Jon Galloway

MCE 2005 Update Rollup 2 includes support for DVD changers. "But", you say, "I don't own a DVD changer." Yeah, me neither. What's cool is that you can very easily use this feature on DVD image files stored on your hard drive.

A common requirement in business application is a scheduled process - call a webservice, process the data, and FTP the results to a business partner, for instance. Developers kick around possible solutions - BizTalk's overkill, DTS won't handle it well, what to do?

First Mike has linked to a command line parser library for .NET called Param.NET. Then Roy proposeda better command line parsing class which is attribute based. So, now's the time to mention a command line parameter class that worked well for me recently.

I've really appreciated a few recent posts from Microsoft developers on the practical reasons behind some frustrating restrictions on Microsoft products - DRM and the inability to upgrade some Windows Mobile 2003 devices to Windows Mobile 5.

I've been looking for this exact product for a few years now:


Riya is a free photo search service built around facial recognition. Sure, they support searching based on who's in the picture, but they've taken it further than that by treating the faces as people with identities and e-mail addresses. If I upload a picture of you, it'll show up in your searches^[1]. That's cool!

I installed the Windows Vista October CTP (Build 5231) on Virtual PC yesterday. There were a few gotchas that I thought I'd share in case it saves anyone else some time.

1. Virtual PC can't capture an ISO image greater than 2.2 GB, so you need to use something like Daemon Tools on your host machine to mount the ISO as a virtual drive, then capture it as a physical drive in VPC.
2. Vista won't install on a RAW partition, which is what an unformatted VPC Virtual Hard Drive (VHD) image gives you. You can do some tricky commandline DISKPART stunts, or you can just create the partition in the install process knowing that Vista still won't like it, reboot the VPC instance, and this time VPC will recognize the partition it created. I went with the second option.
3. This Vista build can't access Windows Update. You just get a message saying you need to use Automatic Updates and tells you how to set that up. Knowing that unpatched machines on the net can get haxxor'd in 20 minutes on average, I set the Auto Update time to the next hour and disabled the VPC network connection until that time. Silly me, there weren't any Auto Updates since it had just been released, but I still think minimizing Internet time before patching a machine is the best plan.
4. The VPC VM Additions Installation hangs on this Vista build, and the graphics are absolute hell without them (640x480 at 8 bit, I believe). The trick is as follows: leave the hung installation running, go into the Control Panel and remove the VGA Display Driver, and say Okay when prompted to reboot. When the system comes back up, you'll have the state of the art S3 Trio display driver. It got wiggy on me when I tried to change the Display Resolution, so I rebooted again and was able to change the resolution and things were great. Dog slow, but great. If you cancel the install or kill the wrong msiexec process, the install rolls back and the drivers get removed, causing the magic not to happen.
5. I kind of lied about the VM Additions. The video drivers are installed, and they make a big difference, but the rest of the VM Additions aren't installed. That means no folder sharing, etc. They might release VM Additions for Vista Beta 1, but I'm not holding my breath.