For those of you out there that are smarter than me ... and after yesterday's post, I'm thinking that there are a *lot* of you ... You probably noticed that I was a little confused between the effects of IE7 protected mode (Low Rights IE or LoRIE), the VS 2005 SP1 release and the debugging problems that I was experiencing on Vista.

I've known about IE7 protected mode, sandboxing and virtualization for many months now and was even cognizant of that when I was having my debugging problems. I even glanded down at the bottom bit of the IE chrome and noticed "Protected Mode: On", but for some reason I thought http://localhost would *not* be affected by the protected mode. I was dead wrong. Arghh.

So, the answer to the basic debugging problems that I was having w/IE7 on Vista are entirely solved by adding http://localhost as a trusted site in IE7. Remember to uncheck the "https://" checkbox when adding the site, or else you won't be able to add http://localhost.

There are a bunch of other blog posts on the subject if you are interested.

I decided to re-build dasblog (the blog software that I use) on Whidbey (VS 2005) over the holidays. It is something that I had always wanted to do and it seems like the dasblog folks have not yet publicly taken that on. Before anyone gets any strange ideas, I have no desire for a thinkjot-like schism, but wanted to move the codebase to Whidbey and work on getting the software to run under partial-trust. If this all works out, and the dasblog team wants to adopt my changes, cool, otherwise, I'm going to just use it myself.

Anyway, I decided to tackle this task over the holidays. Believe it or not, I almost exclusively use the free VS Express SKUs for my coding work. The "free" part isn't a big deal for me as I have a full copy of VS team suite a couple meters away from me, and I can download and install any program (including "Microsoft Bob") from the MS network that I want. Still, the Express SKUs are super convenient since I can download and install them in about 10mins and they satisfy most of my needs. Anyway, I downloaded the dasblog source and started playing with it. It became clear that I needed to use both VS express C# and VS express Web to get this done since the Web product didn't appear to support multiple projects in a single solution; in fact, it didn't appear to support the solution concept at all. And I then realized that since VS C# doesn't support JIT attach debugging (due to licensing issues), that the whole thing wasn't going to work at all. That's when I reached over for the quite large (requires two hands) VS team suite box to do some "real developlment" ;)

After a fairly lengthy install (and I didn't even install MSDN since I use the web mostly), I started back at it. I was able to get the web and class library projects into one solution in VS. Cool! I then hit F5 and it was immediately clear that something was terribly broken. The web project launched as expected, but was immediately detached from the debugger. Huh? I tried a couple more times, and I had the same experience. I was able to attach VS to WebDev.WebServer.Exe and then refresh the page, and then my breakpoints were hit. This approach though is anything but a good experience.

I had heard that there were some incompatibilities with VS on Vista, but I was under the impression that it was more niche issues, of which this is not. It is also very strange that I didn't have these same problems with the Express products, which I've been using on Vista for months. I wonder why the full product has some additional problems. I'm sure someone in building 41 knows.

Time to install VS 2005 SP1. I went to the following page. I downloaded the Vista-specific update. That didn't work, claiming that I was missing a file or two. I then downloaded and installed the non-Vista-specific SP1 package, which is just shy of 1/2 GB. Ouch! That worked. Upon launching VS, it claimed that I needed the Vista-specific update. Oh, I see, you need to install the generic VS 2005 service pack, and then the Vista-specific update. That was not at all clear to me from the VS 2005 SP1 page. Grrrr. Anyhow, now you can avoid the trouble that I had.

I then launch VS, but it claims that I need to launch the app elevated. I was actually expecting that, but thought that they would have manifested the application to force the elevation dialog. I guess not, or maybe that's still coming. Developers are going to go nuts if they have to remember to right click on the VS 2005 icon and hit "Run as administrator" every time, or just turn off UAC on their dev-boxes, which is a bad idea.

OK, launch VS again, but elevated, and voila, everything is working correctly again. Peace and harmony have now returned to my development experience.

I'm very thanksful that the VS team has pulled off this pretty significant service pack ... *before* Vista is generally available. I'm glad to be back and productive again. The directions on MSDN could use some improvement.

I did an interview with my buddy John Bristowe a while back. You can hear me largely talking non-sensically about the CLR and at Developer Night in Canada. If you read Joel Pobar's blog too, then you hear me taking that guy down. Sorry Joel.

I really like the program that John's got going there. I couldn't believe how fancy the intro sounded. I'm now trying to get other Canadians at Microsoft to do interviews with John. Let's see where that leads. I hope that we'll have something in the later summer, as John made it sound like he'd be taking the summer off.

I'm hanging out at Microsoft Calgary at this point. I'm still recovering from the Calgary launch yesterday, which involved standing for several hours answering lots and lots of questions. Actually, the standing wasn't that bad. My favourite part though was the Q&A at the end of the day. I'd say that Calgary was probably our best stop on the tour for Q&A, with the caveat that I did not attend the Toronto Q&A (even though I was in the building). The Calgary folks provided us with a constant stream of high-quality questions, including a string of them on Windows OneCare, which we really were not able to answer.

The only bad thing is that my notebook hard-drive failed yesterday at the launch. I knew something was bad when the BSOD popped up on my XP machine. Gotta say that that never happens on XP, contrary to the belief of the Slashdot crowd. They'll likely need to put on their tin-foil hats to read/hear that. My buddy Marc -- whom I'm staying with in Calgary -- graciously leant me his PIII Thinkpad for the day. It is slower than my regular machines (particularly compared to my X64 machines with 4 times more RAM back at the office), but it sure works better than my cooked laptop.

Well, I'm at the end of my tour-of-duty on the VS 2005 Launch: Canadian Edition. I really enjoyed myself hanging out with the MS Canada folks, in Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver and Calgary. In particular, there was a set of us that spent a lot of time in the experts area (while not presenting), answering and routing customer questions among each other. It was tough to beat the expertise held by the Count and the Saint. They could pretty much answer anything from Com+ to Windows Forms, with a whole lot in between. I noticed a bunch of interesting diagrams that the both of them constructed on the paper boards (cannot think of a better term). Can you say WCF? And Zed was our man when it came to VSTS, particularly licensing and the apparent mystery of VS SKUs. We were constantly calling him over, as there were *a lot* of questions relating to VSTS.

I also enjoyed "experting" with the bunch of the folks that joined us in one or more of the other cities. We had a lot of fun together, on and off the field.

That's all not to mention all of the developer/IT Pro folks that we met in each city. I had a lot of interesting conversations with our customers all over Canada. You are the ones that make our platform so successful. You are also the reason why I put so much effort into the CLR, back in Redmond. It sounds like a marketing-line, but it is true. We spend a lot of time in conference rooms, hallways and each other's offices (not to mention mail) talking about how customers are going to use our product. Invariably, we broaden what seems like a simple scenario into something a fair bit more significant, but that will delight and empower a much larger (hopefully all of them) set of customers. That's what it's all about.

Thanks again to everyone I met on the launch tour. I hope that you got as much out of the experience as I did.

I'm now back to Team CLR, back in rainy Redmond.

I just got back from the pre-launch event. It was pretty much a "beer and cheese". Got to love those. We're doing them all the time in Redmond.

I got talking to a few guys for most of the time. It is amazing to hear folks from back home speaking so authoritatively about the platform that you work on! John, pictured below, had a lot of interesting things to say about ASP.Net. I definitely understood where he ws coming from and had had some of the same experiences. He also made some interesting comparisons with Ruby. It certainly does seem like dynamic/scripting languages are rising in popularity.

Here's a picture of the 3 guys I talked to most. Of the 4 guys pictured, I'm the one on the left with the brown shirt. The other guys from the left are Obi, Richard and John.

Time to go to bed. I'm still on Pacific time, but won't feel much like that when I need to get up on Eastern time for the launch!

I'm being sent to Toronto and Ottawa to participate in the VS 2005 launches there. I guess I was picked since I'm a native speaker ;)

If you are going to be there too, it would be great to meet up to talk about Whidbey. I believe that I'm going to spending most of my time at the "Ask the Experts" desk/area/table. Come by to chat, ask questions or bring your laptop stopped at your favourite breakpoint in the VS debugger.

I also have a bit of time on the 8th and 9th (in Toronto) and 10th and 11th in Ottawa if you'd like to meet to talk about .NET Framework development that you are (or are planning to be) doing. Please mail me @ rlander@microsoft.com if you'd like to meet (at the launch location, Starbucks or your location).

I'm also planning to attend the Vancouver and Calgary events. I'll post more on that after the Ottawa and Toronto events.