I was reading my friend/colleague Jonathan’s blog the other day and came across a post he made about the Play To Feature in Windows 7. While I think his assessment of the techno-political landscape was on target, he was wrong about the availability of the feature in the current beta (build 7000). In fact, we were pushing some photos around on our corporate Wi-Fi network – he on his Toshiba netbook and me on my Asus R1F table (both pieces of personal equipment ;). Seeing 7 on his netbook was awesome- I was completely sold – crisp performance – looks great – full aero glass. Impressive.

Some relevant posts on how to use the Plat To feature.

http://community.winsupersite.com/blogs/paul/archive/2009/01/01/windows-7-play-to.aspx

http://blog.hznet.nl/2009/01/08/windows-7-play-to-xbox-360-media-center-extender

James Senior posted some excellent news for the Mesh-addicted  Live Framework and thus Live Mesh developer. I will be giving this a try later tonight. Now, if we can get the CTP running on 7…

James.Random() : Running Mesh Beta Client at the same time as Live Framework CTP Client

Quick Update – I followed James’ instructions and I am up and running. Thanks!

OK – So the issues I mentioned in my earlier posts all seem to have been cleared up. The Insert Disk issue was resolved by putting a memory card in my memory card slot. I am happy to have it in there, doing the Ready Boost thing. System has been running great for a couple of days now. I have reinstalled the Windows Live stuff and am blogging this with Live Writer on my Windows 7 system. I also switched over to Kaspersky for AV, but still using the Windows Firewall. Overall, I am impressed.

Update: I forgot to mention that I have the LiveMesh Beta running again as well. No issues with install or sync so far.

So considering the issues I have already mentioned, I decided I should take some rash actions. I uninstalled Windows Live, Live Mesh, and AVG 7 Anti Virus. I then re-installed Windows 7 – essentially upgrading the upgrade.

During the install I got one of these errors, hitting try again seemed to work

There is no disk in the drive, please insert disk into drive 
Deviceharddisk1DR1
Cancel | Try Again | Continue

Then the upgrade ran smoothly.

Once the system restarted, I got the same error related to two applications

I uninstalled Windows Live Synch first, then rebooted

On startup I got the same disk not found error for moemonitor.exe

And the same send info dialog (two of them actually) for feed synchronizaiton.

Next step “repair” Live Mesh Beta

It asked me if I wanted to install updates – naturally I said yes 😉

After the update was finished, I got Microsoft Feed Synchronization has stopped working… windows is collecting info.. then the other dialog about send into – so I sent the info.

The action center /More info window popped up – but I got a “this program cannot find the webpage” error. View details says internet connection is lost. I fired up IE to test it and got a bunch of errors and lost Glass. So, going to uninstall Live Mesh now and reboot.

Reboot

Still getting Feed Synchronization errors

Also, I dug into Computer management | Disk management and found that I have an extra CD-ROM drive showing up – Drive E:. To make sure this one was bogus I popped a disc into the drive I do have (D) and low and behold, D had something in it. So, I am going to remove the drive letter (e) from that drive. I will shut down, pull out the removable CD/DVD drive that works (D) and put the second battery in the slot and start up – then I should see no CD/DVD drive… I would think

Reboot

msnmsgr.exe – No Disk
There is no disk in the drive, please insert disk into drive 

Disk Management – still showing the phantom CD-ROM  – no drive letter – no Media

Feed Synchronization errors also popping up – sending that data to Microsoft….

Time to uninstall Windows Live stuff – uninstalling the whole kit n kaboodle

Reboot

Still with the Feed Synchronization errors – time to look at the log files…

log files are no help

can;t run IE either –

Mesh doesn’t;t seem to be completely uninstalled – usersnyusernameappdatelocaltemplivemesh
has a bunch of stuff like moemonitor[0000].exe and some other files and logs.

I am going to try and reinstall mesh and see what happens, if I can get on the web 😉

Fired up Firefox

went to mesh.com

removed my machine (was showing it offline)

reinstalled Mesh and added my machine to the device ring

IE will still not run – time for another reboot

That’s it for now

Yesterday I decided it was time to get off the fence and go all in with my Asus R1F tablet. Previously I had be dual booting Vista Business Premium and 7 Ultimate. The Vista partition is a full blow development machine with all the trimmings – except the Live FX – Live Mesh CTP (the one with the SDK). Id does have the Windows Live Wave 3 stuff installed and it has the beta version of Live Mesh as well.

So I wiped out the Windows 7 partition, extended my boot partition to reclaim that space. I renamed the drive from “Windows Vista” to “7” and run the upgrade.

First problem was that I had Poweshell 1.0 installed and I had to uninstall it. I was notified of this pretty early in the process – a couple of minutes – so no problem. The issue was how to uninstall Powershell 1.0. You have to go to the Uninstall Program utility in Control Panel – but it isn’t;t listed as an app. It is an “update”, so you have to click “view installed updates” and uninstall it from there. OK, that wasn’t so bad.

From there the upgrade went pretty well. It seemed to take a couple of hours, but it was a crazy day and I didn’t;t pay too much attention to it. It didn’t;t ask that I pay too much attention to it, nice.

So now I start up and I start getting error. Dialog boxes popping up one after another

msnmsgr.exe – No Disk
There is no disk in the drive, please insert disk into drive 
Deviceharddisk1DR1
Cancel | Try Again | Continue

Windows Feed Synchronization
Do you want to send more information about the problem?
then the path to a .hdmp file.

On the whole these are the apps that have complained so far:

• msnmsgr.exe
• moemonitor.exe
• winmail
• unregmp2.exe

I am going to uninstall all the Windows Live stuff and see if that helps.

See you on the other side,

When Microsoft announced that Live ID would become an OpenID provider, I wanted to know if this mean that I would be able to log into Windows Live with the OpenID I had established with JanRain (myOpenID). Angus Logan took some time to bring me up to speed on the providing party/relying party issues and pointed out that Microsoft has in fact worked as a relying party with 3 different OpenID providing parties in their HealthVault project.  The supported providers are:

I am always looking for good illustrations of why things like LINQ to SQL , Entity Framework,  and ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria) are a great thing to get to know, well.

Here, Scott lays out a few options and shows us a peak at what Scott Hunter and his team are showing as the future.

Scott Hanselman’s Computer Zen – ASP Dynamic Data Preview – More ways to exploit ADO.NET Data Services for fun and profit

Interested in hearing what other think about this. I have not looked deeply into RPX enough to have an opinion on  this. But I think vendors playing Switzerland at different levels of complexity (RPX or Microsoft Geneva) is ultimately a good thing. What you really need is a lot of competition is this space.

JMPInline: Why using RPXNow is a bad idea

Time to tweak my dev environment again – keep these new stuff coming guys. Maybe I can get this all up on Windows 7…

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