Ryan Ternier : Vista

Vista and the annoying French characters

Ryan Ternier — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 16:43:00 GMT

Since I've installed MS Vista I've been plauged with getting characters like: É, >, ^^,`` when I wanted characters like ?,|,}," (note those are the exact same keys that did this, i just toggled my settings... keep reading).

so what does this?

Pressing the left CTRL + SHIFT keys at the same time toggles a weird setting that does this. I assume it's on canadian keyboard only who have the language set to Canadian English (because all know Canadian Enlish is proper English eh?).

So if you find yourself all of a sudden churning out weird characters when you're typing along, try pressing the left CTRL + SHIFT keys at the same time to switch it back over (You might need to press them a couple times).

How to install .msi files on Vista.

Ryan Ternier — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 22:08:00 GMT

I've been running Vista for about two months now. One thing I've noticed is installing msi files (install files) is a pain. One way around this is to create a small bach file that uses the msiexec.exe executable to launch the msi. When referencing the file names, you must fully qualify them.

Here's an example of one I used to install the Power Tools for Team Foundation Server:

C:\Windows\System32\msiExec.exe -i C:\Users\rternier\Documents\Downloads\tfpt.msi

Once you have a batch file (.bat) with that in it, right click it, and choose Run As Administrator.

And there you go.

The Day Vista turned on me

Ryan Ternier — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 22:06:00 GMT

Yesterday (tuesday) started out fine. Got up, kissed my wife good-bye and left to work all happy and all that jazz.

I get to work and see that my computer was restarted for patch Tuesday... Little did I know that the little ninjas inside my computer didn't want me to play. It seems that something messed up my security within Vista. Even though I was an Administrator (In the Administrators Group) I was unable to use any Administrative tools with Visual Studio... including "Opening a web page"!!!

After spending countless hours (I counted 10) working on this issue, I decided Wednesday Morning (Today) to re-do my computer. (Format, delete, re-install vista etc.).

It was approved my management and voila, it's all working now. I'm thankful that MS finally got the OS SEtup right. Took me 3 hours to install Vista, .NET, SQL 2005, and all my goodies.

I'm not sure why my settings were all messed up. I couldn't open any webpage within Visual Studio, nor could I create a new website. The ASP.NET forums post I have is here incase anyone wants to see if it was ever resolved.