Windows 8 Media Center Pack for Free

Windows 8 came with some multimedia features missing. Mind you, it was by design. Missing features were made available as separate product named Windows 8 Media Center Pack. For a small cost ($10) you can make your Windows 8 work as good as Windows 7. Nice touch.

Good news is that you can get it for free. There are two conditions: you must have Windows 8 Professional (MSDN works also) and you must activate it before January 31st 2013. If that is true, just go to Microsoft feature pack pages and give your e-mail address. In few minutes you should get a key.

With that key just search for Add Features in Settings and enter key when asked to. Feature will be downloaded in background. Just take care not to do anything else on system since installation will restart your computer without any warning (!). After restart you will have one more restart (?) and then Windows Media Center will magically appear.

84% of Bullshit

There is an article in Washington Post saying that Windows 8 is 84% less frustrating than Windows 7. It probably comes from same world where 98% of all statistics are manufactured or “adjusted”.

I will admit outright that I have small sample size of 2+. One is me (yes, I am running Windows 8 again) and my wife is second (running Windows 8 on her netbook). Plus signifies anecdotal frustration evidence from friends. For purpose of this article I will disregard all troubles I already menioned and stick to single one: Fitts’s law.

When working at desktop people are used to having significant things in corner. We have close button in upper-right, application icon in upper-left (double-click functions as close here), we had start button in lower-right and show desktop in lower-left. With Windows 8 left side of deal got broken.

When I try to close application by double-clicking its icon, I never manage to do it. Stupid task switcher pops out and brings me in another application. Starting first application in taskbar has same issue. It is just too easy to switch with mouse (and especially with trackpad) to start screen.

Even if you try to stick to new Windows UI you will get into trouble. Regardless of how significant new UI was to Microsoft, they haven’t bothered to transfer all internal applications to it. You cannot work more than 5 minutes on anything without being thrown back into a desktop. And all those context switches are exhausting.

Best thing that Vista brought was search from within Start menu. We have same thing in Windows 8 but segregated into Apps, Settings and Files. Yes, now you need to know where thing you are searching is. And start screen soon becomes unwieldy mess because every single application gets it icons there. Yes, applications did the same to Start Menu in Windows 7 but I didn’t need to look at it the whole time.

I will not even get into picture viewer that makes it impossible to view next image or mail application that shows first mail and selected one upon clicking. Most of applications in the new UI are probably designed by bunch of non-supervised interns since their basic functionality is usually not working. And good luck finding alternative in Store that is as deserted as church on Friday night.

I agree that on tablets this all works and Windows 8 will probably be 84.07692307692308% better on them. I will also agree that insides of Windows 8 make it most powerful system out there. However, I don’t recall one person saying that something in Windows 8 does not frustrate them. And, mind you, these are users that had Windows 8 for couple of months now.

It just tell that as soon as you assign percents to satisfaction, you are just being a jackass.

Deleting Team Foundation Services Project

As you try new service, one is bound to make a lot of mess. I did the same with my Team Foundation Services account. After initial testing was done I decided to make a clean start and delete a project.

It took me quite a while to give up on finding delete. It seems that somebody forgot to take his pills during design phase and thus delete button does not exist.

Fortunately, this is just an Team Foundation Server so good old command line will do nicely:

CD "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE"

TFSDeleteProject.exe /collection:https://jmedved.visualstudio.com/DefaultCollection/ Test
 Warning: Deleting a team project is an irrecoverable operation. All version control, work item tracking and Team Foundation build data will be destroyed from the system. The only way to recover this data is by restoring a stored backup of the databases. Are you sure you want to delete the team project and all of its data (Y/N)? Y
 Deleting from Build ...
 Done
 Deleting from Version Control ...
 Done
 Deleting from Work Item Tracking ...
 Done
 Deleting from TestManagement ...
 Done
 Deleting from ProcessManagement ...
 Done
 Deleting from LabManagement ...
 Done
 Deleting from ProjectServer ...
 Done
 Warning. Did not find Report Server service.
 Warning. Did not find SharePoint site service.
 Deleting from Team Foundation Core ...
 Done

Of course, if you want to create new project with same name, do not forget to visit File -> Source Control -> Advanced -> Workspaces in order to remove last traces.

Solving Case of Missing Tests

I was quite surprised when Visual Studio 2012 could not run any unit tests for one project of mine. Every time I would hit rebuild, same output would appear “Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation.” and Test Explorer would stay empty.

Solution that worked for me was just deleting whole TestResults directory. One rebuild after, Test Explorer was full once more.

How did this corruption occur is different matter completely. Since this project was converted from Visual Studio 2010 it might be something in conversion process gone wrong. Or it might have been some disk error. Or my habit of interrupting build process finally got me. I will probably never know.

You Cannot Depend on Cloud

Having files in cloud had became a norm. I myself have DropBox, SugarSync, Google Drive and SkyDrive accounts. Every day I rely on them to get my files and synchronize them across my devices.

It gets even worse on tablets. Most of them, regardless whether they are Android/iOS/Windows, rely on cloud storage quite a bit. And why not? Cloud services have became so reliable from technical point of view that any data loss is highly improbable. Solution that requires no backup is finally there.

Unfortunately all those technical accomplishments are irrelevant. TechDirt brings quite a few stories of cloud data loss. And it is not because of technical glitch but because of false copyright claims.

Copyright holders have been quite active in auto-detecting infringing files with most (if not all) cloud providers. If they find unauthorized work they delete it and you get one strike. Few more illegal files later and you might find yourself with blocked account. All your files are gone.

Annoying thing about copyright claims is their “shoot first, ask questions later” approach. It does not matter whether file is really infringing. All that matters is that some automatic bot thinks it does. And than you need to jump through hoops proving your innocence. Even with best efforts and in case of obvious errors that can take days. While all your data is held hostage.

Cloud services are integral part of life these days and almost every computer has some data up in the sky. But do not think that your data is safe just because someone else takes care of it.

Cloud is not a replacement for good backup.