Speech Recognition isn't really there yet..

It seems we cannot really throw away our keyboards just yet, and only use speech recognition, as the following video clearly shows:

(Perl, is perhaps not the most "speakable" language there is, but nevertheless...)

Technorati : humor, vista

Adobe Reader on Vista Ultimate x64

After a lot of work and googling I finally managed to get Adobe Reader to install. The funny thing is that Adobe says that version 8 is Vista compatible. I'd like to question that, at least regarding the installer..

Downloaded

Adobe Reader 8 for Windows Vista

Started the installer, got the downloaded file warning but not the UAC dialog, then... absolutely nothing happened.

Then I tried "Run as administrator", still the same... absolutely nothing happened.

Googled around and found indication that running in XP SP2 compatibility mode might help. It did..

But come on Adobe, get your act together and produce an installer that Joe Average can use without extra fuzzing about!

xcopy deployment deprecated

(Spotted at Channel9)

It seems that xcopy deployment just got deprecated:

>xcopy /?
Copies files and directory trees.

NOTE: Xcopy is now deprecated, please use Robocopy.

Robocopy shows:

>robocopy /?
------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ROBOCOPY :: Robust File Copy for Windows
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So I guess that's the end of xcopy deployment and beginning of robocopy deployment, (or are they pushing ClickOnce deployment all the way?)

Oh the joys of UAC (NOT)

Tried to do a little bughunting on a WCF project, the problem specifically related to dual bindings. However, I did not get so far, since I soon found out through "trial and horror" that in Vista you are not allowed to bind to a port unless running under elevated privileges.

Yes, UAC strikes once again!

I soon found out that this is a known issue and how you should work around it. Basically you add a manifest to the exe requesting elevated privileges.

<assembly xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" manifestversion="1.0">
  <trustinfo xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v3">
    <security>
      <requestedprivileges>
        <requestedexecutionlevel level="requireAdministrator">
      </requestedprivileges>
    </security>
  </trustinfo>
</assembly>

However, I couldn't get this working under a debugger !?! (The manifest is there as both exename.exe.manifest and exename.vshost.exe.manifest)

So, how is one supposed to debug a WCF server on Vista !?!

Uninstalling Google Toolbar on Vista

I recently installed Google toolbar to get "BlogThis" functionality. Alas, I soon discovered that as I use the new beta blogger, this functionality is not supported in the current version of the toolbar :( However, more annoyingly, the toolbar seems to break the right-click context menu..

So I wanted to get rid of the toolbar as soon as possible (at least for the time being).

Now comes the big problem, the thing won't let me uninstall it, complaining about unsufficient permissions, yada yada. Basically because of UAC even though you have admin privileges you are not running with them all of the time. A properly configured installer will ask for elevated privileges, but it seems the Toolbar installer is not clever enough to do this..

So here's how you do it:
Right-click IE icon, choose "Run as Administrator", and then proceed to uninstalling the toolbar. Needless to say, it is probably safest to not go around surfing the 'net as Administrator...

Vista RC1 is out

As Vista RC1 was released to β testers yesterday. I naturally had to get it installed right away, so currently AllThingsMedia is happily running Vista x64 build 5600. Expect a more general release of the RC1 sometime next week..