Great Tool for Virtual CD/DVD Drives on Vista

For years, I've used the Microsoft Virtual CD tool even though it hasn't been officially supported. Today, I needed to mount an .ISO DVD ROM image to install Visual Studio on my home machine, but I'm running Windows Vista.

Unfortunately, Vista doesn't play well with the MSVCD tool. Not to be deterred, a little Web research unveiled Virtual Clone Drive, which is a tool that works very very well on Vista for mounting ISO images, among other formats. You can download it here.

Error Enabling MOSS Publishing Feature

I've been working on a new Extranet project (details to follow once it is publicly announced), and I need to enable the MOSS Publishing features. Unfortunately, I ran into the following exception when I tried:

Exception occurred. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80020009 (DISP_E_EXCEPTION))

A little research uncovered extensive conversation about this on Microsoft Technet. The solution suggested was a series of STSADM commands to manually enable the handful of publishing features, and it worked! So, reproduced below to help anyone else who runs into this problem, is the series of commands that make this little problem go away. (Obviously, you'll want to replace http://siteurl with the location of your site collection.)

stsadm -o activatefeature -filename publishing\feature.xml -url http://siteurl -force

stsadm -o activatefeature -filename publishingresources\feature.xml -url http://siteurl -force

stsadm -o activatefeature -filename publishingSite\feature.xml -url http://siteurl -force

stsadm -o activatefeature -filename publishingweb\feature.xml -url http://siteurl -force

stsadm -o activatefeature -filename publishinglayouts\feature.xml -url http://siteurl -force

stsadm -o activatefeature -filename navigation\feature.xml -url http://siteurl -force

I found it helpful to wrap these in a nice little batch file for future use, but you could just as easily run them one at a time.