The main problem with it after you have moved all of the profile folders to another drive, is that you cannot get to folders like the desktop, Windows just cannot find them anymore. I know you could probably go into the registry and start hacking around and telling Windows where else to go for the user folders but that just never sat quite right with me.

So here is a neat little trick I found, goto the user folder (C:\Users\Logaan) and create a shortcut with the same name as the folder you wish to get to.

Its so simple and I cannot believe that I found this years ago.

Its so cool you can even create links to other folders that you cannot usually get to in this fashion.

Enjoy.

I have seen this behaviour at few times, generally I have just assumed that the settings/resource files have become corrupt or something. And usually deleting them seem to do the job, however on this occasion it did not.

Also every time I went to access the project properties VS died. Even attaching to VS gave no hints to what the problem was.

Looking around on the net it seems to be quite a common problem yet, quite difficult to reproduce.

I have seen several connect issues opened and closed where support could not reproduce it. Seems a bit poor that MS would close so many issues that have similar symptoms.

Most of the solutions I have found were around closing open XAML files in VS and docking any floating windows. This didn’t help.

After removing almost everything from my project short of the project itself I deleted the supporting project files and this seemed to cure the problem (this time!).

If you run into the same problem and can’t find a fix that works, try deleting all of the .suo and .user files and anything else you can find. Trim down your solutions to thier bare minimum (ie, the code), and get rid of anything that is not part of the solution.

The plan journey was 11 hours there in cattle class… not particularly enjoyable however I did get the chance to watch lots of movies on the journey that I had wanted to watch for a while. The flight back was less than 10 hours, I think the pilot had is foot planted :P Only there was lots of turbulance, every time nature called, the plane would hit a whole new patch of turbulance. It was very disconcerting.

I think this trip solidified the fact that I am not a travelling person, it took me 4 days to get over the jetlag, the waking up in the early hours of the morning wide awake. To compound the problem the hours were long, I would get up about 6:30am to get on the bus for 7:30. Spend 10 hours in the convention center, then get back to the hotel for an hour before diving off out for the evenings event.

To make things worse, my laptop would not connect to any of the wireless connections available at the convention center so for half the trip I was carrying at least 5kg of dead weight. The only useful job the laptop played was to charge one of my colleagues iPhone as he forgot to bring his mains charger and his laptop bricked itself.

We arrived in LAX late on Saturday. Sunday was the pre-conference sessions, I went to the sessions on Silverlight 2 presented by Jeff Prosise. It was very good and there were a few tips that I picked up however much of it I had already learnt over the previous months.

This set the precidence for much of the conference, I had chosen most of the sessions on subjects that I already knew a little about, I believed that my knowledge would be improved by these sessions. However in reality they showed little more than I already knew, or could have found out using a search engine. As a result I begun choosing sessions on more complicated subjects which were more enjoyable. I was so nervous before the conference that I would be disgraced as not knowing programming very well, I still felt that I was a junior programmer. Going to this conference was a very good thing for me, my confidence has been bolstered and I know longer feel as if I am a junior programmer.

Monday morning they announced the cloud computing platform Windows Azure. Now, I can get pretty geeky but it really didn’t knock my socks off. I am not totally sure why, it could be the fact that I might not be able to get to play with it for a couple of years, maybe that it is something targetted at the enterprise and I like being able to acheive really cool stuff for free… cos im cheap :P

Another thing that they were pushing at the PDC was multicore programming, and what they are doing to start empowering the developer to easily make use of more cores.

The agile development session was interesting just to see how Microsoft do it or think how we should do it, and they showed off Team Foundation Server 2010. One interesting point was being able to setup source control policies, one policy they demoed was making sure the developer built and ran all the tests locally on thier machine which would be very handy at work. We do suffer from this sometimes.

They were also showing off thier new OS Windows 7, which on the surface looks like Vista but underneath they have made a lot of advancements. They are pushing the scalability and efficiency of this new OS. During one of the keynotes the presenter made a claim that it runs on a 1ghz 1gb RAM notebook very well. They also had machines dotted all over the convention center with Windows 7 on it, its quite impressive.

One particular session that jumped out was the improvements they are bringing in .NET 4.0 to with dynamic languages. To the extent that dynamic languages like python and ruby can talk to static languages like C# and VB and vice versa. This was very interesting, with the idea that you could build a library with a nice model in C# and consume it in python. There was no mention of PHP at all, but it would not take too much for mono to get up to speed and be able to do something similar.

Much of Wednesday afternoon I spent going around the Partnet Expo, talking to various people and picking up free stuff! Got quite a few T-Shirts, won’t have to go clothes shopping for another couple years now ;)

Most nights Microsoft had organised some evening events, my expenditure for the entire trip was very small. Tuesday night they had opened up Universal Studios just for the convention, and that was very cool. It was transformed for halloween. Upon entering, the streets were filled with smoke and dotted throughout were men in consume with chainsaws (without the chains of course) and occasionally they would start them up and rush into the crowd. I prided myself on not being able to react :P The only reason for that was that I kept my eye out for all of them, so I knew when a scare was coming, or where it might come from. Unlike my colleagues, I never jumped once. There was one occasion when we were walking down this sparesly populated street and there was this particular section heavily obscured by smoke. It was inpenetreble and upon thinking that there was someone hiding in there a man in costume rushed past in front me into the other guys and started his chainsaw. They scattered, it was so funny lol. The guy did come back to hassle me however since I can school myself, it wasy to walk off :P

The only other notable night was on Wednesday when the ISVs went to the J Lounge. Very trendy place, they have XBoxs out, and even a game of Rock Band projected onto the side of a 3 story building. There was lots of eye candy as a couple of Lakers girls there. Near the end of the evening they gave out various prizes, I won a $25 dollar Starbucks gift voucher, only problem was that I only had 14 hours in which to spend it before I was bound for home and much of that was going to spent doing things at the convention. I gave it to one of colleagues in the end who was spending a couple of extra days in America.

Overall the PDC was quite overwhelming at first, I think if I went again I would be better prepared, the only thing that would put me off is the flight. Now I am going to be depressed for a year or two before I can use all of this lovely new technology.

In fact, not long after installing Vista did it impress me with its ability to recognise my hardware and also find the latest drivers for me, and failing that, even point me to the correct vendor pages where I could find the right driver.

Brilliant. So far so good. Even after wrestling with Vista for control of my sound panel, where it wanted to put most of my sounds on loud as it could since it thought I was deaf, then put my microphone as low as possible with no boost since it thought no one wanted to hear me complain moan what I had to say. I was prepared to let that one go. (I still won)

But the war continues, I am very good when it comes to the organisation of my files. My documents and files go onto another drive, thats what I want to backup. But no, Vista (and OneCare which just started trying) wants to backup parts of my C: (WHY!? I mean, thats where my programs are kept) then wants to grab everything off my E: (servers and junk… ) then all of my music from my F: that I backup separately…. Wait.. I can exclude folders from backup… nice, so whenever I create a new folder on E: I have to exclude it from my backup.

Thats why I loved NT Backup so much, I could include everything I wanted, even down to the AppData/LocalSettings folders where some games kept thier saves and not include the folders where various programs keep a copy of thier installs etc.

Ah well… more open source or script majik to ensue…

 Then, only a minor annoyance. I have two different monitors, 19″ at 1280×1024 which is the primary monitor and a 21″ at 1600×1050 and Vista just cannot get the wallpaper right. In XP its was fine, I would pick a 1600×1050 wallpaper, ask it to center it and in the smaller monitor it would just cut off the edges.. fine, nice.
In Vista however, doesn’t matter whatever setting I use, it tries to fit it in the primary smaller monitor and never fits into the secondary, then always looks odd. Looks like I have either got to resort to a proper dual monitor background or stick two wallpapers into one large one just so that it looks ok in vista. I could using something like NView, but its been bloated with features that I do not care for (IE Popup Blocker… don’t need another, I already have 100s from other programs trying it on)

Apart from that its been behaving itself… I cannot deny it is a nice OS for the standard user. My father has managed to get on much better with Vista than XP. I just can’t help but feel that Vista treats me like a deaf dumb user who doesn’t know what hes doing…

 EDIT

After having stuck two wallpapers together to try and make one… the center behaviour from XP seems to occur in Vista as well. What I don’t understand is why right clicking on an image and setting it as the desktop background is different from selecting the image from the browse menu.

I also found this article: http://www.petri.co.il/installing_windows_xp_ntbackup_on_windows_vista.htm which should solve my backup problems. Bacula seems to be too advanced for my needs.