If you’re a lucky MSDN subscriber and have been waiting for the final Windows Vista bits, they’re available for download now.

What I’ve been waiting for is also ready: the ability to request a key for your Vista development system. I’ve got mine and am writing this from Windows Live Writer running on my shiny new Vista Ultimate work laptop. Yay!

Categories: Microsoft, Vista
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The review from news.com mentions several problems with RC2 that seem like steps backwards from RC1.

That may actually be the case, since, as far as I understand it, RC2 is built from what’s called the “RTM branch” in the source control system Microsoft uses to keep their code neat and orderly.

The thing about the way Microsoft uses source control is that they create “branches” of source code at certain points in time. This is documented at http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix-win2000/invitedtalks/lucovsky.ppt. Granted, this presentation refers to Windows 2000, but I doubt the principles have changed much.

The point that I want to make is that the RC2 source code (from the “RTM branch”, according to http://www.istartedsomething.com/20060901/windows-vista-beta-features-vs-content/) may have been branched off from the main trunk some time after the RC1 branch, but may not have had some of the RC1 code integrated back into it. Some code from the RC1 branch may not make it into the RTM branch at all, if it’s judged to be of dubious quality.

Judging by the fact that what Microsoft terms the “RTM branch” started with build numbers at 5700, and that RC2 has a build number of 5744, calling it “RC2″ is a bit of a misnomer, really. It would more accurately be called an “RTM preview”, but since lots of folks have been screaming for an “RC2″, that’s what Microsoft probably decided to give them.

It would be interesting to hear some Microsoft folks comment on that news.com review or my little commentary here.

Categories: Vista
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The coolest thing in it is the Reliability Monitor:

It tells you about crashes that happened in the past, applications that installed or uninstalled with failures, hardware failures, windows failures and so on, and then it compiles all that data into a nice visual to give you an impression of how stable your system is / was.

If you click on a graph point in the past, you get a report of what exactly happened on that day. In the graph above, I was playing around with getting OneNote 2007 Beta 2 TR installed after I had upgraded an Office 2007 Beta 2 install that didn’t include that particular component originally. I had lots of installer crashes and app crashes that day, and it shows in the dip in the graph.

Of course, the Performance graphs are not too shabby either:

It finally includes a hard drive monitor as well, not just CPU, memory and networking!

You can find it in Performance Information and Tools – Advanced Tools (or by typing “rel” into the Start Menu Search Box):

Categories: Vista
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I ran across an issue with my home network server, which is running an older version of Linux and Samba to share files around the house. Vista RC1 wouldn’t authenticate with the server. After some digging using Google I found out that you need to change one of the local security policies (Local Policies – Security Options – Network Security: LAN manager authentication level) from “Send NTLMv2 response only” to “Send LM & NTLM – use NTLMv2 session security if negotiated”.

Unfortunately the machine I had this problem on didn’t have the secpol.msc file on it (I still don’t know why), so I dug some more and found that there is an equivalent raw registry key:

HKLM/System/CurrentControlCset/Control/LSA – LMCompatibilityLevel

It’s 3 by default on Vista RC1 (NTLM2 only) and I had to change it to 1 (LM & NTLM, NTLMv2 if negotiated).

I’m afraid that this will bite some other folks like me who have “unorthodox” network setups at home. I hope Microsoft has a good reason to ship with this default setting, but I’d advocate they change it.

Update: A friend at Microsoft helped me realize that enabling LM & NTLM can be a potential security risk. Passwords can be stolen when using LM and NTLM. Vista uses NTLM2 by default to guard against the known vulnerabilities of NT & NTLM authentication.

In my personal situation I’m not that worried about changing the setting, since my computers stay isolated on my home network, but it’s probably not for everybody.

Categories: Vista
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I had to do this recently to make a backup of a system hard drive for “just in case”…

I found some instructions using Google (https://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=181082&SiteID=1) and here is the gist of what needs to be done (to spare you from having to read the whole thread):

Run a command prompt as Administrator and do the following:

BCDEDIT /set {bootmgr} device boot
BCDEDIT /set {default} device boot
BCDEDIT /set {default} osdevice boot

Then run Ghost 8.x like this:

ghost.exe -fdsp
or
ghost32.exe -fdsp

I tried this with two hard drives (once with a test drive, then with the real one), and it worked beatifully.

Categories: Vista
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To me Windows Vista marks a great new milestone for software developers. Not just because Microsoft invested years of development into a new programming framework, but because that framework will be included out of the box. Until now, if you wanted to take advantage of the power of the .Net Framework (1.0, 1.1 and 2.0) you had to either include the installer for the framework or create some other magic to get it on the user’s system (asking the user to please, please download and install it first?)

With Vista, not only do you get the .Net Framework 2.0 (much improved over the previous versions) in the box, but also the amazingly powerful Windows Presentation Foundation (which is what I’ve worked with), Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation (two pieces I know nothing about yet).

This will lower the barrier to entry for applications developed using these powerful tools to zero. As long as you’re writing your application for Vista you can be sure the basic requirements are there.

There will be issues with certain features of WPF (rendering in software vs. hardware, especially for 3D), but the framework helps you detect these issues and makes it possible to adapt your application to lower its “flashyness” (RenderCapability.Tier, remember this needs to be shifted down by 16 bits if you want to use 0, 1 and 2 as the human readable values).

To me Windows Presentation Foundation is the most important technology to come out of Microsoft for a long time. I’ve never written too much actual Win32 or even MFC/ATL UI code for client applications, but I’ve done a lot of HTML / CSS stuff and pure business object stuff (COM/ATL). More about that in my next post. I don’t want this to get too long.

Categories: Vista, WPF
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Build 5600.16384 is the RC1 build of Vista that Microsoft published to select testers on Connect today. It will be more widely available next week.

Categories: Vista
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