Recently in Technical Category

Today I installed Windows 7 on my Thinkpad X41 Tablet PC and here is how it went:

First of all, this PC didn't have a CD drive and my external CD drive was not working. So I decided to create a bootable USB drive to install Windows 7, thanks to the innumerable and affordable 8GB USB pen drives available now:-). I created the bootable drive as per the instructions listed in http://www.bwana.org/2009/01/11/how-to-install-windows-7-beta-from-a-usb-drive-to-an-hp-mini-1000-without-vista/. But whenever I booted my Thinkpad with the new USB drive, it said "Missing Operating System". After some hunting around, I found that the problem was due to a missing switch "/mbr" switch in invoking bootsect.exe. So I ran the following command:
bootsect.exe /nt60 G: /mbr

With this command, the USB was made bootable and the installation started. And guess what, the installation completed in just 20 minutes on my 40 GB 4200 RPM hard disk. Wow!! Too good, huh?

After the installation, I ran the Windows Update to update the drivers for network card, audio card etc. The display driver was still not installed, so I installed the XP-compatible driver from Intel support site. Now the system is up and running.

Yes, it was a pleasant experience.

Amid criticism about the annoyingly frequent UAC (User Account Control) notifications on Windows Vista, Microsoft decided to prompt users less frequently in Windows 7. But this decision has generated sharp criticism from all circles. Security experts have criticized that this exposes a vulnerability that will put users at high risk. Basically, with Windows 7, users can choose how often they want to be notified - the default setting is to notify only when a third-party application is making a change. The catch here is that any changes to the UAC setting itself are being made within the OS and not by a third party. Hence malicious code could turn off such alerts entirely without notifying the user that such a change had been made. MS is literally getting beaten up for this decision. Finally, Microsoft announced that they have decided to adjust the feature such that it notifies users when the UAC itself is modified. These changes will be available in the Windows 7 RC due later this year.
As I write this, I am reminded of the Malayalam proverb "Velukkan thechathu paandaayi" (translation: the face cream that was applied to become fair has created a patch)

Today when I hit F5 in my Visual Studio project (a sample Win32 console application), I got this weird error "msdia80.dll cannot be loaded". I did a quick search in the Internet and found a few solutions:

• Reinstall Visual Studio SP1: Unfortunately, this is not a viable option because we know how much time it takes to install SP1
• Register the msdia80.dll: This is a very easy fix. But where do we find this DLL? Here is the answer: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\VC

I tried the second solution and it worked fine. So this is what we need to do:

1. Open command prompt.
2. Navigate to the folder C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\VC
3. Run this command "regsvr32 msdia80.dll"

That's it. Enjoy debugging your application.

Microsoft has released XmlLite, a light-weight fast XML parser exclusively for native C++. XmlLite is supposed to be a near-equivalent of System.Xml namespace of the managed world. I said "near-equivalent" because XmlLite is just a forward-only reader. It does not provide schema/DTD validation or DOM implementation. Neither does it support XPath or style sheets. So perhaps it is far from near-equivalent.

But what I like about this parser is that it focuses on performance and low overhead. More importantly, it is meant for native C++ apps. After all, MS hasn't fogotten the C++ community.

Kenny Kerr gives a good overview of XmlLite in this MSDN article

technorati tags:XmlLite, XML parser, native C++

I recently came across Trac, a minimalistic web-based project-management and bug-tracking system. Normally, these kind of products come with a plethora of features; but turn out be seldom used. It is better to have a light-weight product with just-enough features, but easy to use. This is the idea behind Trac. It is the best fit for developers to organize their work without disturbing the development process which is deployed in the team/organization. Trac is Wiki-based and interfaces with Subversion.

The only problem is that it is not trivial to install it on a desktop due to the intricate requirements for particular version of Python and other software. But we managed to get it running along with its WebAdmin plugin. There are quite a few Trac Hosting sites like CvsDude, WebFaction.

Microsoft has released Visual Studio 2005 SP1. This includes some 70 improvements like Core Duo support, performance improvements in TFS, integration of TFS with Excel 2007 etc.
VS2005 SP1 Release Notes say

Service pack installation takes longer than the original product installation:
Installing Visual Studio 2005 SP1 takes longer than installing the original release version because the SP1 installation is much like a product installation, but with additional installation tasks. Installation time depends on which product is installed and the computer’s configuration.
Installation requires significant disk space:
Disk space equal to that taken by the original product installation may be needed to install a service pack .
If you have more than one Visual Studio product installed, you will need disk space for each service pack installation. You can find an estimate of the required disk space on the download page for the service pack.

Here is what Fabrice says about the SP1 installation..

Update: You should make sure you have some time available for the installation. Here, it took more than one hour and a half with 99% of the CPU occupied all the time!

I was waiting for a Service Pack of VS2005 which would fix some of the common VC++ development issues like Updating intellisense forever, precompiled header problems etc. I wonder whether these are fixed in SP1.

Microsoft has released IE 7.0 to public. Microsoft has included features like tagged browsing, subscribing to RSS feeds etc. into this version of IE. Phew... At last..:-)
Read more from CNet News

I played around with Flock some more and I have a better feeling of the same. In my earlier blog, I had overlooked the fact that it is a beta version of the product and the minor issues can be pardoned.
Some cool features I like are automatically saving the bookmarks to del.icio.us, reading my blog as a feed etc.

Now I really like the idea behind the Flock browser. It tries to harness the power of Web and integrate many applications like blogs, flickr photos, del.icio.us etc. This concept is very powerful and is the part of the recent ideas like Web 2.0, Social Network etc. But in order to achieve the status of a social browser, Flock needs a lot more power. George talks about this in his blog. He talks about a social browser which provides good visualization of the wide-spread content on the web. He calls this application FolkMind and has started an Open Source project named Folkmind for the same. It is really interesting, especially the project's caption "Virtual brain of humanity" :-)