When copying multiple files via Explorer, if it runs into duplicates, it ask you if you wish to replace the file, keep both files (appending a 2 on to the file being copied) or skip the file and then continues with the copy. 

When copying multiple files and it runs into a file that has an error (such as a file in use), it now prompts you to "try again", "skip" or cancel.  In the old days it would stop the copying process and you would not know which files it missed.

They added a "new folder" option to the Folders tree so now when you right click on a folder in the tree, it will allow you to create a folder at the location.  In the prior versions of Explorer, you had to use the menu bar to create a folder or right click on files pane to create a folder.  Much cleaner with the new method.

In Explorer or the "Save as", "open", etc windows, it now displays the file location path as a series of drop down menus at each nested folder so it is much easier to move around.  If you wish to copy the file location path to the clipboard or manually enter the text path, simply click into the area and it will change the drop down menus to a text path such as "C:\Windows\System32\Logfiles".  This is a real time saver.

In Explorer or the common "Save as" and "Open" windows, it displays your favorite links (file paths) on the left side and has an option to display the folder list tree under that the same way as in Explorer. You can easily and quickly access all your favorite locations on your computer with just a couple clicks!  Additionally the window includes the ability to search for files or customize your view. The "favorite links" list is easy to add your own links. These are major improvements from the past. 

IIS 7 just has way too many new features to begin on this list as it is a major upgrade.  One fact though that will have developers jumping for joy is that IIS now supports multiple websites, not just one as XP did in the past!

While it is not a new feature, the hibernate and low power modes seem to work very well in Vista.  It is nice to pick back up where you left off the last time you used your machine.  I finally turn my machine off (hibernate) every day, of course with it running it does make a good space heater ;)

Many may also overlook the enhancements to most of the games that come with Vista along with a few new titles such as "Chess Titans", "Inkball", "Mahjong Titans" and "Spider Solitaire".  However, one that could be left out is called "Purble Place" (will leave that for you to discover when you use Vista :) ).  Even good old Solitaire has a fresh look.  The chess game is not bad either.

Security is greatly enhanced in Vista and the built in Windows Defender is another one of those items most people do not notice.  It helps keep your computer safe from trojan programs and viruses.

As I find more "little things" in Vista I plan to add them here if I remember.  Often I notice something and plan to jot it down only to forget.

Today I run into a quick little problem attempting to open a local website under IIS 7 via the Visual Studio 2005 IIS browse option.  It simply gave a message:

Local Internet Information Server

You must be a member of the Administrators group on the local computer to access the IIS metabase.  Therefor, you cannot create or open a local IIS Website.  If you have Read, Write and Modify permissions for the folder where the files are lcoated,, you can create a file system Website that points to the folder in order to edit the files.

So, at this point I figured it was the UAC (user account control) getting in the way, so I disabled it.  Had to reboot the machine to make the change take effect and tried again.  Nope, still did not work, same error message.

At this point I did a quick check on the web and found:

http://blogs.msdn.com/ webdevtools/archive/2006/09/18/761206.aspx

It appears I was correct about the UAC and that you should run VS using the “run as administrator” option or disable UAC, but beyond that you need to make sure you have installed (or as Vista says “Windows feature turned on”) the “IIS Metabase and IIS 6 configuration compatiblity” and the “ASP.NET” features under IIS feature list in teh “Turn Winodws features on or off” window which you access via the “control panel->Programs and Features” window.

I find it annoy though that neither of these features are automatically enabled by default when you turn on the IIS features.  The compatibilty one make sense as not on be default, but ASP.NET not enabled by default on IIS seems a be strange since that is the core web development technology for IIS.

Well, I got Vista 64 RC2 install and all running good.  Even works with my QUake 3 and Unreal Tournament 2004. With my new video card and system, Unreal Tournament 2004 looks great!  Much more details than my old GeForce 4 TI4200 card.  Also installed FarCry as it came with my video card.  The FarCry patch though, crashed towards the end of the process.

I now have my Mozilla Thunderbird mail installed along with Firefox.  Much to my surprise, I was able to copy my Thunderbird profile information on my old system over the top of the information Thunderbird created on my new system and all my 20+ email accounts and ton of message rules all worked without a hitch!  Good going Mozilla, this was always a problem moving to a new system and new version of Outlook in the past which was one of the reasons I first started using Thunderbird.

Anyway, the road to installing my development tools started yesterday.  Upon beginning to install "Microsoft SQL Server Express 2005 Advanced", I was greeted with a message that this version of the OS had compatibility issues with the program and that I should first run SQL server 2005 service pack 2 before using the product.  After a few minutes of searching, I found that SP2 is not available yet, so I just ignored it and plugged along.

The install all went well except for the reports part accessing IIS 7 which appears to failed a couple of times.  I will wait and see if this causes problems down the road.

The database appeared to work okay until I tried to attach one of my many database files at which time it barked out an error of:

The server principal "my server" is not able to access the databae "model" under the current security context. (Microsoft SQL server, Error: 916)

A quick check of the net found this blog post:

http://blogs.msdn.com/sqlexpress/archive/2006/10/11/ getting-things-working-on-vista-aka-dealing- with-user-account-control.aspx

It seems the new Vista User Account Control (UAC) is getting in the way and you need to create a login for your Windows user account via the SQL Server 2005 management studio express program giving you the SysAdmin role.  Did that and it appears to work.

At this point I now have Visual Studio Standard installed and have setup the system to allow multiple websites in IIS using different names based off a custom host file.  From what I can see it is all running good.

After installed Quicken 2006, it seemed to be okay and updated itself over the Internet, but would crash every time I went to open a file when it tried to browse for the file.  I double clicked on my file outside of Quicken and it brought up Quicken and appeared to work.

Adobe Photoshop 7 also seems to have installed and is working good.  Was concerned with it being a much older version, but so far so good.

Have no problems with Microsoft Office 2007 Beta nor Open Office.  Both seem to work fine on Vista.

Tomorrow it is time to start working with Visual Studio and building a few projects to see how compatible it it with Vista.  Hopefully things will work without any nasty problems popping up.

One little note, my wife likes to play a variety of low budget games.  So far she has had to set the compatiblity level to Windows XP and use the "Run As Adminstrator" option for a few of them to work.There is one more little problem I have run into and that is with the Hibernate mode, once the system comes back up my local lan connection is usually disconnected.  Normally, I right click on the network icon and select Diagnose/repair which shortly gives me the option to reset the connection, which gets me connected again.  Not a biggy, but annoying.

Here is a summary of the software I currently have working on Vista (or at least it appears to be):

• Quicken 2006
• SQL Server Express 2005 + Management console
• Visual Studio 2005 Standard
• Adobe Photoshop V7
• Open Office
• Microsoft Office 2007 beta
• Expresso (Regular Expression work tool)
• Reflector (Disassembler)
• WinZip
• e-Sword Bible Software
• Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird
• Unreal Tournament 2004
• Quake 3 team arena
• FarCry
• Nero Express 6.6

This is the first of many posts dealing with my migration to Windows Vista and what happens along the Journey.  After only using Vista for three days, I can see where there are many things people will have to relearn coming from previous versions of Windows.  Hopefully, some of the information I post in this series of posts will be useful to others, saving them a few less hair pulling fits…

About a month ago, my main development machine died!  I came in after running an antivirus on the machine for a few hours and it no longer would boot.  Not sure what parts died, but that old development box was at the end of its life. 

Instead of buying a new machine, I purchased most of the parts:

• Gigabyte GA-M55Plus-S3G motherboard
• Twin pack of Corsair 512 MB 800-6400 RAM
• AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ CPU
• BFG 7600GT 256MB video card
• 450 Watt Power Supply

Most of these parts I could trace to being compatible with Windows Vista.  In the current market, a lot of people are having problems combining the right components to be 100% Windows Vista compatible.  The machine I put together is no screamer for Vista, but it does the job and I will purchase a more powerful system hopefully after the first of next year when OEM Vista is available on systems

Anyway, I got the system together and it all worked fine with the 32 Bit version of Vista RC1 (the only version I had already burnt to DVD).  The install was quite easy and took about 45 minutes.  My first power supply was not power enough (I had overlooked the requirement of 20+ amps of 12v) for my power supply and had to order a new one.  Until I receive the new power supply, I am using the built-in nVidia 6100 video control that came on the motherboard I choose.  Much to my surprise, it is very capable for running Windows Vista Aero graphic user interface.  Very clean and snappy!

The first major change I noticed on Vista is the “Start” menu.  For the most part it looks the same as in Windows XP until you move down to “All Programs”.  In Vista, you no longer have the normal cascading menu on the “All Programs” option as you did before, now it replaces the area above the option with the root folders and programs and is more like a tree selector in that you have to click on folders to display their contents.  If you have program names that are wider than the area they appear, it will truncate the names making some things hard to read.  This can be annoying once you are use to the operation of that menu in Windows XP.

The next thing I did was to right click on the desktop to get my display properties set.  When you right click on the desktop, the menu option has been renamed to “personalize”.  This opens a large window with a list of options such as Window frame color, desktop background, screen saver, mouse pointers, theme and finally display settings.  Very few of the windows for these options look anything like older versions.  It was fun setting the transparency of the frame around my windows and playing with some of their new screen savers, but not much more to do in that area.

After my display was as I wanted to look, I basically played around with Vista for a bit to see how well it performed.  Overall, things went easy.  I was happy to find a test driver online for my Wacom Graphire tablet mouse, since I have used one of these devices for a mouse for more than four years.  Installed the driver and everything seemed to work fine.

The same day I got the system up and running Microsoft released the Vista RC2 version and thought it would be a good time to put the 64 bit version to the test.  I started the download of both the 64 and 32 bit versions and while waiting for them, made a full backup of the current system to another drive in the event the 64 bit version did not work so good, I could restore back to the 32 bit without having to reinstall.  The built in backup program seemed to work great and quickly backed up the entire system.

Now I had the ISO files for Vista 32 and 64 bit, I had to burn them to a DVD.  Here is where I ran into problems.  Nero does not seem to work at this point on Windows Vista, nor does many different DVD burning software packages.  After a ton of digging I found a few that has worked for some.  I used a product called SwiftDisc which I found in a blog posting about a person dropping Nero at:

http://west-wind.com/weblog/posts/7246.aspx

http://www.swiftdisc.com/

In the end the product worked to burn the images for me, however the first time I erased a RW DVD, it froze after formatting it for over 30 minutes, I had to reboot to get out of that one.

I am sure that down the road a little bit, we will see Nero come back to the top of the pack status, but I have to wonder in today’s world of DVD burners going for less than $40, how many people want to shell out over $70 for Nero to burn the DVDs.

Anyway, I finally got to the point of installing the Vista 64 bit RC2 and again the install went without a hitch.  However, upon rebooting, the screen that normally shows Vista is loading is now a mostly black screen with some jumbled up graphic blocks in a couple rows on the screen.  Not sure if this is normal for everyone, but it happened on my install.  The system still works but that looks a little weird when you are booting up.

When I installed the Wacom test drivers, the seemed to have a problem on the 64 bit version of Vista.  It has two modes to use the mouse in called “Pen mode” and “mouse mode”.  In “mouse mode” the mouse pointer moves based on the direction you are moving the mouse, in “pen mode”, the mouse pointer is directly related to the position of the mouse on the pad, if I want the mouse pointer in the bottom left corner of the screen, I would move the mouse on the pad to the bottom left corner of its area.  While this works, it is rough to get use to and a no go for games.  Looks like I will have to drop my Graphire tablet until the produce better drivers for the 64 bit version.

I am currently in the process of adding my development tools and productivity software, although I have installed MS Office 7 beta and the refresh pack and it appears all is fine with Office.  Additionally, I have installed Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament 2004 and both are working fine with a standard mouse.

Over the next couple of days I will be installing VS 2005, SQL Server Express Adv, Quicken 2006 and Adobe Photoshop 7.0.  Curious about the Photoshop as it would crash often on XP or Windows 2003.

To sum it up though, Vista 64 is installed and seems to work fine with everything I have thrown at it to this point except my Wacom Graphire tablet mouse and the future looks good!

One last tip though, in Vista the developers seemed to not like where different things were located, so them moved them around some.  I have run into the “Documents And Settings” folder producing an error saying I did not have rights to access it.  Come to find out, it is just a place holder as the real fold is now called “users” in the root folder.  Even many of the folders inside users folder such as Cookies,  Recent Files, Templates, Local Settings, etc, have been relocated to different areas inside a folder called “App Data” which now is better setup to handle roaming profiles.  Even the “my Documents” folder is now renamed to simply “Documents”.  Best to keep an eye out for renamed folders.

Oh yeah, I said that was the last tip, just one more,  if you wish to install other windows components such as IIS, FTP, etc, they are no longer in the “Add and remove applications” in the control panel since that option no longer exists.  To install/remove Windows components, you have to “open” the control panel (new system, not classic) and click on the option for “Programs” (in green) and at the next window that opens, click on “Turn Windows features on or off”.  That one caused me to go “huh”…