June 26, 2007

XAMPP on Vista

Filed under: Web Development,Windows Vista,xAMP Stack — Allistair @ 2:32 pm

Getting XAMPP working on Vista requires 2 things as far as I can see. I tried a fresh 1.6.2 install today but it does not work out of the box. Vista complains only about the Apache web server.

Reading around, I saw developers saying all sorts, such as making copies of the XAMPP folder to ensure Vista had the right permissions, or turning Vista’s User Access Control mechanism off, or installing services from the command line and so on and fourth.

But amongst all these suggestions, only 2 things need to be done to get XAMPP (1.6.2 anyway) working on Vista.

First, don’t forget to run setup_xampp.bat in the XAMPP installation folder.

And secondly, you need a file called msvcp71.dll to reside in the root XAMPP folder. I copied this from my old XP Windows/system32 folder, but you might need to get it elsewhere.

If you do these 2 things, XAMPP should fire up no problem.

Handling HTML Entities in XML Passed to Flash Dynamic Text Fields

Filed under: Flash — Allistair @ 2:01 pm

Today I had to solve the problem of HTML entities such as ' showing their full entity-selves when injected dynamically into dynamic text fields.

The entities originated from an XML input stream fed into the Flash movie.

Quite a few folk out there seem to have developed string search and replace functions, but these are limited by the anticipated characters.

I found a much simpler method was just to set the dynamic text field instance’s .html attribute to true, and then inject the text into the .htmlText rather than the .text attribute. Flash apparantly then displays the characters properly.

And I should add that the dynamic text field in question still has anti-aliasing applied in case any of you are worried that using the html attributes do not support it.

Happy days.