Winphone XNA deployment in Toshiba Satellite L305-S5944

Finally I think that I have the XNA game studio working in my Toshiba laptop. It did not have the 10.1 directx capability. Hence I did the following:

1. Downloaded Intel® Graphics Driver for Windows 7* and Windows Vista* (exe) from Intel site. Ran it with lot of trepidation because I was worried the screen is going to become blank! It failed. Ran it again! It updated the driver.
2. Compiled a Windows Phone application and it failed.
3. Ran dxdiag which showed that I had 10.1 installed.
4. Downloaded and installed DXSDK_June10.exe. This is not required, but I did it to get the DirectX Caps Viewer Tool mentioned in the Release notes.
5. Ran the C:\Program Files\Microsoft DirectX SDK (June 2010)\Utilities\bin\x86\DXCapsViewer.exe and checked the results. It looked OK. I expanded the Direct3D 10.1 folder and saw entries for  D3D10_FEATURE_LEVEL_10_0 or D3D10_FEATURE_LEVEL_10_1. Direct3D_11 folder also had similar entries for D3D_FEATURE_LEVEL_10_0.
6. Tried to install the following and it said not applicable to my system!
   1. Update for Windows Vista (KB971512)
   2. Update for Windows Vista (KB971513)
   3. Update for Windows Vista (KB971514)
   4. Update for Windows Vista (KB960362)
7. Tried to deploy the Winphone application. Same error.
8. Became bold and adventurous!  followed this instruction:
   1. It is possible to bypass this capabilities check in XNA Game Studio by setting the following registry setting: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\XDE XNAEnableGPU = 1 (REG_DWORD)Caution: If you override this registry key, the project will attempt to deploy but only a black screen will be displayed in the emulator if the required graphics card capabilities are not available.
9. Voila! I was able to deploy. This is an empty application. Will check with the Hello world and update this post again!
10. Update: Unfortunately this does not work. Posted in the Windows Phone forum.WDDM 1.1 driver, The current display adapter does not meet the emulator requirements to run XNA
11. Will be updating laptop to windows 7. Let us see whether this solves the problem!
12. Windows 7 resolved it!

MVC Widgets, RenderAction, partial views, sub controllers and RenderPartialRequests part 2

This has become a long post, so I am continuing with the links

1. ASP.NET MVC Preview 4: ComponentController Is Now RenderAction by Rob Conery
2. ASP.NET MVC Namespaces in Web.config instead of Views - ASP.NET MVC Best Practices  by David Hayden
3. Quick Tips About ASP.NET MVC – WebPart Framework by Nunos
4. Developing Web 2.0 Portal Using Asp.Net MVC, Microsoft Ajax Client Templates And JQuery With Drag And Drop Widget Personalization – Part 1 by Lakkakula
5. Renderpartial conditionally on masterpage in asp.net mvc in Stack Overflow
6. RenderPartial vs RenderAction by Derik Whittaker
7. Dynamic Views in ASP.NET MVC 2 by Greg Shakles
8. ASP.NET MVC 2.0 Using Multiple Actions by Brian Mains
9. Web 2.0 AJAX Portal using jQuery, ASP.NET 3.5, Silverlight, Linq to SQL, WF and Unity by Omar Al Zabir
10. Dropthings

MVC Widgets, RenderAction, partial views, sub controllers and RenderPartialRequests – Part 1

Have been spending some time on MVC. It is a fascinating technology with very little documentation! Did lot of web search to find the following interesting topics:

1. Partial Requests in ASP.NET MVC by Steve Sanderson
2. Html.RenderAction and Html.Action by Phil Haack
3. ASP.NET MVC Tip #50 – Create View Models by Stephen Walther
4. ASP.NET MVC Partial Views and Strongly Typed Custom ViewModels by Mike Brind
5. ASP.NET MVC and the templated partial view (death to ASCX)  by Jeffery Palermo
6. Web Parts in ASP.NET 2.0 by Damon Armstrong
7. SubControllers in ASP.NET MVC by Matt Hinze
8. Quick Tips About ASP.NET MVC – WebPart Framework by Nunos
9. MVC Contrib Portable areas download
10. MVC Widgets with RenderAction  by Steve Michelotti
11. Creating a Stock Widget in ASP.NET MVC Application by Azam Sharp
12. Creating an MVC based website with reusable widgets by Geert van der Cruijsen