Tuesday 13 July 2004

Changes to Win32 API in Longhorn - Update Delayed

Nothing to see here, move along...

I haven't quite had the energy to do the next stage. I'm thinking about tackling winuser.h and wingdi.h next, plus probably the GDIPlus headers.

In mitigation, yesterday I watched Coupling for half an hour and spent a long time investigating the ListView.Click issue, which was originally raised on CodeProject's C# forum. Guess what the second response was? "TreeView.Click doesn't work either!" Sheesh...

Tonight I got home pretty late anyway, then my wireless connection stopped working after I read the blog collection and checked for updates. I decided to apply the firmware update to the router, but that didn't solve it, so I hit Disconnect on the View Available Wireless Networks window, then hit Refresh Network List - and nothing appeared. I ended up uninstalling the Virtual PC Network Switch driver and the IPv6 stack (which I'd been looking into a while back) which didn't help, then punching in the SSID and WPA keys again - still nothing.

OK, I thought, let's reboot. After rebooting, the network had disappeared from the Advanced Settings screen. Great - I enter it again, and it works (I can't just click on it in Available Wireless Networks because the router's set to not broadcast the SSID).

I've found that XP SP2 wireless + my card's drivers + Virtual PC Network Switch don't work together anyway. If you have VPCNS enabled on the wireless connection, nothing happens: any packets directed at the connection disappear into a black hole. Disabling VPCNS on the connection sorts it out, although I found I had to Disconnect and Connect in Available Wireless Networks before it would work again.

Anyway, that and normal routine household tasks took up most of the evening. Hopefully I'll get to it tomorrow.

Now I read that back, I realise that I've probably spent as much time writing up the excuse as I would have just writing it. Oh well.

[Edit:]

I need to state that actually, VPCNS works fine on the wireless connection - it was the action of installing it which caused the stack to go bonkers. Disconnecting then reconnecting sorted out the stack. I'd been having weirdo problems with it not working properly when resuming from Hibernate - again, disconnect and connect sorted it out. Let's see if it stays sorted - OK so far.

Because I hibernate this machine (it's a guzunder - it goes-under the desk) uptime doesn't have a lot of meaning. I use hibernate rather than power off because it hibernates faster than it shuts down, it resumes faster than it starts up, and I don't lose my context if I was working on something. We're talking < 10 seconds from press-power-switch to unlocking the console. Also, because of the way it works (dump physical pages to disk) I think the disk cache also remains 'hot'.

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