1 August 2005 in Windows | Comments (1)

So another night of playing around – I finally got Visual Studio 2005 installed on Vista.

How often have you found yourself copying files – thousands and thousands of files. You’re dragging them over your network and you’re about half way and the damn thing, for whatever reason, screws up. No option to continue, no option to retry that file again – you just have to start again. It might not happen that often but when it does it sure is damn annoying.

This is what happened when I tried to copy three files from a CD and it failed on one of them:

It’s only taken until 2005 (well… 2006) for us to get this functionality that should have been there in the first version of Windows. At least it’s finally here!

– JD

1 August 2005 in Windows | Comments (6)

Vista comes with six new fonts and one of them is a fixed width coding style font by the name of Consolas.

If you have a copy of Vista Beta 1 installed I would recommend that you grab this font and chuck it on your dev machine then update Visual Studio to use it. It looks great.

Word of warning however, it is designed to be used when ClearType font smoothening is enabled – if you’re on a CRT or don’t like ClearType is tends to look a bit crap.

Example:

UPDATE: This entry is getting a lot of attention. If you found your way here with Google then please subscribe to my rss feed (here) or pop back some time. I post about all sorts of technology and would appreciate your readership if you like this type of content Cheers and thanks for visiting.

- JD

1 August 2005 in Windows | Comments (0)

In an earlier blog entry I wrote about wanting to know why I didn’t have any transparency in Vista Beta 1. I had seen all the pretty screen shots with the nice transparency around windows and when I installed Vista Beta and there was nothing. A plain boring border to your Vista windows.

If this is you then you’re probably using an nVidia graphics card. The reason for this is that you need a special LDDM drivers. Apparently you get ATI LDDM (Longhorn Display Driver Model) drivers out of the box with Vista Beta 1 but not for nVidia. So to solev this you need to install this driver:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_75.03.html

Be warned however this this is an alpha driver and from my experience so far it’s a bit slow and some people have complained of major problems. If you want decent performance just use the latest nVidia drivers and sacrifice the nicer UI. Also worthy of note is that you will lose your nView software (including the driver options on your display properties).

- JD