Adam Caudill

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1

I must have missed the memo on this, but it seems the first service pack for Visual Studio 2005 has been released (release notes). This release should add a lot of stability to the IDE and resolve of number of issues (such as the frequent VB compiler crashes). It’s a rather large download, approximately 450 MB, and is rather slow to install, but it promises to be well worth it.

The one real downside, is that you shouldn’t plan on doing much while it’s installing; the almost 400 MB of RAM consumed during parts of the installation may slow your system to a crawl. So, make plans to do something else while it’s working, because you won’t be.

Things You Shouldn’t Worry About

I’ve been a fan of Patrick’s blog for some time now, and one of his recent articles, Things You Shouldn’t Worry About, really shines. While I can’t agree with everything, most of the points really make sense. If you run an ISV, or are thinking about starting one, I highly recommend that you read this, it’s well worth it.

Yes, I am alive!

My blog has been rather quiet recently, largely due to a project I’ve been working on for one of the largest banks in the country. The project, a dynamic, scriptable, plug-in driven data capture system, has finally been released and is in production. I’ll not bore you with any of the details, so I’ll get right to the point:

I’ve got a life again!

Well, at least as much of a life as a developer / technologist / workaholic ever has. 😉 I should be back to posting on a more regular schedule now, sorry for the extended silence.

Want a free copy of Vista?

Microsoft is currently running a promotion for free copies of Vista Business Edition and Office 2007 Professional. The deal looks a bit like this: You watch 3 videos, answer some questions about the videos, then fill out a form with a bunch of personal information. Sounds to me like a great deal. This is quite similar to a promotion some time back for a free copy of Visual Studio.

Here’s the downside: If you are a member of the Microsoft Partner Program, or Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN), you aren’t eligible for these offers.

The Optimus Ghost-town

For those of you that have followed the famous (or now infamous) Optimus keyboard, the project has just lost a major feature (the latest in a series of many to be cut) that will substantially cut into the number of people who would buy one. In a few short words, many lost interest:

Optimus-103 will use black and white displays

The once great design has now crumbled into a shadow of its former self. Sporting few of the features once promised, the current design has alienated many of the loyal supporters and made many vow to not buy the product. While the Optimus has lost much of its glory due to these feature cuts, it is still a revolutionary product.

Fiddler2 – Now Available

A new version of the popular debugging proxy Fiddler has been announced. The new version, dubbed Fiddler2, adds support debugging HTTPS traffic just as you would unsecured HTTP traffic. Per the FAQs, this new version effectively runs a MITM attack to do its job, while this is the most effective way of doing this, there is the downside of the browser showing an error, though you should be able to continue by ignoring these warnings.

Installing Vista

I installed Vista last night twice; the first was an upgrade from XP Pro on my laptop, the other a fresh install on my desktop. The experience was quite interesting for both; here are a few thoughts about the process:

Laptop

My laptop has a fairly modest configuration, 1.73GHz Pentium M, 512MB, 80GB hard-drive, and Mobil Intel 915 64MB for the graphics. It’s been running Windows XP Pro, last night I went through the upgrade process to Vista Business. It checking for compatibility it found a couple of applications it had issues with, but it seems it wasn’t happy just telling me that they might not work, but they had to be removed before I could go on.

Vista Available via MSDN

For those interested, Windows Vista is now available via MSDN Subscriber Downloads. Hurry up and get your copy while there’s still bandwidth left.

Have fun 🙂

Power Users, Rejoice!

At long last, Windows has a real, power user’s shell; and it’s been officially done. PowerShell is the new, highly flexible and extremely powerful shell for Windows (XP SP2+). From my first experiences with it, I’m quite impressed. This is a great tool for developers, system administrators, and just about any other power user.

While PowerShell doesn’t offer the power or flexibility that a traditional *nix shell does, the power is impressive. I’ve been looking forward to this being released, now that I’ve played with it, I’ve even more excited. This is a great tool, just trust me, get it, you need it.