Scott Hanselman

We're going on a trip tomorrow so I needed to get my iPod setup quickly and sync'ed beforehand. However, I hadn't put iTunes on my new Vista 64-bit system, and I was shocked to see the iTunes installer fail to install saying "cannot find Quicktime." A little file system sniffing solved the problem.

Since both apps are 32-bit apps running on 64-bit Vista, they are each installed to "c:\program files (x86)." Apparently iTunes has hardcoded "c:\program files" so iTunesSetup goes looking for QuickTime in "c:\program files\quicktime" rather that where it really ended up.

So, before I ran iTunesSetup again, I needed to "lie" to the installed by making a directory link to where QuickTime actually got installed.

• Hit the Start Menu, type cmd.exe and Right Click then choose Run as Administrator.
• Type
  md "c:\Program Files (x86)\QuickTime"
• Type
  mklink /d "c:\Program Files\QuickTime" "c:\Program Files (x86)\QuickTime"
  to create a link FROM Program Files\Quicktime to where it really is. Note this is all one line. 
• Install iTunes by running iTunesSetup.exe and you're all set.

Ridiculous that I should have to do this. Apple really doesn't make it easy on Windows users. Heh, I wonder why not? :)

UPDATE: Nick has a good writeup on this issue with more detail, so check it out!

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.

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In my new ongoing quest to read source code to be a better developer, I now present the first in an infinite number of a weekly series called "The Weekly Source Code." Here's some source I'm reading this week that I enjoyed.

• PowerShell Drive Provider for Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) - C# Source that interfaces Amazon's S3 to PowerShell so you can "dir" your S3 area.
• AForge.NET by Andrew Kirillov - I used Andrew's very powerful AForge library in my Coding4Fun Article on a Motion Detecting Baby Webcam. His amazing source is up on Google Code as a project now. A gold mine of image processing and neuro network computation. When I can read this and understand it, I will be smarter.
• DotNetOpenId - The C# port of the JanRain OpenID library, originally written in Boo, that caused me to go through the Programmer Phases of Grief, is up on Google Code and championed by a team smarther-than-I that's extended it. Headed by Jason Alexander and ScottWater, with a member list of excellent programmers and .NET literati. I haven't been very involved since the inception (life happens) but Jason and team have taken it far beyond my skills. It's fun to return and see how much more awesome some source has become without me.
• C# Duck Typing by David Meyer - I'm still trying to get my head around this one. It's a .NET class library written in C# that enables duck typing. I'm trying to understand where this project fits in the world of C# 3.0 "var" style declarations, as well as within the context of the DLR.

Feel free to send me links to cool source that you find hasn't been given a good read.

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.

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I was just sitting here lavishing in the "three monitors of it all". I can truly say that the decision (well, not really a decision as Jeff absolutely insisted) to get a third monitor, specifically a Dell 20", has truly changed my work life. You can not have too much workspace until the monitors completely fill your field of vision.

(Forgive the silly theme and lack of wallpaper...the book editors require a certain Windows theme)

I can absolutely see myself getting forth monitor, and either mounting it to the far right or possibly above the center.  The amount of time I'm saving by not Alt-Tabbing during a task is significant. 

Window management was taking up a lot my time - I had no idea until I had so much desktop space how much time I was spending just resizing windows. Not moving them around as much as moving them out of the way of others.

When you've got another monitor you can dedicate it to a single task. Right now I'm working on a book, so I've got a VM on one screen, Visual Studio on another, and Explorer on a third. For me, it comes down to this - turning my head is way easier than Alt-Tab.

I never would have believed it until I tried it. I encourage you to look at 2 monitors if you have one or 3 if you have two. With 20" flat panels going for $300, now's the time.

I was using a simple Three Monitor setup in December of 2003, but it never quite took off for me for a couple of reasons:

• The laptop was the third monitor (via MaxiVista) and either my wife or I would walk away with it. I couldn't count on the third monitor.
• The distance between the bezels was crazy wide. In this older picture the middle monitor was 17" at 1280x1024 and the one on the right was a 17" CRT. They were both 96dpi but...
• ...the laptop was 120 dpi (really high-res screen) and the difference was very distracting.

And remember, when you go Multiple Monitor, you need to get Ultramon.

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.

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Congratulations to the team, dasBlog 2.0 is out and it runs on Medium Trust. There are numerous small bug fixes, but the move to 2.0 and Medium Trust support is the major feature. However, the fact that we are on 2.0 (and many of us are building on 3.5) will allow us to do some pretty cool innovation pretty quickly. Clemens Vaster is back on the team and checking in some "dasBlog 3.5" architectural spikes that are worth looking at. They can be found, as always, in the source via anonymous Subversion to https://dasblogce.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/dasblogce/trunk.

Upgrading

The upgrade is simple, just back everything up, copy all DLLs and AS?X files. The only manual process is that you should merge your web.config with the new default one that includes a few ASP.NET 2.0 specific tags. Make sure your virtual directory is set in IIS to be an Application and that Application is set to ASP.NET 2.0.

Getting Help

If you need help with dasBlog, you've got a number of options.

• Start with the dasBlog Home Page.
  • Thanks to Tom Watts for maintaining the home page and generally kicking the teams butt!
• There's also the dasBlog Help Forums.
• You can also submit bugs, feature requests or submit patches.
• Finally, you can join the dasBlog Developers Mailing List.

Hosts that Support dasBlog

There are a number of commercial hosts that support dasBlog. That should mean that they won't say "huh?" when you ask them to setup your blog. Here's the ones we know about. If you're a host that supports or wants to support dasBlog, join our Developer Mailing List and start a dialog with us.

• Appliedi.net
• ServerGrid.com
• WebHost4Life
• DiscountASP.net
• Crystaltech
• Server Intellect
• Brinkster
• ActiveHost

Medium Trust

From my previous post on our Medium Trust Issues:

Tony Bunce has a fine write-up on the issues we ran into with dasBlog on Medium Trust. Here's some highlights:

"The goal of medium trust is for hosting providers to provide functional ASP.NET 2.0 hosting while also protecting against rogue or malicious applications. Unfortunately that protection comes at the cost of application flexibility. ...There are a few features that are limited in a medium trust environment: SMTP on alternative ports and Mail to Weblog via POP3...dasBlog will let you know that you don't have these privileges by displaying warnings on the configuration page.

There is some good news though, these limitations won't affect most users.  Many hosting providers that run limited trust environments don't run in the default medium trust, but rather a "modified full trust".  In that case you may already have all the permissions you need for all of the features to work."

Go check out his post for more details. The most interesting issue we bumped into was that you aren't supposed to be able to call out via HTTP on the server side to any other connections unless they match your originURL in your web.config. In other words, my blog at www.hanselman.com can't call to any other site that isn't hanselman.com. However, you can set you originUrl to a regular expression like ".*" and then you can connect anywhere. Phil Haack noticed this and got the fix from Cathal Connollys.

The Future

There's also some cool stuff going on around our pluggable editors, with John Forsythe setting up a YUI Editor as well as Rich Comments support for the folks who want to live on the edge. Do checkout the dasBlog section on John's blog for extra add-on macros and cool patches if you're compiling dasBlog on your own.

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.

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Windows Update on Vista x64 Ultimate woke up today and told me I needed a new video driver.  Since I was being very careful to not install anything unsigned or controversial, I didn't download any new drivers from the manufacturer's website.  It seemed to me that when Windows Update told me it had a new driver available, they wouldn't be that big a deal to get this new driver.

After much gnashing of teeth and flashing of my monitor, Windows Update announced that the update failed. Waa? That doesn't usually happen. I noticed the error code was a COM hResult with a link next to it. I though I was rid of those. Then I clicked the link and saw this.

This was a pretty interesting dialog because it told me:

"Go to the Discussions in Windows Update website to see if someone else has found a solution or to request help from other Windows users."

<sarcasm>Wow, that was helpful. </sarcasm> It also said:

"If you receive Windows Update error 80070103 while installing updates, you might be trying to install a driver that is already installed on your computer or a driver that has a lower compatibility rating than one you already have installed."

What's a driver compatibility rating? I would assume the Windows Update would only suggest compatible drivers that were the most not-controversial ones available.  In my experience Windows Update tends to be very conservative in these things.

Time to reboot and hope for the best.

P.S. I dictated this entire blog post using the Windows Vista to voice recognition feature.  Worked pretty well, and gave my hands a break. 

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.

About   Newsletter

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