If you are as old as me you will remember the Cairo project, an attempt to create an object based layer on top of what was then Windows NT (remember that?). I was lucky enough to see some of the prototype Cairo builds but they never came to fruition. The best bit was the OFS (Object File System) which was the pre-cursor to WinFS (which also died), but the flashy bit was the UI which eventually was toned down in Windows 2000.
Well now some crazy guys are re-creating Cairo, or at least the shell bits, initially for Vista but also later for XP (Hooray). I’m not entirely sure what they will achieve with this, but almost anything is better than the current Vista shell. So we’ll have to wait and see, but it looks pretty.
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Thanks Microsoft! just got a nice email telling me they are sending me a retail copy Vista for participating in the VHD development program. Unfortunately its coming from the US so will probably attract a hefty import duty charge which will make it not very free, but its the thought that counts.
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I spent a few hours further enhancing my MinVista implementation, and its getting closer. Hopefully I’ll get some time over xmas to refine it further, as I can see some good gains trimming away some of the fat in this build. Talking to people in MS the news sounds good, it seems the message has hit home that the succesor to Vista needs to be more svelte and modular so I’m hopeful beyond Vista R2.
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I have just been trying out the CTP of PowerShell 2.0 to see whats new, and there are good signs of how it really is maturing into a super admin environment. Interestingly, as someone who still see’s the roots of CMD.EXE in its first ancestor, CP/M’s Command Console Processor (remember the back to front logic copying files with PIP?), I still have an issue weaning myself off it and permamently onto PwoerShell. I think that perhaps because of the DCL like structure of the commands it seems more effort to perform a task than in CMD, no matter how much more powerful it is. But with V2 I’m going to make it my default console becuause its so seductive to just be able to CD ENV: into environment variables or CD HKLM: into the registry and then just do a DIR! Try this:
cd HKCU:\software\microsoft\windows\CurrentVersion\run
Get-Acl
… and you will see the permissions for this key! How useful is that, wish this existed back in ‘96.
I love the fact that I can just create a registry key and add values, or grab BIOS data info into a variable with $x = Get-WmiObject Win32_BIOS and then $x.manufacturer contains the BIOS manufacturer name like “American Megatrends Inc.”. Ten years ago we were writing Win32 apps to call from scripts to get this sort of info, all credit to Jeffrey Snover for pulling it all together and making a shell that is flecible enough to leverage and be leveraged.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=60deac2b-975b-41e6-9fa0-c2fd6aa6bc89&displaylang=en
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Sadly, the latest drop of Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Vista doesn’t seem to have addressed the latent performance issues that continue to dog this version for me. One of the interesting aspects is that performace loss for me is not just about the sluggish performance but also the (un)usability of some of some of the Vista ‘enhancements’. The biggest problem I have is the Explorer window where I end up constant renaming files or selecting files or changing columns! One odd thing I have noticed is that Vista generally seems to perform better on 512MB systems as opposed to 1 or 2GB. Scarily, I knocked up a quick app via which I can do bulk copying faster than explorer, I’ll try and do some timings but despite my fiendishly clever code, Explorer should be faster.
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I didn’t notice this before but Vista SP1 actually supports my video card as a DX10 card! Not noticed any difference day to day under Vista, but XP seems so much faster anyway I probably wouldnt notice for a long time.
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I just got a new laptop for Vic which came pre-loaded with Vista Home premium. Vic knows as much about computers as I know about drama, but it only took her two hours to ask if she could have XP back like her old laptop… Its a real shame that Vista has turned out the way it has as a visually attratctive but slow and overweight version of XP in drag.
I asked Vic to persist with Vista for a while and give it a chance … but the final straw came when she tried to copy her photos off her usb key … can you see why ?
I had to agree that it would be somewhat unreasonable to wait nearly 24 years for the copy to complete. This put the 6 days the DVD burn dialog told me into perspective!
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I was pleased to see Microsoft actually listened to the many voices asking for Windows XP to remain available until Vista’s successor appears. Although the extension is only until mid-2008 I expect this will be extended again until a suitable successor appears.
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The answer has to be yes. Anyone who knows me will be aware of my obsession with making my apps smaller and more optimized, its a legacy of memory constrained systems I grew up with computers like the 1K ZX80 and Apple ][ and CP/M systems with 64K RAM. I can’t stand software bloat, and it shows in altaVENTE apps with our players and viewers are generally about ~300KB in size even though they do amazing things.
So, imagine my disbelief today when I was told that adding a Vista compatible set of icons would double the average size of our players! That is software bloat gone mad!
Of course the reason for this is the support for all sizes of gorgeous Vista icons right up to 256 x 256. I love these icons but because we need to place them as resources in our apps they just bloat them completely. I wouldn’t mind if we could ship the icons as a separate file if the user wanted them, and keep them out of the EXE, but we can’t, as Explorer relies on being able to enumerate the icon from the EXE…
So, the solution ? Well, my plan is to go to an 8-bit grayscale icon, which can still look gorgeous, but is svelte as well. Less is more if you know what I mean. We’ll do some prototype and post them for feedback soon.
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Today the BBC announced on the news that they will release the on-demand iPlayer so licence payers can watch programmes up to 7 days after broadcast free of charge on their PC Unfortunately my demographic of non-ethnic, male professional, IT aware meant I couldn’t take part in the iPlayer trials, but now the beta will be available to everyone on July 27th. Like 4OD and Sky Anytime before the iPlayer will only support Windows XP SP2 as an OS, so my Vista Home Media Center still can’t participate in any of the current on-demand services available to me. The ITV version is coming soon, but I’m not sure what their criteria will be.
There is a darker side to this though, as both Sky Anytime and 4OD silently install Kontiki P2P service so that your PC now becomes a distributed server for other users. There’s nothing inherently wrong with P2P as a technology, but you are giving up bandwidth to act as an unpaid server for Sky or Channel 4, and doing so without being told or compensated. You also have no control over how much bandwidth you contribute and when its used. I will be looking into how I can take control of my bandwidth when I have time and will post my results. Not sure what technology the iPlayer service will employ.
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In the true spirit of the Windows 3.1 usability labs, copying and deleting files in Windows is as flawed as ever. I sometimes wonder whether the coders and PMs for the Windows file management components must actually use Linux or OS X. I’m sure they can’t use Windows, or, they have never tried to copy or delete a large amount of files within which one is open by another process, at which point Windows helpfully stops and doesn’t continue…WHY? … How can this make any logical sense? OK I know I should use Robocopy to ease my copy woes, but why doesn’t MS help and put the functionality of Robocopy into plain old copy ? </rant>
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I was just updating a script (which I really should migrate to PowerShell) on Vista and I found that the classic command line utility XCopy is now deprecated in Vista, meaning its still there but on the way out. I discovered this when I was updating some parameters and checked the help, which helpfully informed me that XCopy was now deprecated and I should use RoboCopy. Robocopy has always been a ResKit tool that I have never relied on to be present on the base OS, but it does indeed ship with Vista. A bit of googling and I found Jon Box of Microsoft also found the same issue as me.
So farewell XCopy, we knew you well, and now we need to get to know your descendant as well. RIP.
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I just discovered this by accident today, once a user has downloaded the genuine advantage activex and confirmed their copy of Windows is genuine, the user is redirected to the real download URL. Once you have the URL neither the user nor anyone else who has the URL needs to get checked …. not that I don’t have genuine Windows, as a Gold Partner I’m swimming in licences, but its just time consuming to do all the steps…
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We hit a .NET problem on Vista x64 that took quite a bit of working out. Basically Rhapzode was running fine on XP and Vista x86 but choked when running on Vista x64, with a BadImageFormatException error. The problem was resolved by re-compiling the source with an x86 target, and all was well again as Rhapzode then ran in WOW64 instead of trying to run as a native x64 .NET app. If you suspect this might be a problem for you, then just look in task manager against your process to check it is marked with a *32 meaning its running in the WOW64.
This worked for us because we had the source code, but what if you don’t have access to the source code or can’t recompile. Well, help is at hand in the .NET Framework SDK. The SDK contains a utility called the CorFalgs Conversion Tool (CorFlags.exe). CorFlages examines and can modify the PE header which is used by the CLR to understand how to load the file.
Its a command line tool, and you can run it in view only mode to see what the PE header contains. eg
C:\corflags myAssembly.exe
Microsoft (R) .NET Framework CorFlags Conversion Tool. Version 2.0.50727.42
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
Version : v2.0.50727
CLR Header: 2.5
PE : PE32
CorFlags : 1
ILONLY : 1
32BIT : 0
Signed : 0
Cryptically, the PE data reports that the CLR header is 2.5 … which it is for .NET 2.0, and of course 2.0 for .NET 1.x … makes perfect sense!
Anyway, back to the original premise of forcing .NET apps to run in the WOW64. You can also use CorFlags.exe to rewrite the PE header with a 32bit (x86) flag to force the app to run in the WOW64 on Vista x64. To mark the file as 32 bit use this command line;
C:\corflags myAssembly.exe /32BIT+
You can also reverse the process with /32BIT-. Hopefully this trick will help someone in distress out in the future.
More info here http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms164699(vs.80).aspx
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There’s a useful whitepaper on how Windows Aero works and certainly highlighted a couple of things to me that I had been unaware of. One thing is that there is an Aero state that looks like Vista Basic but is in fact fully compositioned and is using the DWM. Its called Opaque, and the reason it looks confusing is it has the properties of Aero Glass but the borders are not transparent. As the author points out, a sure fire way to check if Aero is running is to hit Win+Tab keys and see if you get the 3D window stack displayed known as ‘Flip 3D’. Anyway, if your job requires you to support Vista this is a worthwhile read and quite interesting, although somewhat superficial.
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/display/aero_rules.mspx
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It irks me somewhat that after years of development on Vista one of the core elements for graphics, DirectX10, does not have any available drivers … I have a DX10 capable card but under Vista it shows up as a nasty 640×480 generic VGA adapter. How can this be ?
As an aside, my DX10 card has more memory a processing power than most average coporate PC’s with a whopping 768MB RAM (WOW!). If you are as old as me then you will probably remember seeing huge indigo colured cubes costing thens of thousands of pounds made by SGi for advanced graphics in Bank data centres which would seem positively lethargic in comparisson to these cards. Progress is truly amazing!
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