Where’s Bill?

I apologize for not posting as often as I would have liked, but I’ve been up to my kiester in home projects and trying to get the April Beta V 2/Beta 3 builds installed. Last week we installed new windows here at the house and this took almost all of my time. The company installed the windows was less than stellar in how they communicated with us which made a fairly simple task far harder. We’re still waiting for hardware so we can lock the new doors. Remember that I don’t believe in guns for all occasions—I’m a bayonet guy—just in case you’re thinking about breaking in. I’m working up a blog entry to let the world know who these people are and why to avoid using them in the future.

As to the April CTPs, I was able to download them without much difficulty (except for the painfully slow download time). It seems that Peter (in the UK) was able to get over 120Kbs download speed while I (within artillery range of Microsoft) could only get about 25Kbs. This meant that it took two days to get the files. It’s funny how the other products I download from Microsoft seem to arrive at 50-120Kbs but the files from MSDN arrive far more slowly.

Both the Whidbey and Yukon installs went very smoothly on this side of the Atlantic—but not for Peter. He tried to uninstall and run the XP Restore. It didn’t work. I did notice that Microsoft had not fixed one of the more serious issues: the exception handlers in ADO.NET seem to be broken. That is, they return “Timeout” for far too many situations that used to return (somewhat) meaningful exceptions. They tell me this is fixed, but in the RTM fork so we might not see it in the next CTP—perhaps not until RTM. I’ve turned in about a dozen help topics written with C# but no Visual Basic .NET examples. So far it’s about one in five that fall into this category.

I also gave up on VPC. The VPC installations are clearly too slow to be useful. The performance I’m seeing in Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 once I install them on a “real” (non virtual) system are now (IMHO) “acceptable” but still noticeably slower than the Visual Studio 2003 RTM build. To get around the performance and strange stuff issues, I went to the trouble of building a base XP system and made a Ghost image of it. No, this approach won’t work for your IBM laptop as Ghost is clueless when it comes to rebuilding an image that you can boot from—at least it never worked for me. I found the new IBM R&R program does the job faster anyway.