Channel 9 - Discussions by gdesroches

Tech Off - Should I go 64bit?

Gary — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 19:37:01 GMT

That's a wise choice. I took the plunge to XP 64 and it hasn't been very pleasant. Some apps just won't work anymore. Most software companies, even Microsoft, treat x64 as a red-headed step child and release apps that only run on 32-bit Windows. Unless you really need more than 4GB per CPU, it's just not worth it.

Tech Off - Firefox, .NET 2.0, WebResource.axd.....Three friends intertwined in a love/hate relationship

Gary — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 22:00:49 GMT

I'm not exactly sure what you're doing here. Do you have something on the server side which should translate to some HTML or JScript on the client side, and it's only happening if you have IE on the client? If this is the case, you can check to see if the server is intentionally not sending it to Firefox clients by changing the useragent string in Firefox. To do this, type "about:config" in the address box and change the "general.useragent.extra.firefox" value to match IE. Sorry, I don't know what it is.

Tech Off - Single .Net EXE problem (I'm THIS close to an e-mail deployment)

Gary — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 21:32:00 GMT

The problem may be with the elements. When you merge multiple assebmlies into one, it probably only retains the main executable's assembly name. Try changing the assembly name in the "filters/input/add/@type" attributes to the executable's assembly name. The assembly name is the "CompanyNamespace" located after the comma.

Tech Off - NLA missing from Remote Desktop Client 6.0 for Windows XP?

Gary — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 20:54:18 GMT

I successfully downloaded and installed Remote Desktop Client 6.0 for Windows XP today. I found it on this page.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/925876

The page says it supports Network Level Authentication. Unfortunately, when I try to connect to a Windows Vista machine with NLA enabled, I get a dialog stating, "The remote computer requires Network Level Authentication, which your computer does not support. For assistance, contact your system administrator or technical support."

Is this supposed to work, or does it only support Vista clients? If the latter is the answer, then why would they even mention NLA on the RDP 6.0 client for XP?

Coffeehouse - Channel9 v4 Previews

Gary — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 21:08:15 GMT

The link you provided gives me the same results. It's being sorted by the last reply, not the thread's creation.

jeffsand wrote:

gdesroches wrote:Cool stuff guys.

I have a request. I would love to see the videos RSS feed sort by newest to oldest videos. Right now, it sorts by newest to oldest reply. Most of the time when I see a new entry in the RSS feed, I click it only to realize I've already seen the video a month ago. Changing this would very much improve my RSS reading.

Totally agree. That's definitely broken, but I think you might be subscribing to a feed sorted by last post.

http://channel9.msdn.com/rss.aspx?ForumID=14&Mode=0&sortby=0&sortorder=1

Seems to return the right results doesn't it?

Tech Off - Problem installing the Windows SDK 6.0.6000.0

Gary — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 14:14:36 GMT

I posted this in the MSDN forums, but nobody has replied yet, so I thought I'd post it here.

I have Windows XP Professional x64 Edition. I have a system partition which is 8GB (D:). I have a separate partition for programs and documents (E:). I also have a big scratch partition (F:). My temporary directory is on the F: drive.

Currently, the D: drive has about 100MB of free disk space. Since only system components are installed here and my swap file is on a separate partition, this is enough space. The E: drive has about 25GB free. The F: drive has about 30GB free.

When I run the Windows Vista / .NET Framework 3.0 SDK setup, it asks me for two folder locations. One for the SDK files and another for SDK samples. I set both to directories on the E: drive. When I go to the next step, it says I need 600MB+ on my D: drive in order to continue. I went back and made sure both of my selected directory locations were on E:. Unfortunately, the SDK still demands 600MB+ of my system drive. I have gone through my D: drive to find stuff I can delete and I still am not even close to having enough room. Why is the installer demanding space from the system drive? Is there a way I can work around this?

Coffeehouse - Channel9 v4 Previews

Gary — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 02:05:35 GMT

Cool stuff guys.

I have a request. I would love to see the videos RSS feed sort by newest to oldest videos. Right now, it sorts by newest to oldest reply. Most of the time when I see a new entry in the RSS feed, I click it only to realize I've already seen the video a month ago. Changing this would very much improve my RSS reading.

Coffeehouse - Channel 9: The Videos RSS Feed Question

Gary — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 14:41:59 GMT

One of the many RSS feeds I subscribe to is the Channel 9 videos feed. The problem is, I don't get the same list I would get if I went to the actual Videos aspx page. Whenever someone replies to a video, it gets bumped to the top of the RSS feed. I don't remember all of the video titles, so sometimes I'll think there is a new video, but be disappointed when I visit the page.

If the all-powerful Channel 9 Overlords would change this behaviour or add an option for it, I would be greatful.

Oh, and keep up the good work!

Coffeehouse - October "Orcas" CTP now available

Gary — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 16:06:54 GMT

Is there an installer I can download instead? I can't use the VPC image since VPC doesn't run on Windows XP x64 and VMWare's converter tool says it can't read the virtual disk.

Coffeehouse - Vista Licensing

Gary — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 00:41:18 GMT

This is to those who don't understand what the fuss is all about.

We are not complaining about most users being affected. We, the ones who are complaining are being affected. This has nothing to do with percentages, although Jason's percentage of users affected seems pretty low. Remember, we're talking about the retail OS license, not the OEM licenses which come with retail machines. I'd bet there are more of us (techies) who will be buying retail copies rather than buying a whole new machine.

I agree most people will not be affected adversly by this license. This is not the point. "Most" does not mean "all." We are complaining, because it affects us. If I buy Vista, Microsoft is telling me in a legally binding document (even though I didn't sign anything, but that's a completely different issue) I am not allowed to transfer my OS license to a new machine more than once. I don't care if we are a small percentage of users. We are still getting ripped off.

I am not going to assume Microsoft will allow me to re-activate anyway. That is not what the license says. I don't know about other people, but I will not gamble $200-$400 of my money and see what happens later.

If Microsoft comes out and says something like, "Whoops, that isn't what we meant," and they change the wording to allow me to use my copy of software for more than the next two years (I build myself a new machine about every year), I'd be happy to buy a copy of Vista. If it turns out this restriction stays, I will not buy a copy. Vista has some nice things I'd like to use, but XP works just fine, and Mac OS X is looking really nice these days.

I was not happy about XP's activation "feature," but I was not one of the ones who said they would not buy a copy. I can still use XP the way I want to. This is not so with Vista. Microsoft is telling me I need to re-purchase the expensive software in the future. This is a big deal to many users, and Microsoft needs to say something about it.

Tech Off - PowerShell: Running an executable with a long filename and using a variable as a command line parame

Gary — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 22:39:20 GMT

I started a little project today, and I figured I could bang it out in PowerShell. I want to take all .img (DVD image) files and mount them as virtual drives with a program called "DAEMON Tools". I thought this would be easy to figure out.

Here was my first step. I came up with the following code within seconds. I can now iterate through all .img files in a directory.

[code]
$files = get-childitem -filter *.img
foreach ($file in $files)
{
echo $file.FullName
}
[/code]

Now, to call the DAEMON Tools executable and pass the file name as a command line argument. The following line works in cmd.exe. I have to use quotes, because the path has a space.

"C:\Program Files\DAEMON Tools\daemon.exe" -mount 0,myimage.img

However, this does not work in PowerShell. It took me a quite a while to figure out how to run an exe with a long filename, but I finally found it on some random blog post. So, this is what I have now.

[code]
$files = get-childitem -filter *.img
foreach ($file in $files)
{
&'C:\Program Files\DAEMON Tools\daemon.exe' -mount 0`,`"myimage.img`"
}
[/code]

Now I need to know how to use the $file variable as a command line argument for the executable. I couldn't find anything related to this stuff in the documentation, in the wiki, or through the other various links google gave me.

Why is this information so difficult to find? All the web sites I've seen contain the same basic MONAD tutorials. There is no mention of how to run a plain executable other than stating "Just type it in."

Sorry about the rant. I'm just frustrated. This stuff should have taken a few minutes to figure out.

Can anyone help me out here?

Coffeehouse - What happened to .NET 3.0 in Longhorn?

Gary — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 01:29:47 GMT

Sven Groot wrote:

orangie wrote:heard somewhere Orca was for 2007

This is the original developer tools roadmap that places Orcas with Longhorn: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/productinfo/roadmap.aspx

Yeah, this is what I was talking about. I guess it must have been the Whidbey delays.

Coffeehouse - What happened to .NET 3.0 in Longhorn?

Gary — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 02:00:52 GMT

I recall hearing (from the .NET show I believe) about .NET 3.0 being built into Longhorn. Now I'm hearing it will ship with 2.0. Was 3.0 suppose to be 2.0 with WPF, WCF, and WinFS, or was there going to be more until they scaled back?