Month: August 2006

more asp.net 2.0

The last time I mentioned ASP.NET 2.0 was probably the last time I did any work on it at home. I went to an MSDN event this week that talked about a couple of things in .NET 2.0, so that kind of got me interested in picking it up again. I worked through a bit more stuff today, basically GridView and DetailsView examples. I still have a lot to learn.

Meanwhile, I was listening to an episode of .Net Rocks this week, and the guest, who had been working in .Net 2.0, referred to that as the “old way”, and wished he could have been using the new stuff, like WCF and WF. I feel like I’m falling behind! We haven’t done much of anything with 2.0 in work yet. I’d really like to move a bunch of web stuff from ASP.NET 1.1 to 2.0, but it’s hard to find the time.

User Access Control (UAC) in Vista

One of the most annoying things about Vista so far is the plethora of UAC prompts. I thought I’d try to figure out how to turn off the warnings on CA’s anti-virus software, since a couple of these come up every time I start the computer. Apparently, it’s all or nothing right now — there’s no way to turn off the prompts for individual programs. (See this thread for some discussion on that.) If I was using Vista on my normal home computer, I’d probably get about 10 or 20 of these, given all the programs that load on startup.

Windows Vista

I installed Windows Vista beta 2 on my laptop last night. I decided to try an upgrade install, which took quite a long while, and left me with a pretty slow and weird system. In particular, the wireless networking didn’t work at all right. (I hadn’t really expected much from that, but I thought I’d try it.)

I punted and did a clean install today, and that went a lot faster and has left me with a much more stable system. I had some inital problems with the wireless card recognizing my Airport Express base station, but it seems to be working now. (It’s an Intel Pro/Wireless 2100 3B Mini PCI.)

I also signed up for CA’s eTrust Anti-Virus free one-year trial subscription for Vista beta users. My usual AV software, F-Prot, probably doesn’t work in Vista.

Since I did a clean install, I don’t have any other software loaded yet. I may try the Office 2007 beta, or I may just stick with Office 2003. I’m not sure on that yet.

My laptop barely meets the requirements for Vista, so I’ve got none of the funky Aero Glass stuff going on; just the basic interface. It looks nice enough for now.

Assuming the system remains at least borderline usable, I’ll leave Vista on the machine and play around with it a bit over the next few weeks.

Incredibles

I was watching The Incredibles just now, and I realized something that had gone right past me the first few times I saw the movie. When Helen says “india golf niner niner”, that’s a reference to Iron Giant, which was released in 1999. Obvious, now that I think about it. (I’m used to looking for THX-1138 references in George Lucas films, but not Iron Giant references in Pixar films.)

Free Anti-Virus Protection

Just for yuks, I sent off for an activation code for Active Virus Shield, AOL’s new free anti-virus software. I’m not sure if I can talk myself into actually installing it on one of my own machines, though. I’m kind of scared to put anything related to AOL on my computers. Given their previous history, I’m afraid I might never get it off again.