Martin Woodward

A neat (if not well known) feature of Windows Vista is the built in ability to do a "Command Prompt Here" by selecting a folder, keeping the shift key down and right clicking on the folder.  While this is neat, I've sometimes found myself needing an Command Prompt with full administrative privileges.

I stumbled upon an excellent tip from Randy Rants on how to get an elevated command prompt here. 

Personally, I like my admin command prompts to have a dark red background color so that I remember it is running with elevated privileges (see my previous post if you want a admin command prompt icon using this meme).  Anyway, my registry entires look something like:-

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\runas]
@="Admin Comm&and Prompt here"
"NoWorkingDirectory"=""
"Extended"=""

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\runas\command]
@="cmd.exe /t:4f /k \"pushd %L && title Command Prompt\""

Have fun - usual warnings about registry hacking and backing up etc. According to Randy this should also work for XP users who run with non-Admin privileges.

RC0 of Windows Server 2008 was made available earlier this week.  I am currently installing it inside a Virtual PC and I have to say I'm impressed so far.  The installation process is much faster and smoother.  Also, it is very strange to see how far the "secure as default" mantra of Microsoft has come over the past few years.  In Window Server 2008 when you first install even the Sound Service is disabled and you have to enable it before sounds will come out of your soundcard (this is made easy by some nice UI from the standard volume control).  How times have changed... 

BTW, when installing Windows Server 2008 inside Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 I said that it should use the Windows Vista soundcard when creating the initial VPC configuration and it seems to work great.

With the Trustworthy Computing initiative, we'd all thought the days of easter eggs in Microsoft products had died, however three enterprising young men from the Anti-piracy Team at Microsoft managed to get themselves included as part of the security hologram on the front of every copy of the Windows Vista media.  If you have a copy of Vista handy, take a close look at the color windows logos, in the outermost circles you will see two large rectangles with two small rectangles either side (about 1mm high).  If you zoom into these rectangles you'll either get a public domain picture of an old master, or the picture above of the folks that designed the hologram.  Good work fellas!  For more information, see the Windows Vista blog, the site of the guy who noticed this picture or the Engadget post about the story.

In Windows Vista, one of the first things I do on a new machine is create an "Admin Shell".  The steps I do are as follows:-

1. Copy the shortcut of your favorite command prompt (PowerShell or cmd.exe)
2. Rename the shortcut "Admin Shell" or whatever you want.  I use "Admin Shell" and then eventually the Windows, "Admin" keyboard shortcut works for it when I have use the computer long enough.
3. Edit the shortcut properties.  (Right click, Properties).  In Shortcut, Advanced... check the "run as administrator" option. Then set the Colors, Screen background to be something that will let you know that this command prompt is running as administrator - I use 51,0,0 as the RGB value to give the shell a nice but slight scary red tinge.

The only thing that was missing was an icon to make this stand out more as my admin shell.  Here is a red version of the PowerShell icon that I just hacked together - enjoy (Right click, save as...)

File attachment: admin_shell.ico (72kb)

When debugging network issues, I tend to fallback to good old telnet as a way of opening a port to a machine.  Being able to do "telnet myserver 80" to check if a web server is up, listening, resolvable and no firewalls getting in the way helps you figure out where the problem is.

I'm staying in a hotel at the moment, and struggling with hotel WiFi.  While debugging the network problems I realized that the telnet client is not installed by default on Vista.

To install it,  go to Control Panel, Programs, and then "Turn Windows Features on or off" under "Programs and Features".  Scroll down a bit and then Telnet Client is available.

When running Remote Desktop from Windows Vista I've been getting the following error popping up everytime I connect.  It is a little alarming and I've never really sat down and figured out what this was telling me - basically I translated this to mean "Vista has a new, more secure Remote Desktop client, you are talking to an older version of the server - is this ok?".  I've been meaning to figure out how to make this dialog go away for a while and was just assuming I was dumb.  However a couple of few weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending the MVP Summit and every single Microsoft employee that used remote desktop to talk to his or her machine somewhere else on campus also got this dialog pop up - so I figured that I wasn't being that dumb after all - or maybe just as dumb as everyone else, which considering the company I was keeping at the time I would take as a compliment.

It took me a while to figure out how to get rid of the dialog when connecting to a known older version of the remote desktop server.  When doing the connection, click on the "Options >>" button and then the "Advanced" tab.  In the "Server Authentication" section, change the authentication option to "Always connect, even if authentication fails".

Then, after a bit of digging around I found this great post from Scott Forsyth who points out that there is a registry key you can also use to control this behavior, add a DWORD value called AuthenticationLevelOverride to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Terminal Server Client and set it to 0.  You will no longer get prompted and the Server Authentication option in the advanced tab will be grayed out.  Obviously that reduces the security when remoting to your machine so it is up to you if you want to take that risk to save you the annoyance of seeing that dialog any more.

Today, I received a fancy new Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter 8000 mouse courtesy of Microsoft.  This is a Bluetooth enabled mouse with some useful extra buttons for slide advance and a built in laser pointer when presenting.  It is a nice mobile mouse that, while not without flaws, I would still recommend.  Anyway, I wanted to use my Dell's built-in Bluetooth model (the Dell Wireless 350 Bluetooth Module) rather than the supplied Microsoft Bluetooth USB dongle.  It was then that I noticed my Bluetooth wasn't working properly under Vista - when I searched for new devices, it just wasn't finding any.

I had a bit of a search around, and people were suggesting all sorts of nasty hacks.  In the end, I came across the new official Dell drivers that were posted on the 26th January 2007 so I'm making this post to hopefully get caught in the search indexes and help out a few other fellow early adopters.  To download the Dell Wireless 350 drivers for Windows Vista - visit the official Dell site.  The install flashes the Bluetooth chipset and installs all the stuff necessary to get your Bluetooth up and running.  I also downloaded the Reliability update for USB stack in Windows Vista 32-bit (KB925528) (not sure if I needed to or not, it just sounded like a good thing) and the latest version of Microsoft excellent IntelliPoint software.

One of the things I've always enjoyed about Windows 2000 -> Windows XP -> Windows Vista is that no matter how much the UI changes, some shortcuts just seem to stay around allowing me to quickly navigate around the system.  One that has survived is right clicking on My Computer and then selecting "Manage" - which takes you to an MMC console with most of the commonly used snap-ins pre-loaded.  However, one I used a lot more has disappeared.  I used to to right-click on the "My Network" shortcut in the start menu and select "Properties".  That would take me to the network connections wizard.  In Vista it takes me to the Network and Sharing Center screen (possibly helpful for my Dad, but not what I was after).

From the dialog, you can press "Manage network connection" and it takes you to the good old network connections dialog

However, I wanted a quick way to access this from my keyboard, so I used a tactic I've found I've been doing a lot with Windows Vista - I create a shortcut to it that I placed in my Programs menu.  The trick was to find the control panel file responsible for this dialog.  After a bit of digging I tracked it down to be "%SystemRoot%\System32\ncpa.cpl".

Here is a screenshot of my shortcut settings in case you want to do the same

The Vista Aero interface is awesome - but capturing that beauty has always been hard for me.  All that changed this morning when Jeff Atwood put me on to an awesome tool by Kenny Kerr. Kenny Kerr's Windows Clippings 1.5 is simply the best capture tool for Windows Vista that I have used.  I am probably the last person in the world to hear about it, but on the off-chance that I am the second to last, here are some of the things I like and why you should use it:-

1. It can capture shadows, transparency etc really well.  However, it can magically take out all the cruft that you get from background windows coming through.
2. When you are doing a screen capture - the effect that is used while you are selecting the windows is suitably beautiful for a capture tool that takes such nice pictures.
3. Screen shots are saved in a file name using the window name of the application you were taking a screenshot of.

It does one thing and does it really, really well.  Thanks Jeff for the top tip!  For a little user-guide on how to use Kenny's excellent tool see his post (with pretty pictures) here.

Over the next few months I'm going to be doing a bit of traveling to the US again, and this offer could not have come at a better time - free TMobile access from my Windows Vista Laptop - sweet!  I'll post back when I have been through the sign-up process to see what validation it does of your Vista running status, I hope for their sakes that it is a little more than a User-Agent check...

Update: Sadly for them, they are simply doing a user-agent check. This offer may run out pretty quickly so sign up now if you can...

So, next on my list was to get iTunes working so that I can easily feed my podcast addiction.  I am very nearly at the point of purchasing a new MP3 player so I am ready for any excuse to tip me over the edge.  Anyway, to get iTunes 7.0.2 to work correctly on Windows Vista RTM, I had to run the application as an administrator.  It only seems to need to run as administrator to get iTunes to Sync with my iPod, but as that is the only reason I run iTunes it is kinda handy.  This gave me the change to make my first foray into the world of the Program Compatibility Wizard.

Step 1:  Press the Windows Globe (or press the windows key on your keyboard) and go to Control Panel.  In the search dialog, type "compat".  Click on the link "Use an older program with this version of Windows".

Step 2:  Press Next

Step 3: Select "I want to locate the program manually" and press Next

Step 4:  Type the program location or browse for it.  Mine was in "c:\Program Files\iTunes\iTunes.exe" which is the default install location for iTunes.  Press Next

Step 5:  Select "Do not apply a compatibility mode" and press Next

Step 6:  Press "Next" on the display settings screen, nothing needed to be changed here

Step 7:  Finally.  Check the box "Run this program as an administrator" and press Next.

Step 8:  Press Next again and confirm that everything works as expected, then save the settings. 

There we go.  Hopefully they'll be a Vista compatible version of iTunes soon.

I'd been having trouble getting Visual Studio Team Suite up and running on my new vista install.  I was assuming it was something nasty in the long winded installs of Visual Studio Team Suite, Team Explorer, SP1 for both and the Beta of the Vista GDR for Team Suite.  Every time I tried to start Visual Studio, I got the following error:-

"An error has occurred while trying to access the log file. Logging may not function properly".

Luckily for me, Gabriel Lozano-Morán posted the solution over on the MSDN Forums - turns out that I had installed a Visual Studio Plug-in as part of my VMware Workstation 6 Beta.  I didn't really want this plug-in from within Visual Studio anyway, so I re-ran the VMWare setup and removed the plug-in.  All is now working just fine.  Thanks Gabriel !.

I was having trouble getting my external monitor to work properly.  The NVidia Quadro FX Go1400 installed in my Dell Precision M70 is quite clever when it comes to auto-switching and automatically selecting the best resolution.  However, Vista was also trying to be clever and the two collided.  Anyway, to cut a long story short, I stumbled upon the Windows Mobility Center which is a handy place for laptop owners.  Pressing the Windows-X key brings this up instantly and you can turn your Wi-Fi On/Off, mess with external monitor configuration etc etc.  Not exactly rocket science, but it'll add it to my short list of Windows key shortcuts that I actually use.

Well, the time came.  I got too jealous of everyone with Windows Vista and decided to upgrade myself.  Before I start complaining, the reason I installed Vista on my main dev box is because I like it.  I like the fact I use the mouse less.  I like the fact I get prompted when things want admin status.  I like the fancy UI.  I like the faster start-up times and the additional support for mobile users.  I upgraded to Vista because I like it.  It runs great on my Mac Mini so I decided to bite the bullet and see what it is like to run on day in day out.

However, an upgrade before the official consumer launch means that I knew it was going to be painful.  So much so that I actually bought a new hard drive for my laptop and installed Vista on it.  My dev machine is vitally important to me so I wanted to make sure I could roll back quickly at any point.  I took the opportunity to upgrade from a 60Gb drive to a 100Gb drive at the same time as I'm guessing that I'm going to have to use a Win XP virtual PC image quite a lot for the forseeable future so that I can test / reproduce problems with software in XP.

I started the upgrade on Saturday so that I would be productive again by Monday morning.  The actual install of the OS went very well, by far my easiest install of Vista to date.  I have a Dell Precision M70 and my Windows Experience Index is 4.1 - constrained by the CPU which is a Pentium M 2.26Ghz.  My new hard drive got a 5.0 and my Aero experience got a 5.9 from my NVidia Quadro FX Go1400.  Eclipse and Teamprise all installed just fine and worked with no problems so I knew I was good to start work Monday morning.  I've created a new category on my blog called "Vista" in which I'll post my trials and tribulations as I use the OS day in day out as a Team System developer.

Dave Glover has held onto the title of world's smallest Team Foundation Server instance since August 2006.  However, I have a confession to make. 

On Tuesday I was doing an MSDN webcast demonstrating the Teamprise plug-in.  We have a bunch of TFS test instances over in our head office in Champaign, but I was doing the webcast from my office in Northern Ireland.  I was a little worried about running live meeting, routing my VoIP phone call and also accessing a test TFS instance over the VPN back into the office all on my 2Mb ADSL connection so I figured I would play safe and talk to a local instance of TFS.  Normally I talk to one running on my laptop - however, I had a spare machine sitting on the desk right next to me that I can connect to over my Gigabit Ethernet.  It is dual core with 2GB RAM and 120GB hard disk just sitting idle - so I figured I would put TFS on it.  The machine worked a dream, and the demo passed off flawlessly (well, apart from a few presenter glitches, but you can't blame TFS for that).  This was a little surprising for me, as the machine in question was my Mac Mini...

Courtesy of the good folks at SizeEasy.com here is a comparison between my Mac Mini, Dave Glovers Mini ITX system in a Morex 3888 case and a can of pop.

Now, I cheated a little bit.  Rather than installing a clean version of TFS (with all the pre-requisites such as Windows Server 2003, SQL Server 2005 etc) I simply dropped in a test VMWare image that I normally use for demos into a beta version of VMWare Workstation 6 that I had installed on the Vista partition of my Mac Mini.  I'm not sure if virtualized instances count in the World's Smallest TFS Server book of records, but maybe now you can see why I was surprised when it worked so well :-)

I'm loving Windows Vista RTM.  I'm actually considering moving my main development PC over - just need to be certain that everything I use will work just fine - in the meantime, I'll stick with it running from my Core Duo based Mac Mini.  Today, I stumbled over a great blog from Tim Sneath, a Windows Vista Evangelist.  He has a series of "Windows Vista Secret's" that are well worth subscribing to.  One of the things I've found when using Vista is that my hands can stay on the keyboard much more - making me significantly faster to navigate around the system.  I was particularly please to read his Windows Vista Secret #10: Open and Elevated Command Prompt in Six Keystrokes.

The "trick" in the tip is that if you press Ctrl+Shift+Enter on a command in the search bar, it will run that command with Admin rights - therefore to run a command shell as admin Tim recommends you do "Win key; type cmd; press Ctrl+Shift+Enter; and then hit Alt+C to confirm the elevation prompt". But you can also use the Ctrl+Shift+Enter shortcut to fire up Notepad as admin and then have the ability to edit your hosts file etc.

Personally, I have a shortcut to Cmd that opens it up with Admin rights and a different background colour (called "Admin Console") - that way I can get to an admin console by typing "a" at the search bar and the console is always a different colour so I remember which console is the admin one.  To do that, copy the "Command Prompt" shortcut from the Accessories group in Program Files, rename as "Admin Console" or whatever you want.  Go to the "Shortcut" tab and select "Advanced...", then check the "Run as administrator" box.  Press Ok, and then press Apply.  Finally you can go to the Colors tab and edit the background colour - I use the dark red to signify danger.

Just as a follow up to my previous post, I was having trouble switching back into Mac OS X once booted into Vista.  As part of the Boot Camp process, Apple allow you to burn a CD containing the Windows XP Drivers and Utilities.  Included is a handy utility to select the default Startup Disk.  Using various tools, I was able to extract the Control Panel extension and install it into Vista.  However, I was unable to get this to work - even when elevated to Administrator - it would always complain about not being able to get Administrative rights.  Reading around the problem a little I think this may be either a Vista security thing or a driver thing (probably the former).  I think pn XP the utility somehow manages to write a variable into the EFI telling it which boot partition to use - whatever mechanism is trys seems to not be working on my installation - but they again I may have just installed it wrong in my attempt to hack around BootCamps "Drivers for XP" installation program that really doesn't work on Vista.

The alternative is to press the (alt) Option key on startup.  However, I have a cheap Belkin KVM that I'm running this through and it didn't seem to work (think it is something to do with the USB keyboard detection).  Thankfully, this tip came to my rescue, by holding the menu key of my Mac Mini's Apple Remote I got the bootloader screen allowing me to select my OS X partition - nice.  Then I booted straight back into Vista, because I really am loving it :-)

At the moment, we are going through a heavy testing phase on Version 2.0 of the Teamprise Client Suite.  This happily coincided with the RTM of Windows Vista, so - like any self-respecting Early Adopter, I figured I should go install the RTM edition of Vista and see how Teamprise performs.

Initially, I tired out Vista on a laptop that I've had for a while (yes, that one).  The Vista RTM experience was a lot better than with any of the pre-releases, but the latest graphics drivers for the ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 inside the Compaq nx7010 were still no good at driving the built in display so I had to switch back to the XP drivers again.  Even then, the graphics card only scored a 1.9 on the Aero experience index - making it unable to run with the Fancy Aero interface.  Obviously that wasn't quite good enough - so I had to look around for another spare machine that wasn't too important (i.e. not my main development machine).

Recently I acquired a new Intel Core Duo based Mac Mini for testing Teamprise on Mac OS X.  It's an awesome little machine - but the dual processor, 2Gb RAM, 120Gb HD little machine was crying out for more abuse - so I downloaded and installed Boot Camp and then installed Vista on my Mac Mini.

I have to say, the whole installation process worked flawlessly.  All the "out the box" drivers just worked allowing my to connect to Windows Update and download the latest versions of everything.  The Aero experience score on the Mac Mini is 3.4 - and that experience feels great I must say.  I really do like Vista as an OS.  I spend a lot of my time on other operating systems, and I feel like I have the familiarity and productivity of Windows but with the extra security and UI bells and whistles that previously came along with Mac OS X and Ubuntu.  In fact, I'm writing this blog post right now from the loveliness of Windows Vista on a Mac Mini.

Anyway, the good news to report is that under the RC of Java 6, Teamprise runs just great.  No security issues, nothing.  So far not a single Vista related issue has been reported.  Also, I got that lovely excited feeling back - like when I first started using Teamprise on the Mac.  It should shouldn't look this pretty and work so well, don't you love it when the "write once, run anywhere" promise of Java holds true...

I logged into my MSDN subscription account this morning to find the following additions in my Operating Systems section!  Obviously, the first thing I did was to start the download of the (single) DVD image for all 32-bit versions of Windows Vista.  I tired to request my product key for Windows Vista Ultimate Edition, however there was an error in the MSDN Application - I guess that they are still getting those set up.  Anyway, the current estimate is that my download will finish in 20 hours 10 minutes (and that's while the US is asleep), so I'm guessing the keys will be available by the time I finish downloading.

Update:  It's 2pm now and my download got to 16% complete before it was interrupted.  Now I cannot get a connection at all probably because everyone else in the world is trying to download it.  I think I'd better wait until the weekend...

Update:  It's now 6pm and my download speed has picked up to 246Kbs (the maximum for my ADSL link), also the product key section of MSDN is now working and I am the proud owner of a Windows Vista Ultimate Edition key!!  Hmm, I wonder what I'm going to be doing this weekend :-)

I just discovered Microsoft Max.  While the application still seems to be in the early stages, it has to be the prettiest application I have ever used - just take a look at the semi-transparent splash screen with it's lovely wobbly progress bar. 

This is currently a photo-organizing/sharing app based on top of the WPF and WCF stuff in the .NET 3.0 release (think Picasa but from Microsoft).  I'm pretty happy to see that my Dell M70 with Nvida Quadro FX Go 1400 graphics card qualifies as a "Tier 2" device for WPF world - hopefully signifying a Vista upgrade will actually give me the fancy look and feel.

As far as the application goes - currently it allows you to automatically share photos with your friends so that they automatically receive new photos inside Microsoft Max.  It also has a decent RSS aggregator.  Apple has something similar in the iLife suite of products for Mac OS X, I think it is iPhoto, don't remember.  Anyway the use case I have in mind is an easy way for my father to get the latest photos of my family growing up automatically on his desktop so that he can print them / burn them to DVD.

However, while Microsoft Max looks incredibly nice, there are some problems with the current architecture as I see it.  The main one is that without the equivalent of a .Mac account, files are transferred directly between my machine and my fathers - meaning both machines have to be on for this to work.  It also has to make it through the multiplicity of NAT's, firewalls etc separating our machines.  I hoping that there is a backing Windows Live online service in the works to help with this, we'll see.  The fact that you have to have a MS Passport to use the software certainly suggests that this may be the case.  The lack of information on the Max web site leads you to think that this is the basis of some sort of social network type application - more indications that in the Web 2.0 world Microsoft are stepping up the pace to justify a specific OS to be an ideal complement to peoples new online lifestyles.

Anyway, this bodes well for applications coming the pipe from Microsoft to make Vista a more consumer friendly OS.  Also it shows what can be done with WPF. 

While WPF has me very excited, I'm also a little scared.  You are going to have to have a modicum of graphical talent to use WPF sensibly or you could very rapidly have a very ugly application.  It's looking like application vendors are going to have to hire some of the creative talents from the games studios to make apps that are visually pleasing. 

One thing is certain, the Windows world is going to have a revolution in UI design over the next 5 years - probably the biggest change in the history of Windows - and anyone not keeping up is soon going to have a very dated looking application.