Since installing Windows 7 RTM I have been slowly reinstalling all of my development programs.  The only one that has given me a fit has been SP1 for Visual Studio 2008.  The base program installed just fine, but SP1 failed every time.  Even after trying some suggestions I saw while searching, nothing worked.  But, earlier today I finally found success.  Prior to firing up the install for SP1, run the following from the command line (make sure you fire up the command prompt as an administrator.

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reg delete HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\SQMClient\Windows\DisabledSessions /va /f

After running this command, SP1 installed with no issues.

I stumbled across a nice little tutorial this morning by Chris Peterson of Alagad. It explains how to create a Windows based instance on Amazon EC2. It appears as though Chris will be authoring more posts that explain storage, backups and the pros/cons of running in the cloud. If you are curious on how how to set up instances in the cloud, give this a quick read.

Late last week I spent a day trying to install ColdFusion 8 Enterprise on a new 64 bit Windows Server 2008 server.  It did not go well at first.  The install itself succeeded, but nothing was working.  When trying to launch the administrator to complete the installation, IIS threw one of the most bizarre error messages I have seen.  After doing a little research the error was trying to tell me that it was having a problem using the ISAPI filter for ColdFusion.  This was due to the fact it was made for IIS 6.  If you have ever noticed, the .dll that parses the ColdFusion requests is named jrun_iis6.dll.

I then came across a blog entry from Jason Holden describing exactly what needed to be done to get everything working.  I uninstalled ColdFusion, and followed the steps from the blog entry.  I then reinstalled ColdFusion and everything was working normally.  In short, IIS 7 must be set up to handle filters made for IIS 6. The only question I have is why hasn't Adobe addressed this in the installation notes?  It sure would have saved me some time!  And kudos to Jason for the tips.