I was catching up on some older blog posts from different people recently and I came across some posts talking about how wonderful SlickRun is. Everyone is right, by the way, because SlickRun is amazing. It was probably the main program that moved me from being primarily a mouse user to a keyboard user. I still love how fast I can get around by taking my hand off the mouse and keeping them on the keyboard!

Anyway, I'm a beta junkie and I love finding out about new releases of software. I'd been looking for news on SlickRun for a while, but hadn't seen anything so I thought I would check out the SlickRun forums. I ended up finding this post where Eric notes that, because he is actually working on Windows Vista, the alphas for SlickRun probably won't show up until after the RTM for Vista.

Though I don't think a forum post carries nearly as much weight as a blog post on release announcements, I still have to say that I can't wait to see what Eric is working on for the new version. I'm looking forward to more from SlickRun!

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.

Great news!

Google Reader has been updated and it is usable now!

Find out more here!

(Thank you Digg!!!)

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!

Last month (almost two months ago!), I posted on how to programmatically get the caption for an image in C#. I haven't posted much more on the subject lately, because I've been busy with other things like playing with Vista RC1 and different unit testing frameworks. I also have learned a lot more about the different methods for storing metadata in images. My previous method ONLY works for images where the metadata is in the EXIF format. There are a variety of different metadata formats available and I discovered that not all of my digital pictures use EXIF. In other words, my previous post DOES NOT WORK for those images. I also discovered that there is no reason to use my previous method, because Omar Shahine has already done all of the hard work here.

If you're interested in EXIF metadata, use his PhotoLibrary. It is a very well designed library for setting and retrieving EXIF metadata on images. I really wish I had known about it a couple of months ago, but at least I learned some stuff on my own. That's always nice. The problem is, once again, that it only works with EXIF metadata. Basically, I wanted a solution that gave me the same results that Windows Explorer file properties provides. I wanted the caption regardless of the metadata format.

The solution? Windows Presentation Foundation!!! WPF provides a completely new way to look at images. There is a great overview in the MSDN documentation here.

The short of it is that you can write code like this, though:

ImageSource src = this.image1.Source; 
BitmapMetadata bm = ((BitmapMetadata)this.image1.Source.Metadata); 
MessageBox.Show(bm.Title); 

Neat, eh? What's even better is that it works for every image I've tested with it so far. The only other code in my small example is some XAML to get an image loaded and the code to get a click event handler so I could see the results of my test.

Nice!

I guess my new Gallery Manager application will target the .NET 3.0 Framework!

Note - for uncommon metadata attributes, there is a GetQuery property that BitmapMetadata provides. I haven't looked into much, but it looks like it covers many of the various metadata formats available. You just have to know the query syntax... which I currently don't. If anyone knows of any good resources on this, please let me know!

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!