Bob On Development

It’s a jungle out there, and sometimes it keeps IIS from starting a web site.

I don’t want to rain on everybody’s parade, but there is a really significant fly in the ointment when it comes to the gee-whiz media tagging feature in Windows Vista’s Photo Gallery application.

For all those who like to complain about how “closed” Windows is, have a gander at the latest technical preview of a new CGI implementation that will improve stability and performance of PHP under Windows.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the weakest link in Vista is the video driver system. My wife’s new Vista Ultimate installation on a brand-new box has been the source of so much trouble I scarcely know where to begin. But I know most of the cause: video drivers.

I won’t re-pave this oft-visited topic, but want to mention a few interesting twists I encountered and solved moving a number of IIS sites from Windows 2000 Server to Windows 2003 Server.

If you’re relying on a backup or migration strategy that involves mass-copying files to network drives using Windows Explorer, here are two tips that will probably save you some frustration:
When moving a folder that contains deeply-nested folders, you may well encounter illogical errors about a file name being too long. The file name itself [...]

It’s been a very discouraging day setting up a brand new computer with factory-installed Vista.

RadarSync has created a web site aggregating the latest Vista drivers from a number of vendors. If you’re hunting for Vista device drivers, try this site first.

Despite my earlier rant about Vista, we are about to acquire the first Vista box in our household. My wife’s old Dell is so full of XP lint that we are faced with a clean re-install of XP, which seems like not worth the effort on a 4 year old box. So when [...]

One would expect, particularly for a product so stunningly late and much reduced from its original ambitious goals, that a second release candidate would be reasonably stable.