Scott Hanselman

Hanselminutes Podcast 81 - Vista x64 Redo for Developers

September 15, 2007 Comment on this post [7] Posted in Podcast
Sponsored By

My eighty-first podcast is up. I didn't totally love the last show. It was good, but not great. I wanted to cover a few other things, but you know, you get to talking and then 20 minutes has gone by. Some listeners agreed, so, I was sitting in the hotel room on the Sunday night before I started my New Employee Orientation (NEO) at Microsoft, sick to my stomach and scared out of my gourd, and figured I'd record a solo show, with a prepped outline beforehand, and fill in the gaps in Show 80. Here it is, I hope it doesn't suck.

Subscribe: Subscribe to Hanselminutes Subscribe to my Podcast in iTunes

If you have trouble downloading, or your download is slow, do try the torrent with µtorrent or another BitTorrent Downloader.

Links from the Show

Do also remember the complete archives are always up and they have PDF Transcripts, a little known feature that show up a few weeks after each show.

Telerik is our sponsor for this show.

Check out their UI Suite of controls for ASP.NET. It's very hardcore stuff. One of the things I appreciate about Telerik is their commitment to completeness. For example, they have a page about their Right-to-Left support while some vendors have zero support, or don't bother testing. They also are committed to XHTML compliance and publish their roadmap. It's nice when your controls vendor is very transparent.

As I've said before this show comes to you with the audio expertise and stewardship of Carl Franklin. The name comes from Travis Illig, but the goal of the show is simple. Avoid wasting the listener's time. (and make the commute less boring)

Enjoy. Who knows what'll happen in the next show?

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

facebook twitter subscribe
About   Newsletter
Hosting By
Hosted in an Azure App Service
September 15, 2007 13:13
Thanks Scott, I was already hoping you would do a bit more on the show and had exactly the same experience as you with the last show: it just suddenly ended.. :-)
September 17, 2007 4:31
Thanks...that's why I really needed to do Part 2 ;)
September 18, 2007 3:37
Sorry but I have a second question re development with Vista 64 and Virtual PC.
These days I don't know of many developers that don't use 2 monitors. I like how virtual pc 2007 allows you to have the host os on 1 monitor and the vpc on another, however do you know of a way that you can have the vpc on both monitors ?
September 18, 2007 3:46
I hear that you can do this with VMWare, but not with VPC. I just do one monitor = one VPC.
September 18, 2007 15:18
Hi Scott,
thanks for the nice show, we are using Vista x86 on 10 Developer PC's for nearly two months now and I have to say that we have more issues than you mentioned in the show:

1) There is something wrong with the license compiler - we are using Infragistics and Dundas Charts (both need it) and if we are compiling with nant the process on some machines take significant (2 up to 4 times) longer than on others

2) Edit and Continue support for Console and Windows Form Applications is only working if you change the platform target setting for the executing assembly to x86


September 27, 2007 19:34
I recently moved to x64 to start understanding how we can get ready for web applications on Windows Server 2008 x64. Having a relatively new development machine, a Dell Optiplex 745, the drivers were there and stable. The big challenges were:

Poorly written installers - marked to only install on x86 even though the program itself will run on x64 without a problem (e.g. Windows Live installer, Enterprise Library, Software Factories)
Framework vs. Framework64 - a few PowerShell extensions would register with the tools under Framework which set the assembly to run with PowerShell x86. Running PowerShell x64 I needed to edit the install script to use Framework64. To get around I would prefer that there is a bit of registry inspection and dual registration.
Dual architecture PE files - I had an issue with Process Explorer where it tries to extract the x64 version into the same folder. I store it in the SYSTEM32 folder where my non-admin, day-to-day user account cannot write. I had to extract the x64 binary and replace it to maintain the storage point.
Image Mounting - Ended up dropping Virtual Clone Drive for MagicDisc which works on x64

When compared to the very first time I loaded Vista x64 (the day it became available on MSDN), support and stability are much better. I have access to all 4GB now and I'm happily running Windows Server 2008 RC0 x64 in my VMware image on my way towards testing our apps for full x64 compat.
October 05, 2007 18:15
Hi Scott.

When you mention your VM set up you always state that the VMs are on external drives. Do you have multiple external drives -- one for each VM -- or do you just have one to prevent the VMs contending for your main disk(s). Are the external drives USB or something faster?

I use VMWare, not Virtual PC so I don't know if there's any difference in this area, but my experience of using VMs on external drives is that it can be a bit of a pain.

Do you have any configuration tips for using VMs in this way?

Thanks, Nick.

Comments are closed.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.