Loosing the Address Bar

Microsoft Windows has had the "address bar" for a long time. Although not used by many adding it to your taskbar for some has provided an amazing way of quickly getting to files, folders and web addresses.

I have used it for a while and have it in the bottom row of my task bar, I have this setup at home on my machine, work and until recently Hayleys Laptop.

SP3 came out recently and I immediately updated Hayleys laptop to it, all seemed fine, however today I logged into as me, and noticed the address bar had "vanished". First of all I thought I has just knocked it off but no it had physically disapeared from the toolbar list.

A quick Google later left me speachless....

"After installing Windows XP Service Pack 3, the Address Bar feature will be removed from the Taskbar. The Address Bar feature will not be present in Windows XP Service Pack 3. This change is in response to a regulatory request and is present beginning with Windows XP Service Pack 3 Beta."

It has been removed! The reason behind this is that the Addres Bar is actually part of IE, and Microsoft are trying to make IE less dominant within Windows due to antitrust. I personally think this is a joke, if the address bar opens links up in your preffered browser, in my case Firefox, does it matter that it's an IE component that fires up FireFox??

After further browsing I have found an Addon some one has wrote MuvEnum Address Bar to help with the issue but as of yet I havn't tried it due to now wanting to put something else on Hayleys Laptop.

To remove such an established feature is a real low blow, and I'm sure there must be a better solution, even if it involved more work.... So I was left without my address bar on Hayleys Laptop and hoping that work doesn't upgrade to SP3 anytime soon. Interestingly SP1 Vista still has the address bar so I wonder if SP2 will remove it.

Post HH{H} Launch Thoughts

OK so todays been a busy day.

Got up at 5am for a 6.30am Train to Birmingham for the Microsoft UK Heroes Happen {Here} Launch. The train journey was pretty uneventful and I even had mobile internet for a fair chunk of it.

Upon arriving at the venue it was apparent that this was an MS event. Big banners with the Hh{h} marketing everywhere.

Registration went very smoothly and considering we didn't arrive till 8.50 we were able to make it to the keynote / marketing bonanza ;) Whilst sat in the keynote I had a rummage in my initial swag bundle and to my dismay there was no notepad! Eek! Here was I with a new Microsoft Pen but no paper and to add insult to injury my laptop was low on juice to my initial train journey. Not Good.

One thing I also noted early on was that there were alot of attendees, and I mean alot. So much that at the start of the first session my fears were realised, there were more people than seats in the sessions, I only got to attend the first session by one seat.

This then lead to quite a few tweets on twitter about the situation, and the lack of power for laptop users, whats the point of wifi, which although slow did work, if you have no power... Of course unless you're Chris Alcock with a super battery addon ;)

I have to say the quality of the presentations were very good and were very much aimed at being launch demo's. This isn't a bad thing, very quickly I was able to find out what VS2008 would mean to me and things I could do with it.

In particular I thought the Linq talk by Mike Taulty was very good. He knew his stuff and delivered the content very well. I think I said the phrase "no way" and "really", and perhaps at one point "shut up, no" as you do. I think I am now in love with Linq and can't wait to play with it... say tomorrow night :D

Anyhow the day progressed and I even found a plug socket upstairs to get a quick 30min charge. I then got even more MS Swag, MSDN mags and such and then finally what I had been waiting for.... The Software.

The Hh{h} software pack is in my opinion very professional, it fits well and comprises of an evaluation version of Windows Server 2008 Enterprise, SQL Server 2008 ctp 5.0 and Visual Studio 2008 Standard.

I was happy enough to get a full version of VS for at home finally which is great, the other software I know I will VM for testing and developing at home, in particular I really do like IIS7 and have been using it in Vista for over 7 months, to be able to host development sites locally on a server edition of windows I know will vastly increase my deployment knowledge.

What the software suite also included which I actually missed originally is an "Application Voucher" which allows you to get an evaluation copy of SQL Server 2008 when it's released. This is good and for me anyway lets me think I haven't missed out too much with SQL 2008 being delayed.

My day rounded up with attendance at a session on IIS7, which covered alot of what I had read / seen previously but also covered some of its other new features and how / to use them. In particular I hadn't realised that as of IIS7 IIS will not be constrained to only being updated with a new Server OS release, IIS8 for example will probably come out on Windows Server 2008. Also new modules for IIS7 will be released on their website in particular the new media throttling one was demo'd and looked very good.

The day drew to a close and the closing session touched on the future of programming in parallel. This is a very important and was very aimed at developers, I enjoyed it none the less.

It was then meant to be the community reception and I did attend for a while. However alot of people seemed to just leave and there was no real air / buzz about the place. There didn't seem to be a lot of mingling or good conversations going on. This was disappointing and I did expect more, there was an abundance of drink but no food, maybe this didn't help.

Anyway overall I did enjoy the day, alot of travelling and very little sleep is beginning to take its toll on me but it was worth it none the less. The question now is do I play with Linq tonight.....

Heroes Happen {here}

Ok so tomorrow is the Official UK Launch of the new MS Development Suite, Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008. I will be in attendance and hope to get a good look at the new suite and what can be done with it. I'm travelling down to Birmingham and sadly will be on a 6.35 am train :( At least I'll be with Chris and Derek On the train we aim to do a mini "hackathon" and I'm hoping to get my latest project up to a 0.2 "alpha" release. That of course rely on getting my mobile sharing the internet with my laptop, I just worked out how to do it on my viewty but sadly need it's USB cable :( Anyhow time for an early night, I'll no doubt be on twitter and may even blog at lunch :D

The problem with the XBox 360

Why is it when you have a great product, say an Xbox 360 , which is great by the way, the games, XBox live arcade, need i go on... Theres always a drawback / something which makes you feel robbed... That's right the Media settings, why is it that you can either use the Windows Media Extender functionality or pair it to a Windows PC with the Media Sharing setup. This in my opinion sucks. So ok the Media Center extender functionality is tied to Media Center / Vista, that's bearable but why make it so that a remote device has to be a windows pc! Some of us in the world have Network attached storage, some of us even manage to get their NAS device, which in my case is a nice Linksys NLU2, which ill post about another time, to run an iTunes Media server... Sweet but oh no the XBox 360 does not count this as a device. Which means I'm still unable to play my beloved music collection downstairs with out my laptop. It's even worse when you think I have purchased a fiar few albums and tracks on iTunes, including the The The Hoosier's The Trick To Life and New Young Pony Club's Fantastic Playroom albums recently as part of a birthday gift. and I can't play them anywhere I need to :(

So whats the solution?

Well for one Microsoft will allow the XBox to connect to a normal network share, its not even a complicated Apple or Linux only share, its SAMBA! This will at least allow me to play my MP3s and CD's I have ripped into my computer. The next stage would be for the XBox to connect to a iTunes music share. Now I know Apple are keeping their DRM tech under wraps but for the good of the consumer media devices, which the 360 definitely is, must be able to talk to others and not be tied in to specific brands and technologies. I think we as consumers put up with far too much of this "tied in" attitude. I'm not going to go into the whole DRM debate as this will turn into an essay and not a blog post, but things need to be better supported, cross-platform.

Ideas

One Idea I have had is to write an add on to Media Center, which you can do in Vista although I'm not sure if this then shows up on the XBox? Any know for sure? Which accesses your iTunes and allows you to change its tracks / see whats on, you could then in theory stream your directx output from iTunes to your XBox. This as a concept sucks as your then tying up your PC but it may be a temp solution. Of course getting your XBox to talk to a network share or even an iTunes server would be truly amazing but we will wait and see on that one.

For When Youve Had Enough of Vista Backup

Windows Vista came with a brand new backup tool to help save millions of people from loosing all there beloved data. But what happens when the user doesnt want ever file known to man backed up or the categorisation version misses out too much information? Well when it comes to the Vista backup tool your stuffed. Thats all it does, All, or next to nothing. Gutted I decided to bin off Vista Backup tool and find a worthy replacement, amazingly it didnt take too long. Presenting Microsoft Sync Toy v1.4 ;) Amazingly SyncToy does exactly what I want to. I used to use it many moons ago for syncing my uni files on my Laptop with my Desktop PC, but since I left uni and Hayley "inherited" , stole, my laptop I havnt used it. Until tonight that was, I decided to start it up again, create all my folder shares, development, databases, documents, music and photos and then schedule it to run every week. Now on a weekly basis all my files are backed up to a spare internal HDD and an external HDD. When it comes to sync options, SyncToy has every mode under the sun, I decided to set all mine to contribute, so new files, updates and names changes are copied to my backup, however deletions arent, in case I get all shift + del happy ;) And thats it, just simple backed up goodness. Now if you are a fan of having all your information in a backup format MS can see when your reinstalling from a backup etc, why not use SyncToy to get all the data you do want onto a HDD in a suitable format and then get Vista Backup to make its own backup image of that drive, that way all the files you want, none of the ones you dont and no hassle. If only other people thought like me....

Going all Ubuntu

Well since HackDay I've been feeling all fuzzy over the sheer number of Ubuntu users and feeling I needed to use it again. I have used it before however since installing Vista I couldn't be assed to dual boot etc again. Tonight I decided to VM the latest Ubuntu release, I VM XP with IE6 and Windows Server any way for testing purposes, why not Linux. As to date I have only been using MS software as VM's i have been using Microsoft Virtual PC 2007, so i thought tonight we could add a bit of non M$ goodness. So i created my new machine, set up the RAM and HDD mounted my ISO, booted up, and chose the run / install option. This is where thigns got flaky. Once the VM had loaded from the "live" Cd the screen turned to gibberish, utter jibberish. I thought initially it was something had went astray during the boot so I rebooted the VM. Alas the error still appeared. So here I was with either Gibberish or a black screen, and both options quite hapily ate 50% of my CPU usage. After traulling the net it appears there are quite a few issues with Ubuntu on Virtual PC. the root of all this seems to be because the S3 video adapter that is emulated by MS is only 16Bit. Most Linux Distro's expect and use 24bit, hence the errors. I tried to use lots of alt methods by using lower bit rates etc but it still crashed for me, at which point i decided to give up and try VM instead. So here I am, happily installing VMServer and getting some Ubuntu loving. It's a sad state when Virtual Machines don't run properly due to poor emulation. Hopefully at some point ill get Ubuntu back on Virtual PC as it makes my life easier having them all in one place!

Frolicking with Vista - 2 - How Not To Do It

So yesterday was a long day, Im way behind in doing me mates church a website and was meant to be working on that al day. However I decided to try out the new Orcas CTP. Mistake, started installing it and the .Net Framework 3.5 install failed. Not only did it fail but it corrupt my entire ASP.Net. DOH. So I could no longer code. So I tried to do repair installs on all my frameworks, but nahdah. So, I decided to get my spare HDD installed into my machine, and configured it to be my main hdd and successfully installed Vista as I thought this would be quicker than trying to fix my XP's. Now I tried to do a clean install of Vista by doing a bodge However when i tried to activate with my official key it failed and told me i had to do an upgrade from XP :( So I was gutted, I then tried to reboot into my old XP's using the bootcfg app I posted on del.icio.us the other day but they fail to load. So Im currently royally screwed. Cant get to old boots and new vista although working fine won't activate, looks like I'm going to have to format all 3 OS drives, then install XP on 2 of them and then upgrade one of those for Vista, oh the joy. At least Ill get another storage drive out of it ....

Frolicking with Vista - 1

Well after waiting roughly 9-10 weeks for my Vista "free" upgrade, which actually cost me £12 handling and shipping :S It finally arrived. A nice new shinny Vista Home Premium - OEM. Now as expected this was an upgrade edition, so as with all older Windows OS' i was expecting to do a clean install and simply provide my XP media to prove i qualified for the upgrade. So after slapping another HDD in so i could triple boot, Dev1, Games and now the new Dev2 which will eventually lead to Dev1 being formatted, I started up the install process, slapped in me key and then was very nicely told that i couldn't clean install a Vista Upgrade it could only be done in an existing OS. Slap in the face number 1. So I then and rather rashly might I add, decide to get rid of me third HDD for now, as it was running off the slave IDE on the Secondary controller anyway and was installed under the cdrom, which took some fiddling. I decided to upgrade Dev1 as it was only reinstalled no more than 2 weeks ago following some tedious AMD X2 upgrade. I started this process fine, loads up, copies files in windows, all looked very pretty. Scheduled reboot so it can uncompress the Vista image and take over your old OS and guess what happens when the OS Setup kicks in. STOP: 0x0000007B Yes thats right a dreaded BSOD. Bugger was the first thing i said, and felt like cussing our mate Bill again. Slap in the face number 2. So here I am pondering what my next move is. Reboot and try it again. Reboots BSOD again. So here's to me hoping i can get the Old OS back as really its not changed anything, so i reboot and choose load previous version of windows. Luckily this then presented me with the usual choose your XP boot and I was happy again. However when ever I reboot now it trys to start installing vista again and if i forget to cancel it I get my loving BSOD. So after waiting for an age my Vista experience has been a bit crap so far. And last night I had another friendly encounter with it. I helped a guy from church setup his new laptop, printer and wireless Internet. Wireless took no more than 15mins. To then find that his brand new printer didn't come with Vista drivers was shocking. HP should be ashamed! So we then spent about 20mins downloading 180Mb Vista drivers off of the HP site. So it all worked fine once we had the drivers but it not shipping with them is, in my opinion, shocking. Any how hopefully tomorrow I will grace these bloglines with more joyful tales of my Vista experience

Orcas

This is the first of a couple posts I'm hoping to get finished tonight, the other two are in progress but I don't want to post them until I finish some other bits and pieces. Back to this post though. Saturday I was finally able to get all the Visual Studio Orcas downloads, and I got myself Virtual PC 2007, uncompressed the base and orcas files to give it a whirl. Now i know its CTF so you have to be patient however what I experienced yesterday was far from good :( Upon creating my new virtual machine as per the site's instructions I was presented with an error. Instead of being able to update and choose the location of my base image for the orcas machine i get the browse file window, find my file, and then click open . . . . and that's it nothign happens, you can click open as much as you want but nothing happens :( Bit of a major error as Orcas won't work without it. I then tried to load the base image. This loads up fine but could I login with the login details provided by Microsoft, hell I couldn't :( After a few searches on le Google I found that the password is actuall P@ssw0rd, not P2ssw0rd. Error 2 for Microsoft. (Error 1 was my image not wanting to update) So of course I'm now confident I can load up my virtual image just to play with Windows Server 2003 at least. Well not quite, P@ssw0rd wouldn't work either. By this point I'm pondering if I continue this venture or just give up. However not being a quitter, well often, I decided to Google my new problem. Low and behold the answer came quite quickly. Basically the Base PC image its expecting by default a US keyboard, so to get an @ you do shift + 2, I had naturally assumed that Virtual PC made this conversion for you, as that's the logical thing to do. Keyboard Mappign can't be that hard, especially as it was a Microsoft OS I was virtualizing, now armed with the solution I tried logging in again P"ssw0rd. As you can imagine I was quite happy when it logged in, however I was surprised by the fact you have to activate your windows :( very odd in my books, especially as I had disabled the network card emulation as I didn't really want Server 2003 on my network. Any how after activating the network and rebooting Windows booted fine and activated. However I still can't run orcas as the stupid orcas image wouldn't update. When I find out why I will post my solution here so other people can not be bogged down by these issues. I'm hoping to see how good orcas is one day. Probably not today though :(