Fixing iMac speaker sound when using Windows 7

The sound from the iMac speakers when using 64 bit Windows 7 is not as high quality as Mac OS X. Here are a few things you can do to fix the sound, or rather few settings that change the sound a little.

First make sure your Cirrus Logic drivers are up to date, you can download them here. Go to Device Manager (in Control Panel, as Administrator), select Sound, video and game controllers, select the Cirrus Logic driver and right-click and select Update driver software and then choose Browse my computer for driver software, pointing it to where you un-zipped the driver you downloaded. This step should make sure that Bootcamp did indeed install the latest drivers.

The second step is to change the the way Windows 7 thinks of your speaker organization. Select Sound (in Control Panel), in the Playback tab, select Speakers and click the Configure button on the bottom left. For me Surround works best, by default Quadraphonic was selected and changing this to Surround seems to work better.

Maybe I'm imagining things, but this does sound better to me, if you figure out something else do leave a comment.

Test your websites on all browsers

While writing the last post, about Silverlight disk space on Win XP, I just noticed the difference between IE and Safari on even the most trivial possible website (which I wrote basically as a placeholder for bizspark). Note to self, start testing on IE, umm please.

Silverlight Reports Incorrect Space Usage On Win XP SP2

I opened an old-old version of windows xp (a VM), to test some Silverlight 4 stuff I'm working on (GraphiteCharts). First, the install was flawless, took seconds, damn impressive stuff (I still hate the blue install screen and its hideous font though). While I was at it I thought I'd clean up this VM aka remove unused stuff mostly, when I found that Silverlight reports its space usage incorrectly, or may be the comma actually means a dot (.). This could confuse people who don't know what Silverlight is and think its un-necessarily hogging space. Obligatory screen shot below.

Silverlight 3 and 4 development setup part 2

Following up on the previous post about setting up a silverlight 3 and 4 development environment (link), this post talks about modifying that environment to use visual studio 2010 (ultimate) and expression studio 4 instead of the earlier visual web and c# express editions. There are two parts to setting up, first uninstalling the express versions and the second installing the new studio versions. If you want to go straight to this final development setup without the intermediate express installs then follow steps 1,2,3 and 4 from the previous post; ignore the un-install steps in this one and jump straight to the installation bits.

Un-installs
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1) Uninstall the Silverlight 4 tools for Visual Studio 2010.
2) Uninstall the Silverlight 4 SDK.
3) Uninstall Silverlight 4.
4) Uninstall WCF RIA Services V1.0 for Visual Studio 2010.
WCF RIA services have a nasty-nasty bug and need some registry fixing to get rid off. First uninstall (via Add Remove Programs or Programs and Features in Win7) this will get rid of the folder in MicrosoftSDKs (C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\RIA Services). If however you now close and re-open Programs and Features you'll find WCF RIA services are back, this is because the registry entries have not been removed. You need to go in and manually do this (regedit.exe is your friend). The keys to remove are mentioned here; look for modestyZ's second post, the 4th post overall.
5) Uninstall Visual Web Developer Express 2010.
6) Uninstall Visual C# Express 2010.

Installs
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1) Install Visual Studio 2010 (I have Ultimate; thanks to bizspark; but other versions should work as well).
2) Install Silverlight 4 tools for Visual Studio 2010.
3) Install the Silverlight 4 update (mentioned in the previous post), discussed here and available here.
4) Install Expression Studio 4.

That's it [sic], you should now have a working top of the line Silverlight 3 and 4 development environment with support for Visual Studio 2008, 2010 and Expression Studio.

Silverlight 3 and 4 development setup

This post is more a instruction list for myself than anything else. Microsoft keeps changing the instructions on silverlight.net and it gets harder each time to find the steps needed to setup a working silverlight 3 and 4 development environment. This is how I setup mine. These steps give you a silverlight 3 and 4 development enviroment with Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Web Developer Express 2010. I do not yet have license for Visual Studio 2010 and am thus using the free versions. If everything goes to plan, this setup will give you the ability to develop for Silverlight 3 with VS2008 and both silverlight 3 and 4 with VWD2010.

The steps:
1) Install Visual Studio 2008.
2) Install Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (service pack).
3) Install Silverlight 3 tools. This installs, the Silverlight 3 SDK, Silverlight 3 and tools for Visual Studio 2008. This can be found here.
4) We need to now install an update for the Silverlight 3 SDK as described here. We basically need to un-install build 3.0.40624 of the Silverlight 3 SDK and install the updated 3.0.40818 version available here.
5) Install Visual Studio Web Developer Express 2010. Optionally install Visual C# Express 2010.
6) Now install the Silverlight 4 tools, available here.

Thats it this is all I do for my development environment. I'll write a new post when I get VS2010 and the Expression Suite and update my environment.

Update:
7) An update for the runtime is available, as described here. The direct link to the developer version for Windows is available here.