During the last days I have taken the time to get familar with Windows 7, at least a little. So far, I do like it, though it is far from stable on my machine at the moment - at least, Windows Vista was better in that respect.

The new Taskbar and the start menu are pretty amazing. I like the feature to show progress and states on it, as well as add buttons to the window preview panes. Also, the Jump Lists are quiet nice, so I started importing those features into Delphi, all available as a small component set. Those will be available soon, with more details about what and how they will work.

However, so far I have seen many sample videos, read quiet a few blog entries on how to program those jump list, but they all habe one thing in common: they are missing the code samples. If you are looking for those samples, download the Windows 7 SDK Beta and look into the installation folder. For me, those are at C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0\Samples\winui\Shell\JumpList.

Well, as I've written before, I have reinstalled my work machine. Still the same setup as in the last post, basically it is just Windows Vista Ultimate (running in a domain), 2007 Office System, and Visual Studio. First, I have installed Visual Studio, then Office and last the RAD Studio. A few minor tools along the way.

When working in Visual Studio on ASP.NET Applications, I could not use the designer at all. Using the Source view of ASPX files worked fine. When switching to Split- or Design view, the editor would freeze and nothing else would happen. I could close the tab and keep on working in Source view. Not more on ASPX-files. While this is fine most the time, I sometimes would just like the designer.

I reinstalled (repair function) the whole Visual Studio 2008. And it got better, well almost. When switching into Split- or Design view I could see the page, but every control would be causing the following error.

Error Creating Control - Panel1
The type initializer for 'Microsoft.Web.Design.ExtenderInformationServiceProvider' threw an exception.

Or it would tell me, that a control with the name of Panel1 exists already. Whichever error it liked to show. Well, after searching the internet for about an hour I found a solution that seemed to make no sense, so it should work. So I did just that:

• Uninstall the .NET Framework 3.5
• Reboot
• Reinstall the .NET Framework from the Visual Studio DVD
• Reboot
• Run Visual Studio and be happy

It works! So if you have a similar problem, try your luck with un- and reinstalling the .NET Framework 3.5.