NFI

pnet debugging

Radek finally offered his debugger patch for us to have a play with. Should be interesting to see what comes of it. The complete Portable Studio tree and debugger (with patch) can be grabbed from Subversion here:

svn://svn.gna.org/svn/libide/trunk/studio studio

libjit enabled Winforms

I just received wonderful news that libjit/SWF enabled Portable.NET runtime is no capable of running Winforms applications. Excerpt from the email:


Hello All!

The obligatory screenshots are at:
http://maybe.dotgnu.info:8000/~krokas/screenshots/


IIS and WAS

One of the nice things that Microsoft provided with this beta 2 of Vista is pretty much all the bells and whistles. IIS 7.0 beta is one of those bells.

Turning this service on is not really all that difficult. Select the start menu, Control Panel, Programs, select Turn on or off Windows features. Once you’ve done that, you’ll be presented with a listbox where you can select IIS and the desired components.

The problem here is that the WAS (Windows Activation Service) was already installed and IIS depends on that service, otherwise it will fail to run. Normally this is not a problem, but you can install and uninstall IIS until the cows come home and WAS is just not anywhere to be found in the Services management console. This is after a fresh install of the operating system as well and Windows indicated that WAS was indeed installed (all options checked).

The solution to this is to remove BOTH WAS and IIS (expected reboot required and kindly prompted for) and reinstall both at the same time after the reboot.

Suddenly IIS services start as they should and you can continue on to the new IIS 7 management console.

MSI not installing as User/Administrator

Okay, after 5-10 minutes of screwing around with trying to get a Microsoft product (Atlas) installed in Windows Vista beta 2 with zero success due to the new user protection, I started to pull out what little hair I had left.

In a nutshell, a user (even if they’re in the Administrators group) is not allowed to install MSI files (completely). You’ll usually get 98% of the way done, then WHAM! unable to access some file (usually install state) followed by the wonderful installation rollback.

The fix to this however, is to create a batch or command file that calls the MSI in question. For example:

atlas.bat:
atlassetup.msi


Once you have done that, you can then right click on the batch or command file and select ‘Run as Administrator’ and you’ll be right as rain! I hope this helps someone else out because it was starting to do my head in.