Hanselminutes Podcast 81 - Vista x64 Redo for Developers
My eighty-first podcast is up. I didn't totally love the last show. It was good, but not great. I wanted to cover a few other things, but you know, you get to talking and then 20 minutes has gone by. Some listeners agreed, so, I was sitting in the hotel room on the Sunday night before I started my New Employee Orientation (NEO) at Microsoft, sick to my stomach and scared out of my gourd, and figured I'd record a solo show, with a prepped outline beforehand, and fill in the gaps in Show 80. Here it is, I hope it doesn't suck.
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Check out their UI Suite of controls for ASP.NET. It's very hardcore stuff. One of the things I appreciate about Telerik is their commitment to completeness. For example, they have a page about their Right-to-Left support while some vendors have zero support, or don't bother testing. They also are committed to XHTML compliance and publish their roadmap. It's nice when your controls vendor is very transparent.
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Enjoy. Who knows what'll happen in the next show?
About Scott
Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.
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Martijn
These days I don't know of many developers that don't use 2 monitors. I like how virtual pc 2007 allows you to have the host os on 1 monitor and the vpc on another, however do you know of a way that you can have the vpc on both monitors ?
thanks for the nice show, we are using Vista x86 on 10 Developer PC's for nearly two months now and I have to say that we have more issues than you mentioned in the show:
1) There is something wrong with the license compiler - we are using Infragistics and Dundas Charts (both need it) and if we are compiling with nant the process on some machines take significant (2 up to 4 times) longer than on others
2) Edit and Continue support for Console and Windows Form Applications is only working if you change the platform target setting for the executing assembly to x86
Poorly written installers - marked to only install on x86 even though the program itself will run on x64 without a problem (e.g. Windows Live installer, Enterprise Library, Software Factories)
Framework vs. Framework64 - a few PowerShell extensions would register with the tools under Framework which set the assembly to run with PowerShell x86. Running PowerShell x64 I needed to edit the install script to use Framework64. To get around I would prefer that there is a bit of registry inspection and dual registration.
Dual architecture PE files - I had an issue with Process Explorer where it tries to extract the x64 version into the same folder. I store it in the SYSTEM32 folder where my non-admin, day-to-day user account cannot write. I had to extract the x64 binary and replace it to maintain the storage point.
Image Mounting - Ended up dropping Virtual Clone Drive for MagicDisc which works on x64
When compared to the very first time I loaded Vista x64 (the day it became available on MSDN), support and stability are much better. I have access to all 4GB now and I'm happily running Windows Server 2008 RC0 x64 in my VMware image on my way towards testing our apps for full x64 compat.
When you mention your VM set up you always state that the VMs are on external drives. Do you have multiple external drives -- one for each VM -- or do you just have one to prevent the VMs contending for your main disk(s). Are the external drives USB or something faster?
I use VMWare, not Virtual PC so I don't know if there's any difference in this area, but my experience of using VMs on external drives is that it can be a bit of a pain.
Do you have any configuration tips for using VMs in this way?
Thanks, Nick.
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