I was just setting at a command prompt in Vista on my laptop and I typed 'cd /' out of habit and, to my surprise, it worked! Not only that, but tab completion still behaved as expected!

I actually have been using the '/' character in PowerShell because it is easier to type than '\' (not as far to reach) and it is the default in *NIX systems as well (i.e. my Ubuntu installation).

Now granted, I probably shouldn't get used to this in the event that I inadvertently code a '/' character in one of my programs, but then again, I should technically be using the System.IO.Path.PathSeparator anyway.

I get excited about the little things.

NOTE - this might be the result of Service Pack 1 on Vista also...

UPDATE - I lied. You can type 'cd /' and get to the root, but tab completion still completes only for the current directory. In other words, if you're current directory is c:\windows\ and you type 'cd /[tab]', you'll get directories that are in c:\windows. Sorry. My excitement just dropped a little.

Check this out...

My Vista stability score was well on its way back to 10 when I got hammered with some hard crashes in Internet Explorer. It took me a while to figure out what the problem was, but then I noticed the Sun Java icon in the toolbar and the Data Execution Protection message...

I had recently enabled DEP with Internet Explorer via the Internet Options menu (you'll have to run Internet Explorer as an Administrator before you can change this option). I was sort of curious about it and wanted to check it out.

I discovered about DEP and Internet Explorer 7 via Michael Howard's blog and I also verified from a comment to his post that (as of the writing of this post), the Sun JVM does not work with DEP in Internet Explorer.

So, if you're getting a lot of random crashes in IE, don't stress out. It might be DEP.

Too bad my stability score had to drop so low, though.

The web has been busy with news about .NET 3.0 going RTM, along with Office 2007, Vista, etc. But some other news that hasn't received quite as much publicity is news regarding Sysinternals at Microsoft. There were a couple of posts today that I thought were very interesting.

The first post is about the move from the original Sysinternals site over to Microsoft. I think the best part of the announcement is the focus on letting the "community demand help drive [their] priorities." A few of the comments have been negative regarding the decision to not post the source code to the tools, but that is the only negative thing that I can see in the post. Besides, if people want the source enough, maybe Microsoft will put it back out again. They listened when people complained about the Vista EULA didn't they?

The second post is even better news. In addition to some new releases of some great tools from Sysinternals (mostly to support Vista), a new tool has been released called Process Monitor! Process Monitor takes all of the functionality provided by RegMon and FileMon and combines them with even more information such as information about threads! If you're worried that it will put too much into one place because it was nice to focus only on registry or file access, don't because with the click of a button, you can tell it to only display registry changes, file changes, or thread changes. If you want to get straight to the main Process Monitor page, it is here.

Here's a screenshot of Process Monitor in action:

Unrelated to this post, but I used the Snipping Tool in Vista to get this screenshot. It works pretty well.

I recently installed GhostDoc 1.9.5 on Vista RC2 at home. At first, I received as error towards the end of installation so I searched around a little bit to see if anyone else had seen the error. Then, as with most issues I've had with Vista, I decided to see if elevating the install to admin would work which seems to have worked fine.

The easiest way I've found to run things that don't offer a "Run as admin" option on the click menu (like MSI files) is to run the Command Prompt as an admin and then start the program from there. You can pull up the start menu, type cmd and then CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER which will run the command as an admin (thanks to Kristan Kenney for that info). Quite a nifty shortcut key for running as an administrator.

Okay, maybe it isn't hilarity, but it is somewhat ridiculous when Vista will let you get around a compatibility dialog warning you that a program isn't currently compatible on this version of Windows but a similar dialog that is displayed when you try to uninstall the same application that will not let you override it*!

At least as far as I can tell - YMMV.

(I wish I had thought to take screenshots... I did a quick search online but didn't come up with any examples of the dialogs I mentioned... sorry)

* I was installing/uninstalling Nero 6... installing so that I could copy a CD and uninstalling so I could install Nero 7, which is now supported on Vista.

I'm a big fan on Windows OneCare. I installed the betas and was thoroughly impressed at it. I recently posted in frustration, though, that the current version wasn't supported in Vista yet. Well, the 1.5 beta has now been released and it is supported under Vista. Here's a screenshot of it on my machine:

So far so good!

I recently updated my Vista installation to RC2 (build 5744), which went fairly smoothly for me. The installation went even better than for RC1, because I had moved my documents to my D: drive, so once I told Vista where they were, most of my initial configuration was done! I did have one weird problem with installation, but it disappeared when I booted from the DVD instead of attempting to install from within the previous install of Vista.

I ran into my biggest problem today, though, when I attempted to install Visual Studio 2005. I had downloaded the ISO quite a while back and had used it to install VS2005 first on Windows XP SP2 and later on Vista RC1 without any problems. Under XP, I was able to use the Virtual CD tool that Microsoft provides, but it wasn't supported under Vista. As a result, I had found the SlySoft Virtual CloneDrive, which worked great on Vista RC1. It didn't seem to work so well on Vista RC2 and I have no idea why.

The Visual Studio 2005 installation would fail with an error loading the file Rmt9x.mst. My problem sounded quite a bit like this one detailed on the MSDN forums, but I wasn't sure. I had also noticed some strange behavior with restarting since I had installed RC2, such as the restart hanging, even to the point of me having to power down my computer instead of waiting on the restart. On a hunch, I decided to uninstall Virtual CloneDrive and give DAEMON Tools a try. It helped that DAEMON Tools said that it supported Vista!

Once Virtual CloneDrive was uninstalled, I started up the DAEMON Tools installation which asked for a reboot. I was a little wary, but went ahead and let it and it rebooted without any hangs! First good sign!

After the reboot, I started up DAEMON Tools and pointed it to the VS2005 ISO and started up setup. The installation ran great, so everything points to something in Virtual CloneDrive not working as expected under RC2.

As I mentioned earlier, I still have no idea why Virtual CloneDrive began having problems under RC2. It ran great under RC1 and I really liked the interface it provided. DAEMON Tools is admittedly less user friendly, but it certainly gets the job done, which is what I needed.

I recently moved my documents from my C: drive over to my D: drive at home. My C: drive is a 10,000 RPM Raptor drive, which is insanely fast, but doesn't provide as much disk space (still a completely worthwhile tradeoff IMHO). As a result, though, I don't have room on my C: drive for a lot of other things like programs and games, which is why moving my documents to the D: drive is so nice. This is what it looks like in Vista:

Now, notice the buttons on this screenshot, specifically the "Restore Default," "Move," and "Find Target" buttons. Do you see them in the screenshot below?

I don't!!!

Where are they?!?

The only difference that I can tell is that the one is for my personal folder and the other is for the Public folder... is it a security setting? I'm not sure, but I tried running Windows Explorer as an Administrator and it still didn't work. I'm currently running build 5600 (RC1).

I'm not the only one to experience this behavior.

If you've seen some of the Vista screenshots lately or even installed the RC1 for Vista, you will undoubtedly have noticed that Windows Vista makes use of the C:\Users directory instead of C:\Documents and Settings that Windows XP had previously used.

I had been a little curious how Vista handled programs that might have the C:\Documents and Settings path hardcoded (which is a bad thing), but I now understand. Documents and Settings still exists! The new Users directory is actually much more like a Junction point (see Scott's post on code organization and junctions for more information if you're unfamiliar with junctions) that references the Documents and Settings directory!

Would you be interested to know how I discovered this?

I was digging around my drive trying to track down a duplicate song that iTunes had found. It showed one beneath my Users directory and one beneath my Documents and Settings directory. That really threw me at first so I dug down into the hidden Documents and Settings directory and found duplicates of all of my document files! The reason I wasn't suspicious about this is because I didn't do a complete format before installing RC1. I still did a clean install, but it simply doesn't perform an upgrade of the existing Windows install... a nuance, but it is still important. The difference is that directories other than your Program Files and Windows directories stay behind.

Anyway, I started to delete what I thought were duplicates and suddenly noticed my User directory was losing files, too! That's when I realized that Windows was using a junction of some sort to tie the User and Documents and Settings directory together.

Thankfully, Vista's excellent Restore previous versions worked great so I didn't lose any pictures.

One note about the Restore previous versions that caught me though is that if you have the folder open, it won't let you restore it. You actually have to collapse the folder in Explorer and right click on it for it to work. Or at least I did.

UPDATE:
Scott Hanselman and Rob Boek both provided some great feedback to my post. I hadn't thought to try the "dir /ad" command like Rob did to show the junction... I was mainly basing my prior statements based off of observations. Thanks for the updates guys!

As some of you may know, I recently installed RC1 of Vista on my home PC. For the most part, it has been a great experience. I had some early problems because I took the upgrade path instead of a clean install. That lasted about two nights, because though most of my programs still worked, they didn't behave as expected. My memory usage was sky high, too. After the clean install, it has smooth sailing ever since (except for Windows One Care and my HP 2600 All-in-One Printer...).

Anyway, that's not what this post is about. This post is about Windows Vista Secrets!

Tim Sneath, a technical evangelist for Vista, has begun a series on Windows Vista Secrets and they're great tips! I must say, my favorite tips are the built-in Open Command Window Here, Copy as Path, and Running Quick Launch Items. The first two were available before using shell extensions, but having them built in is great. I do wonder if there is a secret to have them always show up as opposed to having to Shift + Right Click, though. That would be a nice feature. Maybe if it is a config setting somewhere, like the UAC stuff is. Another nice feature would be the ability to open PowerShell instead of the standard Command Window.

Anyway, thanks for the great tips Tim! Keep them coming!

Last night, I finally completed my install of Vista on my home machine. I sort of wish I had taken the clean install route instead of the upgrade path, because it took forever! One of my coworkers did the clean install and he was finished in half an hour - it took me two nights! Now, those two nights were really because I started it and went to sleep and was greeted with an "End task" dialog on a program that had hung the first morning. I let it continue through the next work day and was greeted with another dialog when I got back the next evening. I did successfully install it, though, and I like it quite a bit. My biggest complaint so far is that Windows One Care isn't currently supported in Vista yet. It's even a Microsoft product for crying out loud!

Anyway, this post is about UAC, though :)

On my PC, whenever the UAC dialog appears, my entire screen goes black and, when it comes back, the dialog is the only thing that isn't a darker color. When the screen goes black, it is almost as if my monitor has lost the signal from the computer, like when you're rebooting your machine. That is probably my biggest complaint with it right now, because the process isn't very responsive. (Is that a performance issue on my machine? I don't know, but I do have more memory on the way)

Here's what I'd like to see: the ability to have a true Administrator account that doesn't have to have the UAC dialog pop up for administrative-related tasks; HOWEVER, I do understand why Microsoft is hesitant to do this. My parents have been using Windows since version 3.1 and they've never had a dialog like this. *nix users have always (?) had the idea of a root user, so that is something they know, but my parents probably have no idea if they're admins or not. In fact, they only have one account set up and they never even see the welcome screen in Windows XP.

How does Microsoft get them to go from that to having one or more logon accounts and then an admin account that doesn't have annoying dialogs and actually expect them to use the one that HAS the dialogs? We might know not to use the admin account for security reasons, but do you really expect users to read the warning message? Users don't read messages now and I'm guessing they won't read them in a new version of Windows either. I'm sure it can be done, but it won't be easy.

Having trouble changing your PowerShell Script Execution Policy in Vista because of access problems? This whole limited user thing will take some time to get used to, but it certainly is a good idea for security. What I did to fix this problem was I ran the command prompt as an admin. If you go under your start menu and accessories, you'll see a link to the command prompt. If you right click on it, you'll see an option to run as administrator. Here's a screenshot:

Once you do that, you'll be able to start up Powershell and then you'll have authority to change the execution policy. I've typically been setting mine to RemoteSigned (Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned).

Unrelated to Powershell, but wow will I need more memory if I want to run Vista! I barely have any programs open and my pagefile is getting hit like crazy! I'm probably averaging a gig of memory usage... with only one program open!