Getting Vista SP1 via Windows Update

If you want to get Windows Vista using Windows Update then copy the following in a bat (or cmd) file and run it in an admin console (if you have UAC switched on); then run Windows Update. Also the SP1 is a Release Candidate and not the “final” version so use at your own risk! 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 @echo off reg delete HKEY\_LOCAL\_MACHINE\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\WindowsUpdate\\VistaSp1 /f > NUL 2>&1 reg delete HKEY\_LOCAL\_MACHINE\\SOFTWARE\\Wow6432Node\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\WindowsUpdate\\VistaSP1 /f > NUL 2>&1 reg add HKEY\_LOCAL\_MACHINE\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\WindowsUpdate\\VistaSp1 /v Beta1 /t REG\_SZ /d da2ba4db-dedb-437e-8e7e-104643454bb6 /f IF NOT %errorlevel% == 0 ( goto ERROR) :SUCCESS @echo....

December 11, 2007 · Amit Bahree

Good UML Tool (and free too)

Love it or hate it UML is important for anyone involved (Architect/Developer/Whoever) - either you need to create designs based on UML and you need to understand that someone else has. Sure it has its challenges and for some specific things there are better solutions (DSL’s - more on that some other day). I am “old school” and over the years have used Rational Rose (or whatever IBM has renamed it to since buying Rational out)....

December 3, 2007 · Amit Bahree

Parallel Computing with .NET

With all the modern systems using multi-core and multi-processor systems, tapping this new power is an interesting challenge for developers. It also fundamentally starts the shift on how your “average Joe” interacts with a computer and things that he/she expects to be able to. First, check out the “ Manycore Shift ” paper from Microsoft. Second checkout the Parallel Extensions to .NET 3.5 which is a programing model for data and task parallelism....

December 2, 2007 · Amit Bahree

Network Speed @ Oxford

November 20, 2007 · Amit Bahree

SQL Performance and navchar(MAX)

At work we had an issue where our sql performance (SQL Server 2005) was very slow - much slower than we needed and everything looked OK but in the production environment (to which we don’t have access - rightfully) things were not ticking as they should be. We had a requirement to be able to process ~200K / hour and we were barely managing ~ 44K / day! Ouch! As it turns out, the solution in the end after a lot of digging and flapping around was changing the type of one of the columns which was defined as a nvarchar(MAX) to a nvarchar(400)....

November 7, 2007 · Amit Bahree

The Most Evil Pumpkin in Linuxland

Fellow Avanut, Barry , created the most evil pumpkin in Linuxland. <p> <img src="images/clip_image001_thumb.jpg" alt="clip_image001"/> </p>

November 3, 2007 · Amit Bahree

Rotten Neighbors

I think we need something like Rotten Neighbors for the UK ! 😃 What is it? If you have a rotten neighbor then you can tell the world about them. You can browse to your neighborhood and plot your own marker with a complete description Here is an example from in the neighborhood where I use to live in California.

October 31, 2007 · Amit Bahree

Avanade Netherlands having too much fun?

Avanade in Netherlands went on a campus recruitment drive and seem like they are having too much fun ! In case you are like me and do not understand Dutch, then what it says is “Food for IT guys” and essentially was a marketing drive on various campuses where prospective interns for Avanade were offered some food (looks like chips) in exchange for their emails. I think the whole idea is just brilliant!...

September 30, 2007 · Amit Bahree

Feist 1234

Megha send me this one; I had never heard of these guys but I do recognize the music from the new iPod Nano advertisement.

September 30, 2007 · Amit Bahree

Vista SDK Dialog

<rant> I was trying to install the Vista SDK and due to my network card having some issues I wanted to reboot. However, before doing that, I had to cancel the SDK setup (as it downloads the bits during the setup process). Now I understand the need to warn the user not to do “close” the setup as the installations is rolling back to previous state - but the need to have a topmost window is very irritating and not required....

September 29, 2007 · Amit Bahree

WCF Configuration Schema

WCF’s configuration is somewhat complex and the first time you start using it can been daunting. Below is an image of the schema published by Microsoft. You can print this out on a A3 or something and use it has a handy reference. <p> <img src="images/wcf_config_schema_thumb.png" alt="wcf_config_schema"/> </p>

September 29, 2007 · Amit Bahree

Time to boycott Apple?

If I bought an expensive gadget, I own it and can do anything with it (as long as it is legal of course). So if an update deliberately bricks the gadget how is not bullying? Also is it legal (obviously I am no lawyer). Phht … and people say Microsoft acts life a bully! I think it might be time to boycott Apple and take my business elsewhere.

September 28, 2007 · Amit Bahree

Loo signs

Pretty hilarious (and probably true) - how the loo/restroom/bathroom signs should be . 😄

September 24, 2007 · Amit Bahree

Interesting Find #7

Anywhere.FM can be thought as iTunes for the Web. It allows you to upload your music (yes including those songs bought from iTunes), so you can get to your music from anywhere. You can also “share” the music with friends like a “radio station” and of course browse other user’s radio station. Sweet! 😄 If you travel a lot and need a decent solution to manage the various expense receipts (or are just plain lazy then check out Neat Receipts Scanner ....

September 20, 2007 · Amit Bahree

Rules of Threading

As Mr. Kale so eloquently puts it (and of course 100% correct): If you think you need multi-threading, you’re wrong If your specification says “you need threading”, see Rule 1 (For advanced users only) If you think you need multi-threading, you’re probably wrong.

September 20, 2007 · Amit Bahree

Hitachi - Get Perpendicular

You must have heard of the perpendicular storage now coming out - but how is this any good. To understand this listen to poor HDD sector explain it - pretty cool.

September 14, 2007 · Amit Bahree

MS DOS 5 Upgrade

September 11, 2007 · Amit Bahree

.NET "Micro" Framework

No, there is no typo in the title of this post - there is a .NET &ldquo;Micro&rdquo; Framework (which is a Microsoft stack in case you were wondering). I had not heard of such a thing until today (but then I have not done any embedded stuff for a while). It is designed to use only a few hundred kilobytes of RAM (512K) and an inexpensive processor (ARM7 and ARM9 based)....

September 7, 2007 · Amit Bahree

My book available on Books24x7

I was pleasantly surprised to see the appearance of my book, Pro WCF on Books24x7 today. Below is the screen shot from the email 😄 <p> <img src="images/image_thumb.png" alt="image"/> </p>

September 7, 2007 · Amit Bahree

Missed the plot?

I have been playing with some of the P2P stuff in .NET 3.5 and seems like to have missed the plot along the lines somewhere while debugging …. 😄 <p> <img src="images/image_thumb.png" alt="image"/> </p>

September 4, 2007 · Amit Bahree

Miss South Carolina&#039;s Answer to Question - Miss Teen America

To laugh or to cry … that is the question.

August 31, 2007 · Amit Bahree

CS 2007 SP3 (Beta)

Seems like many others are following the MS route in releasing Betas - which might not be the best thing in the world. Telligent has now released the CS 2007 Service Pack 3 (Pre-Release) with a long list of fixes and “new features”.

August 29, 2007 · Amit Bahree

Finding out TFS Version

If for some reason you wanted to know what version (and possibly license) of TFS were you running (as a fellow Avanut did in the communities), then check out this tool by Jeff . Speaking of TFS, Brian has published the &ldquo;final&rdquo; feature list of what to expect in TFS 2008 including compatibility with VSTS 2005.

August 29, 2007 · Amit Bahree

Adding a Drive in WHS

I have been experimenting with Windows Home Server at home and running the RC1. I was low on disk space (having only one internal 80 gb HDD which was also running the OS). It started with one of the annoying Network Health alerts telling me I am low on disk space. Since there was no room in the old machine I am running this one to add another internal HDD I decided to plug in an external USB HDD....

August 25, 2007 · Amit Bahree

Google Mapplets

Google Mapplets are “mini applications” you write which can be embedded within Google Maps. Google has a special &ldquo;preview&rdquo; version of the maps where you can test this out. To help you write mapplets (e.g. a random weather map ) google also has the Mashup Editor ( reviewed by Lachlan ) which is similar to Yahoo Pipes .

August 25, 2007 · Amit Bahree