Jim Zimmerman - ASP.NET, MVC, Ajax and ORM

 When connecting to my vista laptop or my vista desktop tonight using remote desktop, I kept getting this error. "The authentication certificate received from the remote computer has expired or it not valid."  This is new and could not find anything on it except for a comment left on a random blog post I found.  Luckily this worked.  Notice how it says my certificate expired on 7/1/2002.  Very strange.  For anyone else having this problem, this is how you solve it:

1. Start mmc.exe by typing in mmc in the search bar and open Certificates snap-in for local computer account.
2. Navigate to “Certificates\Remote Desktop\Certificates”
3. Delete certificate that’s in this store.

So I decided to volunteer for the FOOTS program with Microsoft and help train and answer questions at the Best Buy in Clearwater, FL of of US 19.

Why did I volunteer to do this?  I thought it would be fun to be around the consumers during the day of the launch event and get to see what people think about it.  

Well I just got back from showing the retail sales people at Best Buy and quite a few customers tonight and they were all very impressed.  In fact after talking about it so much, I am pretty impressed.  You see, I have only used it for email, writing code and blog posts.  I haven't gotten to use Word, Excel, Media Center, Photo manager, create movies, use Flip 3D, etc. very much. :)  People were generally very impressed and were only disappointed because they could not even buy what they were seeing.  Definitely an awkward sales position to be in.  "Look what you can have, but you have to wait until tomorrow".  All in all I think people are anxious to have a new version of windows on their computers.  Seeing all the good deals, I want to buy a new one for home.

If you want to see me in a Vista Polo shirt and give me a hard time at the Best Buy, please stop in.  I will be there on Tuesday, Jan 30th in the evening.

I just read a nice post from Jim Allchin on the Windows Vista Team Blog about some new data features in Vista that help you find data easier.  There were a few things I didn't really consider using the way he suggested and he had some very good pointers like using the search right above the windows new start icon to find not just programs but any kind of file.  Very productive tip.

I have been using Vista for over a month now and had not thought of using some of these features in the way they had intended.  I will let you read his post since he has a much better way of saying it than I would. Cool stuff.

I just came across this list of issues with Visual Studio and Vista.  For those of you that dared to jump on Vista on your development machine you will like this list. 

One thing to note is that to debug properly in Visual Studio you will have to run the application as administrator.  I pointed this out in an earlier post, but also pointed out how to run as administrator all the time form the user access control property.  Well this is fine, but it is nice to have the access control turned on.  I turned it off so that id did not have to remember to right click and select "run as administrator" every time I launched a new instance of VS2005.  Anyway, here is a way to make Visual Studio and just about any other program run as administrator automatically.  Right click your shortcut and you will see this window.

Click the advanced button and then make sure the checkbox for Run as administrator is checked. Now whenever you launch VS 2005 then debugging will work without having to remember to right click the shortcut every time you launch it.

It looks as if NVIDIA spends more time creating mp3's, videos and marketing about Vista than actually creating drivers that a worth a crap.  I want to know what kind of video card they were using and with what drivers for their demos. 

They still are only offering a driver for Vista RC2 from October 17 which really sucks.  I went out and bought a new NVIDIA card as soon as I downloaded and installed the RTM of Vista in November.  I was thinking that NVIDIA would of course already have decent drivers ready.  I was wrong.  Kind of a let down to not even be able to view 3D very well.  The drivers even choke on 3D screensavers.  My xp laptop works better for 3D.

I will give the benefit of the doubt to NVIDIA in case something drastically changed from RC2 to RTM, but at least give us a beta for RTM.

How bummed out I was when I went to debug a web application locally and my debugger in Visual Studio 2005 did not work on my brand new Vista Machine I had just built.  What?  Was this a joke?  I come to find out it wasn't.  Visual Studio 2005 does not work well and even SP1 has the debugger issue.  After researching it a little bit I began to understand why this was an issue.  The debugger actually gets into the kernel I guess.  So how do you fix this?

Well there are a few ways to do this.  The easy one is when you start visual studio you can right click the icon and select run as administrator.

Also if you want it to just work every time, you can run as a real administrator by Turning User Account Control off.  This will also disable some of those sometimes annoying modal dialog boxes when you launch certain programs.  Here is an attempt at a 10 second demo of how to do it.

So I have been playing around with my new computer, well it's not new, but feels like it after upgrading to Vista, all weekend discovering new features.  I came across this entry on the Wikipedia, Features new to Windows Vista and learned many new features that I did not know existed.  I am really excited to use the full functionality of this new OS and feel bad for those that will have to wait until Jan. 30th.  Only two more months.  Probably better anyway to wait because most of the software and driver vendors are still polishing up their code to work on Vista.  Several applications don't work and / or you need to download a beta to make it work.   My graphics card that is Vista ready is not quite ready yet.  The driver I am using is in beta and is not supported.  I have crashed once already but it was worth the upgrade now because the graphics are unbelievable.  Make sure to get a new graphics card that has at least 128 MB ram, but you might as well get a 256 or 512 card.  They are coming down in price.

I am still in awe as I write this.  My upgrade went unbelievable smooth and the graphics and speed of my computer is so enhanced, that I cannot believe it.

When I upgraded, it said that it would not be compatible with Visual studio and SQL 2005.  I just let it go anyway.  Well it seems that Visual Studio 2005 is fine, but SQL 2005 was not.  I still get incompatiblity alerts from Vista for VS 2005, but it seems to work fine. 

So this post has lasted a couple of days in Live Writer since I have been with family over the holidays, putting up all the Christmas lights and upgrading to Vista and Office 2007.  I actually went and bought a new graphics card which is what everyone should do if you have a relatively new computer.  It is worth it.  The graphics driver (which I had to download) is still in beta because they are coordinating it with the launch.  I hope it is the business launch and not the consumer one.  They already missed the developer launch which is us msdn subscribers.  Do not spend more that $100 - $200 though.  Unless you really want the kick ass stuff for games.

Since MSDN developers subscribers were the first one to feel the pain of this upgrade, I am very surprised that they did not have a simple download or fix to this issue with sql 2005 and Visual Studio 2005.  We are the early adopters.  At lease give us some consideration when testing this product.  We live in Visual Studio and Sql server as developers.  This was the miss.

After a few hours taking advice from others on what to do about SQL 2005, I installed service pack 2 ctp version of SQL 2005.  It did not work.  Luckily I found a comment somewhere where I could launch the new SqlProv.exe tool inside the SQL server executables directory and added my admin user over and now everything works fine now.  Thank god because I need to access my local SQL server for development. I think sp1 works also, but I jumped the gun a little and wen tight to sp2 since I had read a post about how sp2 ctp was the way to go for Vista.

I know I may drink the MS Kool-aid from time to time, but I have to honestly say that most Windows users will love to upgrade and should.  Never have I played with an OS that made me really enjoy the experience.  I know that I have a fast computer already, but the OS now matches what my computer can do.  So cool.  Now is the time to buy the dream machine if your's is a few years old.  Very much worth it!  You will be so much more productive, at least after you get over the initial awe of opening and closing windows.