Technology Lighthouse

Getting serious with Vista, and a new round of releases

Well it had to happen sooner or later: I’ve now begun doing actual development work within Vista. This pretty much rules out Visual Studio .Net 2003 as the development environment. If you turn off UAC you can manage to build and debug projects but I’ve seen some nasty hangs while using “Find in Files”. Oh well, I guess it’s time I moved on to VS 2005 anyway, except even that has to be launched with full administrator privileges if you want a quiet life.

Speaking of UAC, I thought I’d got used to its irritating little ways, but it’s found some new ways to wind me up. My machine is a dual boot, with a partition for trusty old XP and another partition for Vista. When I want to update a little text note in my development folder on the XP partition, I have to launch the text editor with full admin privs. Now the development folder isn’t stuck in one of those protected, account-specific places like My Documents - nope it’s just off the root of the drive, so why on earth can’t I just open files in a text editor and save ‘em out? What’s worse is that once you’ve launched the editor with admin privs, you can’t open files using drag and drop, because Explorer isn’t elevated and therefore poses a security risk to the text editor (**???!*)

Then there are the problems with my Logitech keyboard and mouse. I use Logitech’s SetPoint utility for both, and I like it. But in Vista, SetPoint has to be launched with admin privs for it to work properly with both devices. That’s quite easy to do if I use task scheduler to handle the launch at startup, but then you’ve got the problem that the control panel can no longer “talk” to SetPoint because one is is elevated while the other isn’t.

At this point you may be wondering while I don’t just turn off UAC and be done with it. Well, as a developer I think it’s helpful to see what typical users will have to put up with, and code around it wherever I can. I’m just hoping SP1 is going to help a bit. But there’s no way I’ll be installing it on my development system until it’s been out for a week or two!

On a happier note, we’ve recently released ColorCache v4.0.2.0 and PromptPal v1.5.7, and a fresh release of PTFB is due out in the next week or so.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 11th, 2008 at 7:20 am and is filed under ColorCache, Geeks Corner, PTFB Pro, Product Releases, PromptPal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.