Jim Zimmerman

yeah, SP1 is finally here and has over 1000 bug fixes.  I hope they have fixed some vista issues also in the beta I saw up there after you apply service pack 1.  I could not get to it yet, but will have to update to sp1 first anyway. 

You can get all the service pack here.  Happy downloading!  I hope it doesn't break anything. It has to fix more things than it can break, I would think at this point.

You can now download the Release Candidate of ASP.NET AJAX 1.0.  It is time to get your app's ready.  I am pretty sure we will not see too many changes at all now and can confidently write code that will be used when it ships next month. 

This has been a long wait, but well worth it.  I am sure that this framework will grow and grow as it matures.  It has been a little painful to wait this long for a release, but is well worth it.  These guys have worked so hard to come up with a release that works cross browser and is easy to use to develop with and is relatively bug free.  I am excited to all the new features that will be added once there is a 1.0 release.  I think people will really embrace it and add many controls that can be shared across the community.

I just released an implementation of the newest Virtual Earth on blawg.com today that mashes up all of the blawgers in the US and soon the world.  In case you wondering a blawger is someone in the legal industry that blogs. 

It has some cool balloons that pop up when you hover of the rss icons on the map that show information about that blawger. 

The new version of virtual earth has really come a long way and has some really cool features that allow you to plot directions, Ajax callbacks, zooming, adding pushpins, etc.  Check out the Virtual Earth SDK and play around with it when you have time.  They have really good documentation and many features that make it fun to play around with.

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.

Ironically, right before I was ready to install the RTM of Office 2007 Professional, I saw a post titled, Office 2007 won't upgrade from a prerelease version of the 2007 Office System - Office 2007 Setup Spelunking from Scott Hanselman about some issues he had had with upgrading Office 2003 to 2007. 

He had some great information about how to uninstall some things from beta versions of office 2007 that do not necessarily appear in the standard Add / Remove programs feature in XP.  He used a tool called MyUnInst which I ended up having to download also because I ran into a similar problem.  But my problem even went further which was very frustrating.  Even after removing anything that had to do with Office 2007 beta, which I never installed on my system anyway's, but found some of the same files Scott did, I still could not install. 

So I thought well, I have this program called Expression Designer Beta 1, maybe that needs to be removed also.  So when I tried to remove it, it said I could not uninstall it because of some language thing.  What?  So I downloaded and reinstalled the Expression Designer Beta 1 and then uninstalled it fine.  Then Office 2007 installed.

Well all that frustration ended up being worth it.  I love the new outlook 2007.  That alone is worth the upgrade for me.  I really do like having feeds integrated in and the integration of ie7 and office for adding feeds could not be more seamless.

Now I doubt many consumers will have the problems I had, but for other early adopters beware of the betas you have installed and make sure to remove them all to get a nice install of Office 2007.  It is definitely worth it.

This is by far by favorite release of Codesmith.  It has NetTiers as part of it, which is what I use for almost every project I create.  Why would I do such a thing?  Well to save time of course.  I am not trying to sell Codesmith, but if it was my job, I would probably do very well.  You see any time a developer can save time, be more productive and write code the proper way, you feel more empowered.  For years I have known that you can create prototypes very quickly using code generation, but the code generation tools I created were just the way I write code.  This can be good, but also bad. You see, with code generation you can automate creating code that is inherently bad also.  It depends on your style and how you adapt to change.  I have learned many lessons with code gen and have learned that the one that is best is the one that is easiest to change.  NetTiers is not always the best way, but nothing is always the best way.

NetTiers should be use when you need an admin to your application especially.  If your app is constantly changing and you want more dynamic control, then code gen may not be for that project.  Also if you have a team where you want to control the way they access the data layer, then code gen is great because it standardizes the way all of the team accesses data.

If you are using ASP.NET 2.0 and have multiple forms or submit buttons, you may have found out that you can only have one form tag in the master page and are not allowed to have another form tag in the page. 

If you want to have the user press the enter button on the keyboard to cause any of your multiple submit buttons to submit, you have to use the <asp:Panel control and set the DefaultButton property equal to the button id that is in that panel. 

For example, I had an asp:Login control in a master page and also a search form.  When the user wanted to search and hit the enter key, it would try to login.  You could set the DefaultButton property in the master form element, but that is also dangerous if you have other forms throughout your site.  Also if you want to have it work depending on where the user has focus, then you have to use the panel control.