Vista Annoyance #002: Shared By Me search folder does not appear to work

When I setup sharing on Vista because of the lack of ISO mounting software, I found Search Folders in Windows Explorer and was surprised that the Shared By Me search folder showed no results. Here is the final dialog on setting up sharing:

If you look on the dialog, you see the Show me all the files I am sharing link, which brings up the Shared By Me search folder with no results, days later even:

I have 2 files on my Desktop that I think should be showing up in the search results, a Visio file and the Visio ISO file. I thought this was a decent way to expose users to the search folders, give them hints when they use other functionality, until it didn't work that is.

Vista Annoyance #001: No ISO mounting software built-in

This is hardly the first annoyance I have already had with Vista RTM, and I am barely a few hours into using the final version, but the issue I am going to talk about is the most infuriating from a MSDN subscriber point of view.

I started using Vista for real today, installed the RTM and Office 2007 from DVD/CD (I burned both on OS X with the included Disk Utility, assuming I would be passing the discs around), and then realized I wanted to take a look at Visio 2007. So I started downloading the ISO from MSDN. I expected that MS would have finally included ISO files as mountable images, you know, in the OS. OS X has supported mountable disk images, both its DMG format and ISO formats for a while now and I certainly expected that MS would copy this with Vista. I mean every MSDN subscriber has to mount ISO images, why wouldn't you include a driver to make ISO appear as volumes?

While waiting for the download, I tried to install the unsupported Virtual CD driver for Windows XP on Vista, which failed spectacularly, so I actually was more encouraged that Vista had ISO image support built-in. Unfortunately I was wrong, Vista doesn't know what to do with these files. The good news though is that setting up a share on Vista was a lot easier than on Windows XP because I had to enable one so I could copy the ISO file over to my MacBook Pro, mount the ISO, and then copy the contents back over to the Vista PC I am testing with. The other good news is that Windows File Sharing worked perfectly between OS X 10.4.8 and Vista :-)

200

Hard to believe this is the 200th post to my blog, I feel nearly like an old timer ;-)

I really do feel like an old timer with this observation. I am installing Windows Vista RTM on the test box, so I revert to my Windows NT 3.51 or greater installer experience and format the previous Vista RC1 partition.

The interesting part to me is that:

• When you click format, you get the hourglass for a few seconds, and then its done. This is clearly not a traditional format. Not sure how I feel about this, but I always wondering why you had to go through that laborious format process instead of just fixing the file system to say it didn't have any files.
• One format to rule them all, NTFS. You cannot choose FAT32 here. I think that is a good thing

One more thing, good riddance to the hideous text mode setup.

Tip: Using Parallels for Mac with Check Point SecureClient on OS X

UPDATE: Installed the latest Parallels beta, 2.5 Beta 2 Build 3094, and in the limited testing I have done so far, CheckPoint can be connected to the Intranet before the VM is up. Once the VM is started, it just figures itself out. This is with Shared Networking in the VM, which has worked great.

Original Post
Since I am doing all my development work in Windows on a VM in Parallels for Mac, I need to use Check Point SecureClient VPN in either OS X or the VM to connect back to the corporate network. The majority of my day to day apps, Notes, TestTrack Pro, MS Office, Safari and Firefox, iChat and Adium, are running in OS X so for some of those I need the VPN connection available to OS X apps. So I can use that same VPN connection with my Parallels VM too right?

You can, but it turns out there is a little trick, at least I have found that to be the cause. The VM has to be running before SecureClient VPN is connected to your corporate network. Why would it matter? My guess is that SecureClient patches routing tables during its connection sequence, but doesn't do the same when new network interfaces come active, well at least the way Parallels does it. Also, didn't seem to matter in Parallels if I used Bridged Networking or Shared Networking (new in Parallels Build 2.2 Build 1970). Again just a guess, I am too lazy to dig that deep :-)

I can't buy Gears of War

Retail stunts like this make me furious. My wife just stopped into a GameStop in NJ, and I called over to one in Manhattan, neither will sell a copy of Gears of War unless you had reserved it. I have an extremely hard time believing that this is a supply issue, and extremely easy time believing this is an artificial way to "punish" people that weren't good and pre-ordered through GameStop. Thanks GameStop for teaching me a lesson, I will make sure to not buy anything in your stores again over this stupidity. There are plenty of other retailers and e-tailers out there.

[UPDATED] So I got Gears of War afterall :-) I don't understand what scheme *cough* scam *cough* Microsoft and GameStop/EB are running. Target will not have the game in stock at the Bridgewater, NJ location until Thursday 11/9, Best Buy Bridgewater, NJ was not going to have the game until today, Wednesday 11/8. But I called the EB Games in the Bridgewater Commons mall when I got home last night, and they said sure they would sell me a copy if I walked in, but not the collector's edition. So I went, and even then the guy behind the register hesistated a second when I told him I wanted Gear and I hadn't pre-order. He then pushed, hard, for me to pre-order Halo 3 or buy the $3 disc insurance for a year, but I had none of that and walked out of the store with game in hand.

Gears itself, oh my. The graphics are easily the best seen so far on the 360, but you know the graphics really don't matter if the game play sucks. But Gears doesn't! Far from it, the "pop and stop" action is furious. The AI is very good, and the game is funny, at least to me, it seems to embrace and at the same time make fun of huge military action movies, Arnold Schwazengeer's Predator (one of my all time favorties) comes to mind "get to the chooooopper!!!" My only serious complaint at this stage is that I was wishing the moving from one cover location to another was more sticky, but maybe I just don't have the complete hang of the controls yet. If you have ever liked action games, you really have to pick this up.

Making a MacBook Pro my development machine, or Joining a Windows Server 2003 SP1 Parallels virtual machine to Active Directory

As I casually mentioned in my last post, work got me a MacBook Pro Core Duo to replace the aging IBM ThinkPad T42 I came to loathe on a daily basis.

Why the Mac? Easy, it runs Windows and OS X if we decide to support OS X in the future, and it came in $100 cheaper than an identically configured new Lenovo ThinkPad with our supposedly steep corporate discount, and no I am not kidding.

So how am I going to work? That was kinda the mystery part. I wasn't sure if I would use Boot Camp or Parallels, but the intention was to start using Parallels with a safety net Boot Camp partition for testing at full speed

I was also taking time with this change to move over to Windows Server 2003 SP1 because of work I have been doing on Approver.com. I did the equivalent of 40 hours worth of work on a feature that is basically in stasis because Jeff and I couldn't get it deployed since the config is so different between IIS 5.1 and IIS 6 for the feauture I built. I promised I would never let that happen again, for a work or side project, and just develop everything under IIS 6.

So I installed Win2K3 R2 SP1 in Parallels Build 1940 for my work VM, and then tried to join it to the domain and then I wait and wait until I see The remote procedure call failed and did not execute. I was stunned, fear stricken actually, that my whole scheme of using the MacBook Pro with OS X and Parallels had just gone up in flames. It took me a week of testing, Googling, forum crawls, and a fair bit of praying, but I finally cracked the problem.

You can read my Parallels Forum Post, I am murdocdv, for the solution, but I will repeat here. Windows Server 2003 SP1 changes the way RPC packets are formed to increase performance. The details are in this MS KB article. This change though causes some VPN and firewall software to block the RPC packets because it doesn't understand them, and it dawned on my at some point that perhaps the way Parallels bridges the OS X networking to the guest VM networking is close enough to a VPN connection that the hotfix and registry change in the KB article might allow Win2K3 SP1 to join the domain. That is exactly what happened, but you have to follow the directions exactly. Install hotfix first and reboot, then change registry and reboot, then join domain. Not having W2K3 in the domain would have been a dealbreaker, so I am exremely relieved to have fixed this problem.

Update
Parallels Desktop 3.0 Build 5608 still has the domain joining issue, at least for me. You still have to manually change the way Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 (SP2) RPC works to disable RPC negotiation. I forgot about this issue for a few hours before using the right terms in Google the other day. Actually, I think I had eliminated this from the probability matrix for troubleshooting my domain joining problem because surely, *surely*, Parallels had updated their networking stack to work with RPC negotiation, but I was wrong. Also, I misremembered the Knowledge Base article. I thought that with SP2, the don't negotiate behavior was going to be the default, wrong again. I am probably going to have to print out this KB article and hang it on the cube so I don't forgot again :-)

How iTunes saved my vacation

In my Email to Steve Jobs... I told his Steveness that

...I will not buy another video from iTunes until they reach full HD resolution, 1080p.

Allow me to now come clean and say I have already bought several videos from iTunes at 640x480, meaning I paid for them they were not free, and DVD ripping is pretty crappy and on anything but the latest hardware.

Why did I eat my own words? Well I travelled to Italy earlier this month (which was fantastic, highly recommended if you like historic stuff, beautiful country, or wonderful food) and had a pile of DVDs for my 2 year old son to watch on the flights. Well inexplicably, Alitalia refuses to let you use and CD/DVD drive while inflight, even once you have hit cruising altitude! I was actually furious, and thankfully going to Italy the Alitalia leg of the trip was only from London to Rome, but going home it was the Rome to NYC direct 9 hour flight, the kid was definitely not going to hold out that long. The first week of my trip was spent without Internet access in a Tuscan Villa, courtesy of Rentvillas (one of the sites I helped develop while at Vertigo Software), so I couldn't get Handbrake to start ripping DVDs on OS X until I got to Rome.

Once I got to Rome, another wrinkle was that I couldn't rip while I was touring the Collesium or walking the streets because the hotel room power was shutoff if you didn't have the keycard in a slot while in the room. So I only had 2 nights to rip some DVDs, and holy cow is it slow. On the iBook G4 933 MHz OS X machine, it was running between 6-8 hours to rip 1 hour of video! So unless I bought some video off iTunes, I was going to only have 2 hours of video for a 9 hour flight. Sure, some kids will watch the same video over and over again in a loop, but not my kid, he watches the same thing over and over, but there has to be breaks. So I bought a couple episodes of Dora The Explorer, Little Einsteins, and the Pixard movie A Bug's Life. This all downloaded in far less time than ripping a single hour of video and made the flight home a far more enjoyable experience for all.

Just for comparison's sake, when I got home I fired up my new MacBook Pro Core Duo (obsoleted yesterday Core 2 Duo MacBook Pros, damn you Steve Jobs) that work has provided as my main development machine (more on this latter) and ripped some video with Handbrake. OMG, it only takes about one hour to rip one hour of video! This is getting into the realm of usable and has be seriously considering making a run at ripping all my DVDs in preperation for the iTV. Also, my son just beats on the discs he uses and I can't imagine rebuying anything that he watches.

Review Update: Xbox 360 and the Xbox Live Marketplace

Just read a Blackfriars' Marketing: Zune Marketplace pricing too cute by half by way of MacDailyNews and it got me thinking about the 40 MS Points I have sitting in the Xbox Live Marketplace, time to provide another Xbox 360 Review Update
For all that Microsoft got right with Xbox Live, foisting an alternate currency on consumers to buy anything is just wrong. I am not complaining about that cost of the service because I think it's perfectly reasonable to charge for something like this, I am purely worked up because this is entirely anti-consumer, and MS is trying to expand their currency to the Zuna Marketplace and anything else that involves a monetary transaction.
Apparently MS doesn't have enough money in the bank. What gets me the most is that, as the Blackfriar's Marketing points out, you are giving one of the biggest companies in the world, $40 Billion in the bank, a LOAN. How is this? You cannot buy just the points you need for a transaction, you have to buy them in preset denominations that are almost guaranteed to leave you with a balance, so MS has some of your money and you get nothing.
MS Points make me LESS likely to buy, not more. Say I see something on the Xbox Live Marketplace that I want to buy, they are actually making it hard to spend money. I would nearly always have to add points to my Xbox Live account, then buy the item with points. If MS had just used dollars, the transaction would have been over a few steps ago. Why? I have to figure out the stupid conversion to dollars to see if the item is worth me spending my money on it. MS you really think people are stupid enough to not feel when they are getting fleeced just because you have this points barrier in the way?
What is that exchange rate again?Right now, $1.00 is worth about 78 points, so a point is worth $0.0125 dollars. Say I have 40 points sitting in my account, that's $0.50 worth of points. What happens when MS decides to inflate the minimum amount of points needed to buy something, my points are suddenly worth less than when I bought them. Can I "cash out" my points? No. Whatever balance I have in my account is totally at the mercy of Microsoft's accounting department, everything costs more than listed because you can't just buy that item, you have to buy a pack of points. Insane.
Bye Bye Xbox Live Marketplace. So with all that said, I have decided I will not be buying any more items from the Xbox Live Marketplace. The only way MS understands that the scheme they hatched sucks is if consumers vote with their dollars, or lack of dollars. I will still download demoes, videos, anything free, but MS you can forget about me buying anything ever again. Enjoy the 40P/$.50, I am sure you can compound interest that into hundreds of dollars before I die.

Visual Studio 2005 Badness

Working with VS 2005 today I was just editing some code and I see the following dialog pop-up

This is followed by a crash dialog, which I dutifully report to the mothership, and then nothing. VS doesn't crash, it just hangs there and I can't kill the dialog, notice the Cancel button is grayed out. If pop-open process explorer because Google reveals that this has been an ongoing bug in VS 2005 since before it RTMed and it had something to do with handle counts. My VS handle count is 1,261.
I manually crashed it, and this time I DID lose some code because the nice Visual Studio Recovered Files dialog was nowhere to be found. If I wasn't going to trash this machine in a few days I would be installing VS 2005 SP1 beta right now. And good call not waiting on Vista compatibility fixes VS Team, get that SP out the door!

Windows Developers: You are not upgrading to Vista anytime soon

Well I just applied for the Visual Studio 2005 SP 1 Beta Program through Microsoft Connect. When I mentioned my recent Windows hangs in A Feature You Don't Ever Want to See it seems like it may be related to VS 2005 running. I can't say definitely it is VS 2005, but I want into the Beta if they will have me.
This was all prompted by this Visual Studio 2005 SP1 Beta and Visual Studio support for Vista post. Talk about burying the lead, me that is, but in that post, it is revealed that VS.NET 2002 and 2003 are not going to be supported on Vista, so for anyone that needs to develop for .NET 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, or 3.0, XP SP2 will be it, well, forever. You are going to need a VM, or even more likely another machine to see the full Vista UI meal-deal, but you are only going to test on Vista or develop .NET 2.0 + 3.0 applications only with VS 2005 on Vista. That situation isn't possible for me right now, so it looks like I will be running XP as my main development OS for the foreseeable future, and so will a lot of Windows/.NET developers.