Thursday, February 28, 2008

MSDN Event here in Fresno!

Last night at the user group meeting I mentioned the launch event of Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008. I forgot to mention that all attendees will get a promotional pack containing all three new products. You can go ahead and register for it here.

C# 3.0 Cookbook 3rd Edition - I Recommend!

I had the pleasure to work as a technical reviewer on C# 3.0 Cookbook 3rd Edition, by Jay Hilyard, Stephen Teilhet (O'Reilly).
It is a wonderful book with a pragmatic approach to solve common interesting problems.
Thank you O'Reilly for inviting me to work on this book.

C# 3.0 Presentation source code

JD Conley was kind enough to post the source code on his blog of the presentation he did last night, at Fresno State, for our Central California .Net User Group.
Thank you JD!

Saturday, February 23, 2008

Central California .Net User Grop meeting - Feb/27/2008

I am looking forward to next user group meeting, which will be presented by JD Conley, who will talk about C#3.0.
For more information visit www.centralcaldotnet.com

Friday, February 22, 2008

Problem with CD/DVD drive in Vista

I am not proud of having my inaugural blog post on how to fix a bug in Windows Vista.
I have been using Vista 64 and have encountered a few problems.
It started with my old logitech webcam, which I cannot find a vista driver for. I bought a Microsoft Lifecam to replace it, and, guess what, the thing didn't work right out of the box. I had to run a patch to fix something on the USB drivers of Vista 64 bits. It worked. It was funny to buy a brand new Microsoft peripheral incompatible with Vista 64.
The next problem I had was with my CD/DVD drive. After some windows update it appeared with a warning sign in Device Manager, saying that the driver was missing. I spent several minutes trying to find a more up-to-date driver for my drive (TSSTcorp TS-L632H - came in a Inspiron 1520). Also, my U3 thumb drive didn't work.

It turns out that the solution for this problem has nothing to do with driver, after all. All you have to do is
a) Go to the registry and find [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
b) Make sure the class = CDROM
c) Delete both UpperFilter and LowerFilter keys.
d) reboot.

After I did this, both my CD/DVD drive and my U3 thumb drive (which works like a CD) work fine!

Other than these, and not being able to run my McAfee Viruscan on Vista, I haven't had any problems with Vista 64.