http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsofts-windows-azure-has-a-meltdown/12076

Hey Microsoft, you might want to have your developers read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_year

I just wasted the last half hour trying to get an old PC I’ve been neglecting connected to my Windows Home Server. Turns out I decided to do this on the one day it won’t work: February 29th. According to the discussion at the link above, it will work just fine tomorrow…

I’m developing an ASP.NET site using the Wizard control and have code that saves the user’s progress in a database. The idea here is that the user can return to the site and pick up where they left off. Simple enough, but I got caught in what seemed like a never ending debugging session when I couldn’t figure out why the "Previous" button didn’t work when I came back into the site to resume a previous session. The wizard simply would not step backwards when starting on any step in the middle. To make a long story short, turns out the genius at Microsoft who implemented this control decided to make the "previous" button work like the browser "back" button, i.e. clicking previous steps you back in your "history" since you starting using the wizard. In this case, there is no "history" when starting in the middle, so the button does nothing! Not at all intuitive.

I found this discussion enlightening: http://forums.asp.net/p/973337/1235981.aspx

The workaround is simple. Handle the PrevousButtonClick event and decrement the ActiveStepIndex property:

protected void MainWizard_PreviousButtonClick(object sender, WizardNavigationEventArgs e)
{
    MainWizard.ActiveStepIndex--;
}

Hope this helps.

Technically, I don’t live in Syracuse. I live about 15 minutes north in Clay, which is #2 on the top 101 cities with highest average snowfall.

For now, I’ve downgraded Flash to version 9 to workaround the problem. Adobe has older versions of Flash available for download here:

http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_14266

Handy method in the System.Security namespace for replacing invalid XML characters with their escaped equivalents:

SecurityElement.Escape(string str)

I don’t know what made me think to do this, and I think I’ve tried this in the past, but I disabled hybrid sleep (Control Panel, Power Options, Change plan settings, Change advanced power settings, expand Sleep, expand Allow hybrid sleep, change setting to Off, click OK).  Now my PC wakes from sleep every time!

Hybrid sleep is new in Windows Vista and is a cross between the old "standby" mode and "hibernation".  Standby works by powering down just about everything except the RAM, which saves the machine’s state so that it can very quickly resume where you left off when you power it up again.  Hibernation saves the computer’s state to the hard drive and powers down completely.  Resuming from standby is many times faster than resuming from hibernation, since loading the state back from the hard drive takes some time.  Windows Vista’s hybrid sleep mode saves the state to the hard disk but then goes into standby mode, keeping the state in RAM as well.  The idea here is that the state is protected in case the power is lost to the PC (which would wipe out the state in RAM), but most of the time the machine wakes up quickly by using the state stored in RAM.

I don’t know what it is about my hardware that is preventing a wake from hybrid sleep and not "plain old standby" mode.  I have a UPS connected to this machine, so I’m not particularly concerned about it losing power while it’s sleeping.  XP only supports standby and hibernation and that had been working without and problems, so that may be what finally made me think to disable hybrid sleep. 

So now I think I’m going to give Vista another chance.  At least until I run into the next show stopper…

I’ve also seen folks report problems resuming from sleep mode that have NVIDIA graphics chips running VISTA. Exactly the problem I’ve been having.

The Asus motherboard I’m using not only has an NVIDIA video chip, but also the nForce chipset. So, it seems very likely that I unknowingly picked the wrong motherboard when I built my first Vista system. Will NVIDIA ever fix their drivers for VISTA or am I going to have to stay with XP until I build my next system? I’ll probably think twice before choosing NVIDIA in the future…

After backing up my drive, I installed SP3.  Once the installation finished, it wanted to reboot the system (of course).  Problem was, it wouldn’t start back up.  It just hung there on the Windows XP logo screen  with the "progress bar" going around and around forever.  I reset the box and tried again.  This is standard operating procedure with Windows - sometimes just trying something again works.  But not this time.

Fortunately, I could still boot into safe mode and uninstall SP3.  After that, everything returned to normal.  So now, I’m left wondering if I’m going to be stuck at SP2 on this machine and unable to get future security updates.  Is this Microsoft’s way of getting me to try Vista again?  At least under Vista things sort of worked and I could get updates.

Maybe it’s time to reconsider getting a Mac.

UPDATE: 5/10/08 - Installed SP3 via Microsoft Update with no problems. Mac purchase delayed for now.