Visual Studio and WPF

Visual Studio 2010 really shines with its new WPF interface. Side effect of this is relying little bit more on your graphics card. If graphics driver has a bug, you have a problem.

It seems that nobody at Microsoft tested their Visual Studio 2010 beta 1 with Intel’s GE45 integrated graphics. At least once per hour I get “Display driver stopped responding and had recovered” balloon. While this is not end of world, it is pretty annoying.

While this is probably driver problem, I cannot help but to put some blame on Microsoft since only application that ever caused this bug was Visual Studio 2010. Of course I need to blame myself a little also, since I am the one using both Windows 7 and Visual Studio 2010 in their beta stage.

[2009-07-22: New Intel graphics driver is issued over Windows Update with June 2009 markings. It seems that this driver solves problem. I used it for few hours straight without any issues. I do hope it stays that way.]

Wireless

New Virtual PC (currently in beta, integrated with Windows 7) is looking more and more like “light” Hyper-V. It requires hardware support for virtualization, uses same key combinations…

One thing that remains same is support for wireless network. Hyper-V deliberately doesn’t have direct support for it because of some issues, but Virtual PC ignores all and makes life a lot easier.

Project Natal

Today I was on coffee with dear friend and I learned that Microsoft has something called Project Natal. There I said that almost nothing can persuade me to get Xbox.

I saw this video and I changed my mind. There are things that could make buying Xbox a viable option.

Ctrl+Alt+Left

There is always period between installing your favorite OS into virtual machine and installing integration component when mouse cannot be shared between host and virtual machine. Once you click on virtual machine, all your mouse moves are interpreted as virtual mouse moves.

To regain control you need to press some magic key-combo. On newest Virtual PC (beta) that combination is Ctrl+Alt+Left. This is quite a different than what Virtual PC/Server used before (Ctrl+AltGr) but Hyper-V users will find them self at home since same combination is used there.

Other useful combination to remember is Ctrl+Alt+End which simulates good old Ctrl+Alt+Del. In order to switch between normal and full screen, use Ctrl+Alt+Pause.

I will also mention few mappings that will probably cause quite a trouble with old games:

Alt+Home => Ctrl+Esc
Alt+Insert => Alt+Esc
Alt+PgUp => Alt+Tab
Alt+PgDn => Alt+Shift+Tab

I found no way to turn them off.

IIS

If you deploy web application or service and you get “Could not load file or assembly ‘SomeAssembly’ or one of its dependencies. An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format.”, chances are that you are running of 64-bit Windows.

Underlying problem is BadImageFormatException (you can check it in stack trace) but no matter how far down stack trace you take a look, you will not be able to link it to your code. Reason for that is that your application hasn’t started running yet.

IIS

By default IIS’ processes are 64 bits (on 64-bit system). Your code is in 32-bit world. Mix those two and you won’t get far. To fix it simple recompile of application in 64-bits or as “Any CPU” will do.

However, sometimes recompile is out of question. Maybe you have some 32-bit dependencies or you don’t have access to source code to recompile it. Whatever reason is, only solution is to force IIS into 32-bit mode.

Solution

That is simply done:

C:\inetpub\AdminScripts\adsutil.vbs set W3SVC/AppPools/Enable32BitAppOnWin64 True

Microsoft (R) Windows Script Host Version 5.8
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Enable32BitAppOnWin64           : (BOOLEAN) True

This will cause all IIS processes to work in 32-bit mode and that solves our problem. Not even restart is not required.

P.S. Notice that you do need to install “IIS Management Script and Tools” for that script to be available.