Category Archives: Vista

Vista/IE7/FCKeditor problems

I have been working on the expanded Club Starter Kit from Codeplex and ran into problems on every page that had a FCKeditor window.  When running the site from VS.Net 2005, I would get a wierd error message.

fckeditor-error.png

I was pulling my hair out.  Googling for IE7 FCKeditor didn’t help.  I wasn’t having that problem with FF2. 

Well, as it turns out, it was a setting in Windows Live OneCare.  After unchecking the box that is circled, the editor came up fine on a test page.

 onecare.png

So here is one solution that may work for you.  Now why didn’t OneCare block the same thing from FF???

First feature request

My IP Status Gadget finally got a review (after being up 3 days).  It wasn’t a review, more of a feature request.  The reviewer requested two things:

  1. User settable background
  2. Smaller size when public IP address isn’t needed.

So now I can improve it and release version 1.1.  I am really liking the idea of the sidebar gadgets.  For me they are a great opportunity to begin development and releasing software without any repurcussions.  The only downsides are they are free and the code can be changed by someone else and re-released.  But since they only took a few hours, I don’t mind giving it away.  I was just impressed to see the number of downloads steadily increasing. 

I have also thought of a way of monetizing it.  Right now, it will not give you your public IP address (if you are behind a router) without hitting a ASP page.  I wrote a simple ASP page on my website that just does a response.write of the IP address.  I am not giving out the URL, because I don’t want my host to get hit with a bunch of requests.  But if I made a site that you have to subscribe to (maybe $15/year or something like that), then I could add that to the settings page and make some money off the gadget.  I don’t know if I will go through with that or not.

Oh, and my Vista Sidebar post is the 23rd result on Google when searching for “gadget vbscript”.  So at least I know Google is checking my blog!

I guess it is time to start doing more posts on developing gadgets with vbscript, since most of the samples you can find are written in javascript.  I don’t have anything against javascript, but seeing how hard debugging gadgets can be, I don’t want to have to debug missing ;s.  And since most of my software development is in VB.Net, vbscript is just a little easier for me to write.

Vista Sidebar

I have been playing around with the Vista sidebar.  There are a lot of really neat gadgets that you can download for it.  One disappointment was that I couldn’t find a gadget that showed me my computer’s IP address.  There are some that show you the IP address for your wireless card, but for a desktop computer that is about worthless.

After some investigation, I figured out why I couldn’t find a gadget to show me my address.  The sidebar has a good API for things like cpu % used, mem % used, and wireless configuration, but not the ip address for an ethernet card.  I figured out how to do that after spending some quality time with Google.

The trick is to use WMI along with javascript or vbscript.  I finally finished my IP status gadget tonight.  It displays the following:

  • LAN IP address.
  • Optionally, it will also show your public IP address (through a helper asp page).
  • A flyout that shows all available information on your card (DNS servers, DHCP Server, Lease expiration, etc.).
  • A settings dialog to let you put in the asp page url to get your public IP address.

I am quite satisfied with it at this point.  Everything has been coded in vbscript.  It seems like most of the examples that you find are coded in javascript.  Some samples mix and match between the two.  But for this I decided to just use vbscript.  Now if only I could figure out how to put it in a seperate file! 

 <edit> It was accepted this afternoon and is available to download.  Like all sidebar gadgets, this is free.  Click here to try it! </edit>

New Vista Experiences

Yesterday I purchased a new 400gb drive to install Vista Business on.  I finally got my quarterly Action Pack shipment.  In the Action Pack was Vista Business Upgrade, Office 2007 Enterprise, just about every other Office program (Visio, Expression Web, etc), and Sharepoint Server (2006? 2007?  I can’t remember). 

I shut down my desktop computer and installed the new hard drive, removing an old 60gb drive in the process.  I figured I would just boot from the Vista disk and install it that way.  Noooo, that would be too easy.  Apparently the Upgrade version has to be installed from XP Pro.  Ok, well I have XP Pro from the Action Pack, so I will just install that, then install Vista.  And that worked, except for some reason Vista marked the drive it was installed on as the K: drive.  Yuck!  And of course you can’t change the drive letter on the drive that you are booted from. 

Next try was to start the Vista install from my existing XP installation.  Yeah, just try to get XP to boot if you installed Vista in a way that it doesn’t know about your existing XP.  I messed with the command line tool to try and get the boot menu straightened out (BCDedit).  After spending too much time googling and reading, I finally just used the XP recovery console to get back to XP.  Then I deleted the partition that Vista was installed on.  I was going to do the install from within XP and choose a clean install on the new hard drive.  And of course that didn’t work.  This time it was because of the driver for the IDE channels.

Tonight I will unplug the hard drive that my existing XP install is on, and then install XP on the new hard drive.  I then intend on installing Vista as a clean install over the new XP install.  What I am trying to get is a clean install of Vista.  I don’t want a Windows.old folder that is impossible to access, and also impossible to delete.  As far as I am concerned, this is just a waste of space.

I need to keep the existing XP drive around until I can get drivers for all my peripherals.  I also want to do a clean install of Vista, because I know that my existing XP has a lot of junk in it, from registry entries for programs that aren’t even installed to programs that I have not used in over a year, mainly games.