How to disable the Error Report Tool in Windows Vista (dw20.exe)

If you are a software developer, it´s quite frequent that applications crash when thery´re not finished. If you usually open the task manager to take a look, you´ve probably noticed that a process called dw20.exe kicks in everytime an app crash.

Well I honestly still don´t know if that process was the cause, but since I installed vista, application crashes were very slow to recover. I´ve been googling around for a way to disable that process, and it has taken like ten minutes for me to find the solution.

The trick is: SET YOUR CONTROL PANEL TO CLASSIC VIEW. Something I probably shoulded have done earlier... ;).

The option you need only appears in the classic view. Its "Problem reports and Solutions" or "Informes de problemas y soluciones", in spanish.

Right there, select "Change configuration" and then "Advanced configuration". Then select "Disable error reporting" and that´s it.

I´ll tell how it works now. Cheers!

Howto set an InitialDirectory to FolderBrowserDialog

If you still don´t know, this might be useful:

The FolderBrowserDialog that comes boundled with .Net doesn´t have a InitialDirectory property. Maybe that´s why so many programs make us navigate through a hunderd folders again and again.

Well, making the FolderBrowserDialog to pre-select a folder is piece of cake. Just do the following:

this.folderBrowserDialog1.RootFolder = Environment.SpecialFolder.MyComputer;
this.folderBrowserDialog1.SelectedPath = "C:\\ whateveryouwanthere \\";
this.folderBrowserDialog1.ShowDialog();

Easy as that!

I must say that it´s still kindof lazy when trying to resolve paths which include things like this:

@"c:\Windows\System\..\System32"

(Don´t look at me like that! this sometimes happens with automatically-generated paths... ;)

Don´t know why, but it seems that FolderBrowserDialog doesn´t re-use the same routines for parsing paths as the rest of the .Net. Some people say this is a bug... Anyway I guess it doen´t like the "\..\" thing.

An easy way to fix it, is to parse the "hot" path with the DirectoryInfo class. It is much stronger than the folderBrowser and can handle it:

System.IO.DirectoryInfo info = new DirectoryInfo(@"c:\Windows\System\..\System32" );
this.folderBrowserDialog1.SelectedPath = info.FullName;

And that´s it.

Hope it helped. Cheers!

1962 Volkswagen T1 beats Porsche and Aston Martin

Imagine you are a rich guy. Or even better, imagine you are a poor programmer that suddenly sells it´s software to a big company by, let´s say, 140.000 euros.

You will obviously want to leave the freak group of your town, become popular and a well known computer geek. The first step is to buy a decent car... let´s say: a nine-eleven or an Aston Martin. What´s next?

Easy. Take it into Nürburgring for some fast laps. You are cool. You FEEL cool. You look cool. You look the bravest lion around there. And then... it happens...

The 1962 VW T1 with a little bit of improvement.

Jaaa jaaaa jaaaa....

MMC cannot open the file XXX.msc

A copule of weeks ago, my home machine started to show a weird behavior. Suddenly, both Diskeeper nor the normal windows defrag.msc didn´t work.

The message was something like:

"mmc cannot open the file XXX.MSC. This may be because the file does not exist,is not an MMC console, or was created by a later version of MMC. This may also because you do not have sufficient access rights to the file "

Right, after googling it I´ve found several solutions. Ones say that this fixed their problem (enabling offline files). Others (like me) fixed it running:

regsvr32 "C:\windows\system32\msxml3.dll"

This will re-register msxml3.dll. If successful, a dialog will come up saying that, and now your msc files should work again.

I don´t have a clue about what caused this problem. Anyone knows?

Thanks!

Encuentro NavarraDotNet con Unai Zorrilla y el Maligno

Esta tarde, a las 18:30, se celebrará un nuevo encuentro de NavarraDotNet en el que podremos disfrutar de la compañía de Unai Zorrilla (MVP Compact Framework)

Os paso la info:

Evento: Unai Zorrilla viene a la 3º quedada de NavarraDotNet 2.0!!
Día: jueves, 10 de enero de 2008;
hora: 18:30
Lugar: Centros de Excelencia de Software. Polígono Industrial Mocholi. Plaza CEIN. Noain

Organiza: NavarraDotNet con la colaboración de PlainConcepts, Masbytes y CES

Invitado especial: Unai Zorrilla (Microsoft MVP Compact Framewok)

Link para el registro.

Agenda:

18:30: Reunión del grupo de usuarios NavarraDotNet: últimas novedades y elección del plato a degustar. Se comentarán las últimas peripecias con el servidor, la situación de los preparativos de las próximas actividades y demás chascarrillos. También votaremos in-situ para elegir uno de los siguientes temas para la charla que, justo a continuación, nos dará Unai Zorrilla.

Este es el menú del día:

- Nuevos modelos de acceso a datos en plataforma Microsoft
- Desarrollo de aplicaciones para dispositivos móviles
- Windows Workflow Foundation
- Windows Comunication Foundation

19:00: Ponencia de Unai Zorrilla

21:00: Nos llevamos a Unai a cenar

Los comerciales de Dell utilizan nicknames castizos... Me Parto!

No se si es impresión mía, pero cada vez estoy más convencido de algo que es francamente inquietante:

"Los comerciales de Dell utilizan nicknames castizos"

Ja jaaaaaa... es que me parto.

Quizá era tartamudeo agudo, pero hubiera jurado que el comercial que me atendió hace un par de meses no era español. A pesar de que su email era Daniel_Rodriguez@dell.com. Yo pensé... "quizá sea hijo de españoles o latinos, y por eso tiene ese nombre..."

Pues resulta que hoy he hablado con Miguel_Sanz (no, no es nuestro queridísimo presidente de la comunidad), un franchute de los de pro, son sus "egues" (erres) y sus "pog favogues".

Será que les da apuro reconocer que la central de atención telefónica está en Calasparra (más bien en la France, porque te llaman con un prefijo +33)... ¿Cuánta pasta se gastará esta peña en teléfono? En fin, gracioso...

Por cierto, un apunte. No seáis primos como yo antes y cuando pidáis algo a Dell, siempre llamad a un comercial, que os harán alguna ofertilla. Si lo pedís por internet, os quedáis con el precio oficial.

XNA session. Iñaki Ayucar + Javier Cantón. Microsoft CodeCamp 2007

En este link podeís encontrar algunos vídeos que grabó Ander en el CodeCamp del 2007 que MSFT organizó en Huelva. Más concretamente, el de la charla que dimos Javier Cantón y yo sobre XNA, en baja y alta resolución.

Saludiños!

History

In 1976, a new supercomputer designed and developed by Seymour Cray and it´s team (Cray Research) was announced. It was the Cray-1. The first unit was installed in Los Alamos National Laboratory for $8.8 million, could perform 133 megaflops (millions of floating point operations per sec.) and had 8 Mb of memory.

In the pic, the Cray-1 at Deusches Museum:

That can seem quite old but, as you can see, it´s not bad at all for the seventies:

1984: PC 8088 - 4,77 MHz −→ 500 flops

1990: PC 80386 - 20 MHz −→ 160 Kiloflops

1997: PC Pentium II - 266 MHz −→ 66 Megaflops

2004: PC Pentium 4 - 3 GHz −→ 660 Megaflops

Well, now with the 8.8 million dollars we could buy like 9.000 Pentium 4, but that´s not the point... je je... You can read more about the Cray-1 here and here.

Another fun one is the Telefunken TR4. It was first presented even earlier than the Cray, in 1962. It had a Word length of 52 bits and a ferrite core RAM of 32768 words. Huge, isn´t it?

Last, but not less: the The IBM System 360-20.

It is supposed to be the first minicomputer to include an operating system. As you can see in the following picture, I really don´t understand what "mini" stands for in that term ;)

Well, compared to the Telefunken, it´s indeed a minicomputer.

In fact, the 20 model was the cheapest one of the 360 family. It had a magnetic core memory of 4 Kb and was developed in 1966. Another pic:

See you!