Entries for Tyler Brown

Vista Beta 2 Performance Information [Vista Beta 2 Performance Information]

Tyler Brown — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 17:38:12 GMT

I've been running Vista for a couple of days now, and overall I'm impressed with how the operating system has come along. I have however noticed that the performance of this release lags far behind XP SP2. I realise that this is a Beta 2 release, but I find some of the issues to be perplexing given the fact that the operating system is based off of the Server 2003 code base.

For example, loading a burnt data DVD into the optical drive and attempting to navigate through the DVD is painfull. It takes roughly 10 seconds to load up a directory listing. Now I realize that this could all be attributed to driver problems what with the system being in Beta and all, and my system specifications (listed below) could also be a contributing factor.

I've done a rough search for blog postings or something from someone within Microsoft of a substantive position to comment on the performance levels of Vista Beta 2, but have come up with nothing. This could very well have already been discussed here, as I'm late to the party, but I haven't been able to find anything here either.

So basically, once you get down to it, I'd like to know what Microsoft has said that we should expect when it comes to performance from Vista Beta 2, and what kind of performance we should expect from Vista RC1.

System Specifications:
AMD Athlon XP 3200+
1GB PC3200 RAM
ATI Radeon 9600 XT All In Wonder
BenQ DVD Drive

in reply to Vista Beta 2 Performance Information

Bluetooth Cell Phone Back-Up [Bluetooth Cell Phone Back-Up]

Tyler Brown — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 16:30:11 GMT

I've been searching the internet for a solution to a problem that we have at work. We need the ability to back-up a bluetooth cellphone (text messages, contacts, etc.). We have many different brands of cellphones, and I have found some software on the internet that is capable of interfacing with multiple brands of phones, but I'm wondering if just purchasing a bluetooth adapter for our PC will allow us to copy the data over manually.

So the question is, if I hook up a bluetooth adapter to my PC and connect to a bluetooth phone through that, what kind of access will I get on the phone. Will I be able to copy over contacts, etc?

Anyone have a cheap software solution that they can recomend if this is not possible with Windows out of the box?

Thanks.

in reply to Bluetooth Cell Phone Back-Up

Star Trek Online [Star Trek Online]

Tyler Brown — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 20:52:46 GMT

I realize that this game is still atleast two years away, but I thought that some might be interested. I stumbled upon this right before Christmas and it looks like it'll be a really great game when it is completed.

Perpetual Entertainment is the firm working on this game, and there is an interview available for those that are interested.

Star Trek Online
MMORPG.COM Interview

in reply to Star Trek Online

Alternative GPS System [Alternative GPS System]

Tyler Brown — Wed, 28 Dec 2005 20:30:10 GMT

Just saw this over on Beta News, apparently there is an alternative system to the US Military owned GPS system in the works. It will be under civillian control and it seems that there are several countries on board. Apparently it will offer superior accuracy to that of the current GPS system, marking your position to within 1 metre.

Read the article here.

Its good to see that an improvement is being made to the system, although at a rather high price. I'd imagine sending upgrade crews to space to upgrade all the current GPS satellites would cost significantly more though.

I'm not quite sure what other benefits we will see from this system being run by a civillian organization. Sure the US Military could shut down the GPS system at any time, but I don't believe that they could selectively block access unless they encrypt the data transmissions from the GPS satellites...

in reply to Alternative GPS System

Flight Simulators [Flight Simulators]

Tyler Brown — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 20:53:46 GMT

I'll be heading to my parents for a couple days by train tomorrow morning and just remembered that they've got a copy of Microsoft Flight Simulator installed on their computer. Does anyone here enjoy puting in a little flight time now and then?

Any news on any upcoming flight simulators that will harness the latest and greatest GPU's to deliver some mind blowing visuals? The current version of Flight Simulator is great, but the scenery is rather sparse.... with cards boasting 256MB of memory, you'd think we'd see some truly amazing representations of major cities and more detail in between cities.

I've looked online for news regarding upcoming flight simulators but came up short handed... anyone have some links?

in reply to Flight Simulators

WinFX CTP: Black Application Window [WinFX CTP: Black Application Window]

Tyler Brown — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 07:45:00 GMT

I really hate writing posts late at night as they always seem to drift onto the second page by the time anyone with answers comes online, but I do my best thinking in the earliest hours of the morning, and thats when I run into problems...

Anyways, I've got the December CTP of WinFX installed on my system. I originally had the incorrect installation order (VS before WinFX RTC) but I've uninstalled everything and reinstalled in the correct order. The problem now? Whenever I compile a simple WinFX application, the entire window area of the application is black. The border and title bar are the normal Windows XP border/title bar, but the content is just a black rectangle.

Also, if I get application crashes immediately after compilation if I throw a single ProgressBar object into a DockPanel. When I run the debugger, the problem seems to be caused by the BorderThickness property having a value of "Auto, 1, 1, 1" but I never set that property, so I'm assuming that this has something to do with Cider being thrown into this CTP.

Anyone else experienced this problem and found a work-around? I've searched the web a bit but the only thing I could find was a comment made to a blog post asking about this for the November CTP, but no answer was given from what I've seen. It'd be a shame if there were no work-around for this, as it means that I'm essentially out of commission for WPF development until the next CTP... unless I install the previous CTP release.

Just a little extra piece of information: XAML Pad runs perfectly fine. It displays all the WPF content, and I can throw any control into it and it doesn't complain.

in reply to WinFX CTP: Black Application Window

MSN Space, New Error Message Needed? [MSN Space, New Error Message Needed?]

Tyler Brown — Sat, 10 Dec 2005 19:24:40 GMT

I've been trying this for the past couple of days now. I know that it used to work because a couple of months ago I successfully viewed someones MSN space in Firefox. However, if I now open someones MSN Space through MSN and copy the URL (MSN forces links in the UI to be opened in IE, from what I can tell, theres no changing this) into Firefox, you are redirected to a page that gives the following:

ErrorPage.aspx wrote:
This space is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later.

However, opening the MSN Space in IE works flawlessly. Can anyone else reproduce this? If so, why is Microsoft blocking access to MSN Spaces with Firefox? What about other browsers, are they also blocked?

Answer: ScanIAm wrote:

Larsenal wrote:
I have to admit, Beer... I don't know how any of this feels. So far I've been able to calmly just drop the issue when someone wants to argue over something silly. Try it. It's great.

When you say you are trading stock options, do you mean you are trading stocks?

I've been doing this for a number of years and if you are interested, start another thread. We could use MSFT stock as an example to keep it within the coffeehouse limits

At the risk of complete mockage, I've got a system that seems to work. In theory it will work for trading anything.

I'm actually rather interested in getting into some stock trading. Nothing big at the moment. I'm a student with a part time job throughout the school year, so when I get some extra cash, I'd like to invest it to potentially turn it into a larger sum of cash over time, nothing short term. I haven't really looked into trading stocks. I've looked around various sites and explored a bit of the market sites, but how do I get started and what should I know?

in reply to Trading Stock Options - ScanIAm's System

Team Foundation Server - Source Control Policy Override [Team Foundation Server - Source Control Policy Override]

Tyler Brown — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 14:15:57 GMT

Did anyone else notice during the Team System demo's at the Visual Studio 2005 Launch Party that everyone has the ability to override check-in policies established for Source Control? For example, you can enforce a policy that all code must be analyzed with the built in code analyzer before it can be checked in. However, if you don't analyze your code before checking it in, a dialog will pop up notifying you while giving you the ability to override the policy.

I spoke to one of the experts after the session and apparently they've gotten a lot of questions regarding why the override option is there, and if it will be optional. From the answer I got, it's not optional, but that may change. Apparently it's there for certain situations in which you would not be able to check-in your source without the override... but I would atleast like the option to remove the little override checkbox.

Anyone else have any thoughts on this?

in reply to Team Foundation Server - Source Control Policy Override

Microsoft Forums - Not Down [Microsoft Forums - Not Down]

Tyler Brown — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 19:19:52 GMT

Just tried to get onto the Microsoft Forums and was redirected to a page stating:

Microsoft Forums wrote:
The Microsoft Forums are currently down for maintenance. We apologize for this inconvenience while we update the site. The site should be back up by Wednesday April 6th 1700 PST. Please check back then.

Is this a glitch, or are the forums actually down until April?

Edit: Seems like they just experienced a glitch with the downtime page. I just refreshed again and the forums are back up.

in reply to Microsoft Forums - Not Down

Welcome To Vista Screen [Welcome To Vista Screen]

Tyler Brown — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 17:40:00 GMT

With Vista in the not-so-distant future, I've started to wonder how certain things are going to be when you fire up your system for the first time. For example, what will the Welcome To Vista screen look like? Will it be a fancy WPF application to impress new users?

What will the Vista boot screen look like? Perhaps there won't even be one. Afterall, Vista apparently boots up faster than XP, and as it stands, the boot screen on my aging laptop is only visible for 5 seconds.

Just something I was randomly thinking about.

in reply to Welcome To Vista Screen

Bug: Profile Details Require Login [Bug: Profile Details Require Login]

Tyler Brown — Fri, 14 Oct 2005 05:38:51 GMT

I just noticed that if you are not logged into Channel 9 and attempt to view someones profile, none of their threads, replies, clips, etc. are displayed. In fact, it states that "This user hasn't started any threads."

Not sure if this is intentional, or just something that hasn't been caught yet.

in reply to Bug: Profile Details Require Login

Refreshing after Edit [Refreshing after Edit]

Tyler Brown — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 17:30:01 GMT

I've noticed for some time now that after editing a post, the changes aren't immediately available when I return to the thread. Even if I do a forced refresh (Ctrl+F5) it sometimes takes 4 or 5 of them before the changes are available.

Is this a performance issue with Channel 9? Do you have multiple databases that must be kept in synch, and edits are seen as a lower priority operation, thus the reason it takes so long?

Anyone else experience this?

in reply to Refreshing after Edit

VPN Server Problem [VPN Server Problem]

Tyler Brown — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 14:31:25 GMT

Well after 36 days I've finally got my internet connection set up, but now I've got another problem. I've configured my Server 2003 box as a VPN server, as well as my Linksys WRT54GS Router to allow IPSec, PPTP, and L2TP passthrough. I've also configured port forwarding on port 1723 to redirect it to my Server 2003 box. Despite all of this, I'm unable to establish a connection.

I must admit that I'm currently testing this inside of my LAN using my exterior IP address... I'm going to go ahead and try to connect to the VPN Server from within the LAN, however I have a feeling that I'll still face the same problem.

Any suggestions?

Edit: I just tried connecting from within my LAN and it worked properly. Is it possible that the VPN Server is only accepting connections from within my LAN? Is there anything else I need to do with my Linksys Router?

in reply to VPN Server Problem

Folder sharing over the Internet? [Folder sharing over the Internet?]

Tyler Brown — Sat, 24 Sep 2005 20:36:49 GMT

I've got my laptop all set up, including a network drive which I've mapped to a shared folder on my Server 2003 box which is essentially a central repository for all my development projects. What I'd like to be able to do is access that mapped network drive from anywhere over the internet.

I'm still working with my ISP to get my DSL hooked up (24 days of working with them so far, it's really Bell's fault though), but once I get that sorted out, my Linksys router will automatically update DynDNS so that I can easily access my network with an easy to remember domain name.

What I'm trying to determine, and Google didn't turn up much on this, is if I'd be better off simply opening the ports for Windows File Sharing on my router and directing the requests to my Server 2003 box, or if I'd be better off setting up a VPN.

I think setting up a VPN might be better off, as the data transmission would be encrypted, but would it be over kill for something as simple as this? Or is a VPN the right solution for such a problem?

If I do go with a VPN, do I have to forward the ports through the router to my Server 2003 box? If so, what ports are used for VPN? What protocol should I use for a VPN? PPTP? IPSEC?

in reply to Folder sharing over the Internet?

CTP Update Needed [CTP Update Needed]

Tyler Brown — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 04:17:24 GMT

I've got both instances of Windows XP Professional SP2 installed on the laptop, and I'm ready to start installing all of the development components for Visual Studio 2005, WPF, WCF, and the WinFX SDK. The only problem now? I've been out of the loop for a few months, so I'm not quite sure which pieces fit together.

Looking at the CTP Madness tool doesn't provide much help. I'm using Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2005 which lists Beta 2 (April 2005) of the .NET Framework as being compatible, yet it states that the Avalon and Indigo Beta 1 RC (May 2005) as being compatible, yet it states that the download for this item is retired.

It then lists the WinFX Runtime Components Beta 1 as being compatible with Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2. Is this to be used in place of the Avalon and Indigo Beta 1 RC (May 2005)? Or is this an entirely different release?

Also, what is this new Visual Studio Extensions for WinFX Beta 1? I thought that the WinFX SDK provided all the templates for Visual Studio, but the WinFX SDK seems to be a pre-requisite for Visual Studio 2005.

As you can see, it's rather confusing trying to get back into development mode, so an installation order list, along with direct links would be appreciated.

Tyler Brown

in reply to CTP Update Needed

Dual Booting [Dual Booting]

Tyler Brown — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 04:29:37 GMT

Just wrote up my whole thread, again... then I received the infamous thread/reply posting error, again. Anyways, it's late, and I'm not retyping it all again.

To the point: I want to run separate OS's for school work, and for WPF/WCF development work. Apart from being able to easily wipe the development OS if anyting goes wrong, what are the other benefits of installing OS's on separate partitions? Would I be better off installing them on the same partition?

in reply to Dual Booting

Code Master Challenge - MSDN Subscription Required? [Code Master Challenge - MSDN Subscription Required?]

Tyler Brown — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 14:22:27 GMT

This is rather unfortunate. Microsoft opens an interesting competition with all kinds of prizes. Seems interesting to me as a developer, especially as it targets Windows Vista and means that I can get back to working with WCF and WPF. Everythings great right? Until it requires you, essentially, to have an MSDN subscription.

So how can I enter without having the target OS for which to test with? Is there anyway to develop on an XP SP2 box (with VS 2005 B2) and ensure that my application will run within the LUA sandbox? Guidelines for such development? I sincerely hope so...

in reply to Code Master Challenge - MSDN Subscription Required?

MSN Messenger 7.5 - Live [For a month now apparently] [MSN Messenger 7.5 - Live [For a month now apparently]]

Tyler Brown — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 18:10:06 GMT

Just got an email notifying me that the MSN Messenger Beta has now closed, and that version 7.5 is now available to the public. I prefer the new changes to the UI in the 7.5 version, and they've also added a few things. Get it here.

in reply to MSN Messenger 7.5 - Live [For a month now apparently]

Clarification: Vista Interim Build [Clarification: Vista Interim Build]

Tyler Brown — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 03:59:28 GMT

It was announced at the PDC that there will be an interim build of Windows Vista released before Beta 2. Could someone from Microsoft provide some information as to the plans for distribution? Will the interim build be publicly available, or will it only be distributed to MSDN and TechNET subscribers?

What about Beta 2 of Windows Vista? Is this still heading for a publicly available release, or will it once again be only for MSDN and TechNET subscribers?

As for the Vista interim build, any information one where the different frameworks will be at? WPF? WCF? WWF? Will we be looking at production quality versions for these frameworks? Post beta builds? RC builds? What kind of functionality/feature-sets will be exposes that aren't in current builds?

in reply to Clarification: Vista Interim Build

Ottawa Visual Studio/SQL Launch Party [Ottawa Visual Studio/SQL Launch Party]

Tyler Brown — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 03:05:26 GMT

I wasn't able to make it to the PDC this year due to financial constraints (I'm a University student) and the start of classes, however I do plan on attending the Visual Studio 2005/SQL Server 2005 launch party here in Ottawa. It'll be my first Microsoft event, and I was wondering if any other Niners in the Ottawa area were planning on attending?

Admittance is free, and registration is apparently opening up 'early September'... Who will be there from Microsoft? I realize that it's not likely to be the biggest launch party being thrown for these products, but is there a chance that someone from the Channel 9 team will be present?

I realize that this is also posted in TechOff... and I appologize. I accidentally posted it there. It can be deleted if it helps any.

in reply to Ottawa Visual Studio/SQL Launch Party

Ottawa Visual Studio/SQL Launch Party [Ottawa Visual Studio/SQL Launch Party]

Tyler Brown — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 02:45:46 GMT

in reply to Ottawa Visual Studio/SQL Launch Party

Office Suite On A Student Budget [Office Suite On A Student Budget]

Tyler Brown — Fri, 09 Sep 2005 01:20:26 GMT

I've previously done all of my school work on campus as I do not have a personal copy of Microsoft Office. My girlfriend and I are going to need some sort of Office Suite, but the $200 CAD University discounted price for Microsoft Office is beyond our budgets, even if we split the cost.

I'm downloading OpenOffice as we speak so that I can evaluate that to see if it's a viable replacement, but I'm wondering if any other people out there can vouch for OpenOffice standing in for Microsoft Office, or any other cheap/free Office Suite solution. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

in reply to Office Suite On A Student Budget