Blogs|Oct 19, 2007

WiX: The Pain of WiX (Part 2 of 3)

In the first part of this series I gave an introduction to WiX. In this second installment of this three part series, I am assuming that you’ve read through the Windows Installer documentation and through Gábor Deák Jahn’s WiX Tutorial. Additionally, I’m assuming that you’ve written a simple installation using WiX so you’ve read about…
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Blogs|Oct 18, 2007

WiX: Hints for New Users (Part 1 of 3)

If you remember some of the early pronouncements about .NET you probably heard the one where using .NET meant you could just XCOPY your binaries to the server and run them. No wrestling with the difficult Windows Installer technology or strange third party tool to create an installation, just the pure nirvana of copy and…
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wintellect-blogs|Oct 17, 2007

What Keynote Do You Want to See at Devscovery?

Here at Wintellect, we are deep in the planning phases for next year’s Devscovery conferences (April 1-3 in New York, NY, and August 19-21 in Redmond, WA). In past years we’ve had brilliant developers such as Mark Russinovich, Scott Guthrie, Charles Petzold, Jeffrey Richter, and some other guy. As we were brainstorming ideas for Devscovery…
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c|Oct 15, 2007

Why I’m Not Writing a Native C++ Debugging Book

In the introduction of my book Debugging Microsoft .NET 2.0 Applications, I said I was going to write a second book focused on native C++ debugging. I’ve got a great outline prepared that has all sorts of interesting ideas. Some of the highlights are a complete focus on very advanced native usage of WinDBG. Things…
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wintellect-blogs|Oct 15, 2007

Spiffy Apple Keyboard vs. Booting From a CD/DVD

As I posted the other day about the Apple Keyboard on Vista, I thought I’ve follow up with a note that on my Mac Pro the Apple Keyboard did not work when I was attempting to boot from the OS DVD. For some strange reason, I lost WINLOAD.EXE, a super critical part of Windows startup.…
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wintellect-blogs|Oct 11, 2007

Keeping an Eye on View State

View State is the silent performance killer for any ASP.NET application. I’ve seen numerous nasty problems related to view states being far larger than anyone could have hoped to guess. My goal was to find an easy way to keep track of view state on a production server so you’d at least stand a chance…
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wintellect-blogs|Oct 8, 2007

Using an Apple Keyboard on Vista

As you might have read in the past, I’m a very happy user of Vista x64 on a Mac Pro. I highly recommend the combo. Recently, I purchased an Apple aluminum keyboard.         Before you think I’m a total Apple hardware freak (ok, so I am), my motivation for getting the keyboard…
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Blogs|Oct 7, 2007

Complete Virtual Machine Backups with Mere Minutes of Downtime

Last week, I completely virtualized my life. Well, at least my server life is all virtualized. I’d been running my Team Foundation Server in a virtual machine, but took the plunge to get my domain controller virtualized as well. One of the things I’d been planning to do was revisit my server backup strategy, especially…
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debugging-and-performace|Sep 6, 2007

Updated Debugging Microsoft .NET 2.0 Applications Source Code (3.2.10905.1)

There’s been two bug reported in the code so I fixed them. Here’s the updates from the Change Log: Fixed a bug in Wintellect.DiagnosticsConfigTraceSwitchWatcher.cs reported by Burke Attilla where I was not properly handling internationalized paths when looking for the .VSHOST. string. For Vista installations, properly set the InstallPrivileges property in Debugging.wxs and WintellectToolsInstall.wxs. Fixed…
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wintellect-blogs|Sep 4, 2007

Symbol Server Transaction Manager

Symbol Servers are one of the most important, but sadly, least utilized debugging tools you have. Getting the right symbols lined up every time so you can get perfect call stacks is critical to quickly debugging a problem verses guessing forever at the problem. Combine a Symbol Server with a Source Server and you have…
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wintellect-blogs|Aug 7, 2007

File Extension Icons All Messed Up in Vista Explorer?

Recently, Vista’s Explorer decided that my .DOCX file icons should be Purple Palace icons instead. While I’m all for pre-K games, it was a little disconcerting when looking for a particular file. Additionally, many of my other icons were screwed up as well. The weird part is that double clicking on any of the files…
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