Due to a cancelled flight, and other delays, we missed the first day of the Hackathon, but we weren’t deterred. A coworker and I embarked on an ambitious Windows Phone/Azure application that, while incomplete, proved to be a great learning experience. Our Windows Phone 8 application was similar to “The Amazing Race” where a player had to complete various checkpoints, and the first player to complete them all, wins. At each checkpoint, the player would have to answer trivia based on the geographic location of that checkpoint.

Last weekend, a family member stopped by the house so I could take at an issue with her laptop. I managed to recreate the error, and fired up my work laptop so I could “Bing it”. (Yes, I wear that like a badge of honor!). At the login prompt, I banged away on the keyboard, hit enter, and was dropped into the “Formerly-Known-As-Metro” interface. At this point I hit Window-D to get into the familiar Windows Desktop interface, but was instead mocked with a beeping sound for each keystroke I typed.

The Cisco AnyConnect VPN will install on Windows 8 just fine. When you try to connect though, it will fail with an error (which I don’t have a screenshot of). In any case, a simple registry hack will fix it. Navigate to: HKEY\_LOCAL\_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetservicesvpnva and change the value of the DisplayName key. It will likely be something like this: @oem7.inf,%vpna\_Desc%;**Cisco AnyConnect VPN Virtual Miniport Adapter for Windows x64** Just get rid of everything before “Cisco”, keeping just the bold text shown above, reboot, and you should be good to go!