Classic .NET AppPool"

Click "OK" and you're finished.