Category: Windows

Visual Studio 2012, take two

So I managed to get VS 2012 installed. (See previous post for details on my first failed attempt.) I’d love to write up a blog post detailing some weird issue and how I worked around it, but I don’t really have anything useful to offer along those lines. I basically just installed some pending Windows Updates, had a cup of coffee, then tried again.

After the install, I was prompted to install a patch that apparently fixes some compatibility issue. Then, I was prompted to install VS 2012 update 2. I did both of those things, and now have a usable VS 2012 install. I’m still not sure why Microsoft can’t post updated installers for their products when they release patches and updates, but I’m used to the silliness now, so I just grin and bear it.

I had read a good bit of negative feedback about the UI changes in VS 2012, and I have to say that I agree with most of it, now that I’ve seem the product up close. It’s much less pleasant to look at, compared to VS 2010. First, the upper-case menus are ridiculous. Whoever thought that was a good idea has hopefully been fired by now. (Who am I kidding, he probably got promoted!) You can fix that pretty easily with this NuGet package. And the guy who put it together gets extra points for the instructions: “YOU NO LIKE NO SHOUTING?! Run Disable-AllCaps”.

The next easily-fixed interface blunder is the color scheme. The default is called “light”, and it’s kind of an all-grey mess, with a little bit of white, black, and blue.  If you switch to the “blue” theme, you get something a little like VS 2010, and much more usable.

The general flatness of the interface, though, is still pretty blah. There was really nothing wrong with the VS 2010 interface, and no reason to arbitrarily change stuff for the worse like this, and it’s so hard to believe that anybody really thought they were making things better here.

There’s a blog entry on the VS team blog that discusses the all-caps thing in specific. If you read it, you’ll get a good picture of how a very large company can make really poor decisions about specific products, based on big-picture corporate strategies and directions, and how they can be (apparently) clueless about what they’re doing. They talk about how the use of uppercase text is a “strong signature element” of MS user interfaces, including Zune and Bing. Now, really, how much thought does it take to figure out that the menu bar for a complex programming IDE has nothing to do with the user interface on a failed MP3 player or a web search engine? They end the blog post by saying that “we will enable you to customize the casing, and we are exploring options for how to expose that choice.” Well, the blog post is about a year old, VS 2012 has had two update releases, and still no option in the product itself to change the menu casing.

Alright, so that was way too much grumbling about fairly trivial user interface stuff. I guess I’m just in a bit of a cranky mood today! I still look forward to trying out VS 2012, and seeing what useful new features have been added to the product, and to C#!

Visual Studio 2012

I haven’t bothered with VS2012 yet, but today I decided to try to install VS Express 2012 for Windows Desktop on my laptop. I really only want it, at this point, for developing console apps. I wanted to take a shot at using it for the Project Euler stuff that I’ve been playing around with, and I was also interested in trying out some of the async stuff in C# 5. So nothing fancy; I just wanted to get familiar with it.

Well, no luck. The install got about halfway through (judging by the progress bars), then got no further. I know some of the VS installs in the past have been notoriously slow. (I’m looking at *you* VS 2005 SP 1! Or was it VS 2008 SP1…?) But this one just stalled at the same spot for 2 or 3 hours, with no change, so I gave up on it.

I’m starting to wonder if I need to do a fresh install of Windows 8 on that laptop, just to clear up the cruft from previous VS installs. I really wish Microsoft could make an IDE that didn’t cause so much grief just to install…

Windows 8 Blues

It’s been a while since I’ve posted about Windows 8. My intention was to upgrade both my desktop and laptop to Win 8. My laptop (a ThinkPad Edge) is now upgraded, but, after several failed attempts, my desktop is still running Windows 7. One thing I can say about the Windows 8 upgrade process: if it fails, it does a great job of restoring back to Win 7. I’ve had, I think, three failed attempts to upgrade my desktop. Each time, the Win 8 installer figured out that things weren’t working out, and got me back to Win 7.

Meanwhile, my laptop has been working fine under Win 8 for several weeks. I used Start8 to get the Start Menu back, and I haven’t used the Metro interface at all, really. I have Start8 set up to take me straight to the desktop when I log in, so I really don’t even look at it.

I did have an issue on the laptop with Windows Updates this week though. Somewhere in the process of installing the most recent batch of updates, something went wrong, and left my machine unable to completely boot up. Win 8 detected a problem, and tried to automatically fix it, but that didn’t work. I used System Restore to go back to a restore point, and that got me up and running again, though there was some residual weirdness after that. I *think* I’m back to a stable state now, with all critical updates installed, but I’m not 100% sure of that.

So, for anyone looking for an opinion on Windows 8:
(1) It’s workable, if you do something the get the start menu back, and ignore the Metro interface.
(2) Upgrades from Win 7 are kind of an iffy proposition, but probably won’t destroy your machine if they fail.
(3) Once installed, it’s no less likely to go south than Win 7 was. (The BSOD looks different now, but it’s still a BSOD.)

Oh, and if you’re looking for some useful advice on  Win 8, check out these posts from Scott Hanselman and Paul Allen.

another failed Windows 8 upgrade attempt

I took another shot at upgrading my desktop PC to Windows 8 today. I first uninstalled some software that I thought might be causing problems, then ran the upgrade using the “just personal files” option. I figured this would wipe out the Windows and Program Files folders, and leave me with a clean Windows 8 install. The plan would then be to re-install all the software I would need, under Windows 8. Good plan, but once again, the install failed and rolled me back to Windows 7.

I’m really not sure what’s going wrong. I have a few ideas, based on stuff I’ve found in the Windows 8 install forums, but I’m not sure what’s likely to work and what’s not. Since the install/restore process takes about two hours, I think I’m going to have to wait a bit before trying the upgrade again.

Windows 8 upgrade failed

So my ill-considered attempt to upgrade my desktop machine to Windows 8 failed. The computer seemed to blue-screen after the install finished (showing the silly new Win 8 error screen), then rebooted to a screen telling me that the upgrade failed, and that it was restoring my previous Windows version. Surprisingly enough, that worked well, and I’m right back where I started.

I had originally only intended to run the upgrade advisor, and not actually do the upgrade. But, when I ran setup.exe from the DVD, it went straight into the upgrade, without giving me any indication of software incompatibilities or anything like that. I was going to cancel the install, but I decided to give it a shot anyway. I guess that wasn’t really a good idea.

So, with the computer back to Windows 7, I started poking around on the DVD to figure out how to run the upgrade advisor. I didn’t actually find it on the DVD, but I managed to download it from Microsoft and run it from there. There are actually a number of things on the computer that won’t work in Win 8, and that need to be either removed or upgraded. I’m not sure which of those might have been serious enough to have screwed up the install though, or if the problem might be with something else entirely.

Well, I’m going to try to take care or removing and upgrading stuff, then maybe take another shot at the upgrade next weekend.

Sandy follow-up and more

I got cable service back yesterday, so I’m pretty much back to normal, at least as far as utilities are concerned. My goals for today were modest — I just wanted to get my laundry done, pay some bills, run a couple of errands, and then relax and watch some TV.

At work, over the last couple of days, we’ve been working on a web site to allow people to search for open gas stations in the area. Getting gas has been a huge problem here in NJ since the storm. The web site is live at http://findgas.org/ now. Unfortunately, it’s been popular enough that we had to make some adjustments, lest the site take down our main web server. Not really what I wanted to be doing today, but not a big deal either. In hindsight, we should probably have put the thing up on AWS, on a self-contained EC2 instance. Live and learn, right?

Meanwhile, I decided to take a shot at upgrading my main desktop computer (here at home) to Windows 8. I was originally going to go through and uninstall some old software first, but in the end, I decided to just start the upgrade and hope for the best. I didn’t even do a backup first, which is something I may regret later. Either way, it’s running right now. Previous experience from my laptop upgrade would lead me to believe that it’ll take an hour or two to finish.

Hello from Windows 8

Well, I went ahead and installed the $40 download version of the Windows 8 upgrade on my ThinkPad. I did an in-place upgrade, and hoped for the best. It turned out pretty well. I had to remove several Lenovo utilities, but almost everything else seems to be working. Visual Studio 2010 is working fine. (I haven’t tried much, other than a “hello world” program, but that worked OK.) My “WIMP” stack is fine — MySQL is running, and PHP under IIS is still working fine. I checked phpMyAdmin and my test Drupal site, and they both look OK.

Most of the utility programs I use seem to be fine. That includes DropBox, Evernote, KeePass, IrfanView, VLC, and Notepad++. I still need to re-install iTunes, so I’m not sure about that, but I think it will work. And of course Firefox is working fine — I’m using it right now to write this blog post.

The install process was pretty smooth. It took about an hour from the point where I started the purchase, to the point where all the files were downloaded, the pre-install stuff was done, and the actual install started. Then, the install itself took about an hour to complete.

My experience on the ThinkPad has been good enough that I think I can probably do an in-place upgrade of my desktop too, so I’ll probably do that when the box upgrade arrives.

I’ve got a bunch of other stuff to mess around with, so I’ll probably write at least one more blog post on this. But, so far, so good!

Windows 8

It’s Sunday morning, and I’ve got nothing much to do, other than wait for Hurricane Sandy to hit, so I thought I’d catch up on blogging. I have a few things I want to write up, the first being some thoughts on Windows 8. (I’ve found a couple of good reviews/articles on Win 8 at The Register and ComputerWorld.)

I pre-ordered a boxed copy of the Windows 8 upgrade from Newegg, and I’d planned on using that to upgrade my ThinkPad from Windows 7 to 8 this weekend. However, it hasn’t arrived yet. I then thought about just downloading the $40 upgrade from Microsoft and using the boxed copy to upgrade my desktop at some point. I went as far as running the upgrade advisor on the ThinkPad, but the results I got made me back off on that plan and rethink things a bit.

Specifically, Visual Studio 2010 is listed as “not compatible”. I was pretty surprised at this, since I would expect that MS would want developers to be able to move to Win 8 early. I realize that they’d also like to see developers move to VS 2012, but they must know that not everyone can do that right away.

So, I’ve been thinking about my options. One option would be to just do a clean install of Windows 8 on the ThinkPad, and not worry about VS 2010. I do like having it available, but the ThinkPad isn’t my main machine, so there’s no reason I really need it to have VS 2010. Another option would be to just try the upgrade and see what happens. This guy has apparently had some luck with VS 2010 on Windows 8, so maybe it’ll work, even if it’s marked as “not compatible” by the upgrade advisor.

Another interesting thought I’ve had, after reading about how awesome Hyper-V is on Windows 8, is to have a fairly vanilla Win 8 install on the ThinkPad, then have VS 2010 and some other stuff set up in a Win 7 VM. (There are good articles on Hyper-V support in Windows 8 here and here.) Of course, then I need to have a Win 7 license that I can use in a VM. In the past, I’ve learned the hard way that you can’t reuse an OS license from a physical machine from a major OEM in a VM — it detects that you’re not on actual hardware from that OEM, and locks you out. I’m not 100% sure if that’s still the case, but I’d bet it is. So I can’t just use the ThinkPad Win 7 license in the VM.

I think I have a Win 7 product key from my old MSDN subscription, from my previous employer, but that subscription expired a couple of years ago, and I’m not sure if the product keys would still be valid. Which then brings up a bigger question that I’ve been putting off thinking about: Is it time for me to break down and finally buy my own MSDN subscription, or TechNet subscription? TechNet is affordable enough, but MSDN costs about as much as a new laptop would. I like being able to mess with VMs and experiment with new stuff from Microsoft, but the cost of doing so if somewhat prohibitive.

WIndows 8, Mountain Lion, and Ubuntu 12

I have to do a 10pm web site rollout tonight, so I find myself at home with some time to kill. I haven’t gotten much of a chance to play around with Windows 8, so I decided to download the 90-day eval, and install it on my old laptop. I have the ISO downloaded and ready to go now. However, I had installed Ubuntu 11 on the laptop back in February. I haven’t really played around with it much since then, and I was ready to wipe it out, but when I turned it on, I got an update message letting me know that I could update it to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. Well, I decided I’d rather upgrade the Ubuntu install on this laptop rather than wiping it out and starting over with Windows 8. It’s running now, and seems to be chugging along smoothly.

I did a little searching, and it looks like 12.04.1 was only just released. There’s an article about it on ZDNet, dated yesterday. And I guess the original 12.04 release was a few months back, based on the date on this Lifehacker article.

There’s been a lot of OS-related news lately, with Mountain Lion just released and Windows 8 nearing general availability. My old 2007 MacBook can’t handle Mountain Lion, so I’m sticking with plain-old Lion on that for now. I’m tentatively planning to buy myself a new MacBook Pro early next year, but I’m not really that worried about it right now. And I’m curious about Windows 8, but not that enthusiastic about it, given what I already know. I read an interesting CNET article this morning, comparing Mountain Lion and Windows 8. I think I agree with his conclusions, for the most part.

I will likely upgrade both my Windows desktop and laptop to Windows 8, when the consumer version is released, but I’m not that excited about it. Meanwhile, maybe I’ll play around with Ubuntu a bit more!

IPredator

I keep thinking that I ought to sign up for a third-party VPN service, so I can put all my traffic through an encrypted tunnel when I’m on public (or quasi-public) wifi. I meant to do something before I went off to San Diego, but I just didn’t get around to it. Some of the services I’ve seen are fairly expensive. These guys, for instance, are $15/month.

I just found one that’s reasonably simple and inexpensive: IPredator. It’s € 15 for 3 months, which comes out to about $22 US. So, about $7 per month. And it doesn’t auto-renew, so if I stop using it, I can just let the account go inactive until I decide to start using it again.

I have it set up on my Mac, iPhone, and iPad now. Setup was easy enough, and the speed seems reasonable. I need to do some more experimenting on that front.

I’m curious to see if it will work on the wifi at my office. We have a SonicWall security device on our network now, and it can be a bit agressive about blocking stuff. I’m not sure if it will let the VPN traffic through or not.