Kevin Dente's Blog

Generally, I find that the font sizes used on many, if not most, web sites, are too damn small - especially on a 15" UXGA laptop screen. To avoid having to hit Ctrl-+ (text zoom) on every page I visited, I've been increasing the the minimum font size in the Firefox Options dialog. But this isn't an ideal solution - it screws up the layout of a lot of web sites. And minimum means minimum - you can't use Ctrl- - to zoom out and shrink the text size.

I've got a brand-spanking new, clean install of Vista on my laptop, and I'm trying to install Visual Studio 2005 on it. Unfortunately, I'm not getting very far. The installer always displays the following dialog, complaining that I don't have XP SP 2 installed:

I've been meaning to rename this blog for ages. The whole PuppiesAndIceCream thing was originally just a dumb joke from when I renamed the blog the first time, and I never meant for it to stick. But being the unimaginative person that I am, I never came up with another name, and so it has stayed.

For details and the download link, go here.

Am I the only one majorly annoyed by VMWare's support policy (or lack there-of) for VMWare on a Vista host? Apparently EMC's stance is that in order to run VMWare on a Vista host, we need to wait for VMWare 6.0. This presents several problems:

Ever since upgrading to Vista and Office 2007, I've had a really annoying problem with Outlook 2007. After running for a couple days, the UI would lose the ability to repaint itself correctly.  It would glitch out and start drawing large blank regions or garbage. It smacked of a resource leak, but caused by what? I tried everything I could think of - upgrading the video drivers, disabling add-ins...nothing fixed the problem.

One of my co-workers was struggling with a strange problem recently - he installed SQL Server 2005 (with Analysis Services 2005), but the Business Intelligence Studio application didn't install. If you haven't seen it, BI Studio is really just a special version of the Visual Studio 2005 IDE, with Analysis Services-specific projects and editors. What he saw was that even though the SQL Server installer claimed to have installed it, and even created a shortcut for it, the actual devenv.exe executable wasn't installed (the shortcut pointed to an invalid path). I'd installed SQL Server many a time, and never seen this problem. A search of the MSDN forums turned up this helpful topic, with the following advice from 'softie Dan Jones:

I've been working a bit with the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit (bit of a mouthful, isn't it?) recently. The toolkit consists mostly of a set of extender controls. In ASP.NET AJAX lingo, an extender is a control that attaches AJAX-y functionality to an existing ASP.NET server control. Each instance of an ASP.NET AJAX extender control is associated with a single instance of an ASP.NET server control through its TargetControlID property.