Month: November 2006

Book Finished

As some of you are aware the book I was writing titled Pro WCF: Practical Microsoft SOA Implementation is finally finished – w00t! It is right now being set and indexed and it will be off to the press in about three weeks or so. This is published by APress and it should be available by January 22nd – a little longer than usual because of the holiday season.

It sure has been a very interesting experience for me. Hopefully it would be as useful for you. I hopefully will be able to take out some time to talk a little more about it here in the near future – all depends on how much time I can take out.

Big Smile

Mounting ISO's in Vista (x32 and x64)

Mounting ISO’s in Vista x32 is not an issue, most of the XP tools would work. In some cases you might have to run them as Admin, but there are not major issues. I have been using the old  XP Virtual CD Control Panel from Microsoft which you can find more details on MSDN download section.

However if you are running Vista x64 like I am then that is a little different matter. One option that has worked and I would recommend is getting the Daemon Tools version 4.08 x64 which work absolutely fine. You can download that from here (make sure you select the x64 bits and not the x32).

Flash player and 64 Bit

I am finding all kinds of interesting bits and bobs now that the primary OS I am running is x64 bit. For example did you know that Flash Player does not have a x64 bit implementation? Believe me, less Ads for me to see on pages and you don’t see me shedding any tears!

Here is what I get when I tried to install Flash on IE 7 x64:

Flash Player is not supported for playback in a 64-bit browser.

However, you can run Flash Player in a 32-bit browser running on a 64-bit operating system.

Disabling Vista x64 Driver Signing

If you are like me and are running Vista x64 and are having some driver issues and would like to use the XP x64 drivers in Vista, but cannot because Vista expects the drivers to be signed, well then you can disable that.

Disclaimer: please use common sense and back up your data and don’t blame me if this breaks stuff.

Note 2: Using signed drivers is the recommended practice! I would resort to this only as a desperate measure (till all the drivers are released) or if you want to use it in a development scenario.

I won’t get into how attaching a kernel debugger disables this, but will point out the two other options available which most people will be using. 

  1. The first is using the “F8 option” when booking up and going into the “Advanced Boot Option” and then choosing the “Disable Driver Signature Enforcement“. This will disable the kernel signing enforcement for that boot session and of course is not persistent across the various boot sessions. This is ideal if you want to try one specific driver that one time.
  2. The other option is to modify the boot configuration using BCDedit (a.k.a Boot Configuration Data Editor). To run BCDedit you need to be running a command prompt with admin privileges. Here are some examples published by Microsoft on what you need to enter:

    3. // Disable enforcement – no signing checks
    Bcdedit.exe –set nointegritychecks ON

    // Enable enforcement – signing checks apply
    Bcdedit.exe –set nointegritychecks OFF

    // Disabling integrity check on an alternate OS
    // specified by a GUID for the system ID
    Bcdedit.exe –set {4518fd64-05f1-11da-b13e-00306e386aee} nointegritychecks ON

If you are not comfortable using BCDedit especially in a command prompt and are afraid you might screw something up, then check out EasyBSD – a GUI for BCDedit (screen shots here).

I should also point out I am not having any issues regarding Vista x64 drivers and everything works out of the box on my laptop.

More Info: Can be found here.

Dell 1815n Network Scan

I recently bought a new Multi-function printer at home – a Dell 1815dn and it works great. I am quite impressed with the speed and quality – both of which are fine for home use.

This can also scan documents and send it to a machine on the network and that was one of the features that was very useful at home, but the Windows Firewall did not like it and would block the incoming request. To allow the Network Scan to work you need to open up the UDP Port 1054 on your firewall to allow this.

Once you have opened the port, you should be able to intimate a Network Scan from the printer to the machine, however I still cannot initiate a scan from the machine itself (it comes with PaperPort and the usual TWAIN drivers/apps).

Don’t have time to dig into that now, but some day and if I find something will post it here.

Getting Google / YouTube Videos working with CS

If you are running Community Server (CS) like this blog and you would like to get Google or YouTube videos in your posts (like this), then you need to add the following setting in your <Markup><html> section of the communityserver.config file.

<embed
    style="true"
    type="true"
    src="true"
    quality="true"
    bgcolor="true"
    scale="true"
    wmode="true"
    salign="true"
    FlashVars="true"
    width="true"
    height="true"
/>

<object
    width="true"
    height="true"
/>

<param
    name="true"
    value="true"
/>

(via Chris Hammond’s post)

DragMove

Did you know there is a new method called DragMove which is part of the Window class and allows you to move the window using a mouse? I certainly did not – till now. This is part of .NET 3.0, specifically part of WPF and . Here is an example from the SDK:

protected override void OnMouseLeftButtonDown(MouseButtonEventArgs e)
{
    base.OnMouseLeftButtonDown(e);

    // Begin dragging the window
    this.DragMove();
}
 

Is he dead?

Nope, you ain’t that lucky – I am alive and kicking and just have been quite busy lately (or for a change as some of you might say). Between starting a new project and traveling (with very limited access to emails and the Internet), getting the final chapters and code samples for the book out the door and have friends and relatives over from abroad, does not leave me any time for blogging.

I do have a few things saved “offline” and should be posting the same soon.