Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

Have you ever installed a BETA or CTP or an RC build of some Microsoft product such as Visual Studio, and then been faced with the unhappy situation that it could not find the installation sources when you attempted to uninstall the product, or it just didn’t uninstall “cleanly” – leaving traces of Registry entries that prevented you from installing a later version? It’s certainly happened to me several times. But today I ran into a program called Perfect Uninstaller that, for $35, turned out to be one heck of a bargain. Perfect Uninstaller has three modes to completely and totally uninstall any program. It starts out using the regular Windows Installer, but it doesn’t stop there – even if the installer says “I can’t find the MSI source for this”, it doesn't give up like the Windows MSIEXEC installer would do -- it picks up all the Registry Entries by scanning the Registry, and then it picks up all file traces by scanning the filesystem. The result is a 100% complete and total un...

Wisdom cannot and must not be sold for money -- Plato This Hotfix rollup addresses a number of issues and is a good example of how Scott Guthrie and his crew are able to nimbly respond to various issues and push out easy-to-install updates that fix various bugs and issues. This is in keeping with their stated goal of more frequently releasing public patches that roll-up bug-fixes of commonly reported problems. Scott explains more on his blog . The collection of fixes addresses issues with the HTML Editor source view performance, Design View performance, HTML editing, Javascript editing, web site build performance when there are a large number of assemblies in the /bin folder, and more. After successful installation, if you select the Help->About menu item, there is an entry that says Hotfix for Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite – ENU (KB946581). I noticed a definite improvement in Solution load time and more responsiveness in the IDE in general after installin...

At work, our .NET development group more or less unanimously made the decision that now that Visual Studio 2008 is RTM, it is time to think about getting everything we do upgraded to the point where we simply don't need Visual Studio 2005 any longer. The only real issue we could find is that Compact Framework 2003 projects are no longer supported. Since we don't happen to have any, that takes care of that, doesn't it? So we decided that any existing projects would be migrated upwards to Visual Studio 2008. Everything in Team System is getting upgraded; if it doesn't support Visual Studio 2008, we'll let VS 2008 convert it and check all the revised stuff back in. Since 2008 solutions / projects can be set to target specific runtimes you will find that this is pretty much a no-brainer. If your stuff is .NET Framework 2.0 compliant, all you need to do is ensure that the target Framework is set and you can check your stuff in with a Visual Studio 2008 Solution file and ...

Believe it or not, I was never sure about this until this morning when another dev and I were discussing it. So, I searched the web and found the answer: Build means compile and link only the source files that have changed since the last build, while Rebuild means compile and link all source files regardless of whether they changed or not. Build is the normal thing to do and is faster. Sometimes the versions of project target components can get out of sync and rebuild is necessary to make the build successful. In practice, you never need to Clean. Build or Rebuild Solution builds or rebuilds all projects in the your solution, while Build or Rebuild <project name> builds or rebuilds the StartUp project. To set the StartUp project, right click on the desired project name in the Solution Explorer tab and select Set as StartUp project. The project name now appears in bold. Compile just compiles the source file currently being edited. Useful to quickly check for errors when the r...

"Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut" -- Ernest Hemingway One thing I've learned to do pretty quickly with VIsual Studio 2008 is to make a backup of the original Visual Studio 2005 .soln and .csproj files and store them in a little .rar or .zip file in the Solution folder. This makes it easy to "go back to the future" as long as your work doesn't include namespaces that don't exist for VS 2005. Yes, I know you can choose to make a backup during the conversion. I'd just rather be safe. I also learned that the conversion process when you load a 2005 Solution and go through the conversion wizard can be quite slow. Here's a neat way to speed it up. Devenv.exe has a /convert flag. So, make a little batch file that looks like this, and save it in your Solution / project folder: "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe /convert" %1 To run this, drop into a C...

Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Service Pack 1 (x86): http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=79bc3b77-e02c-4ad3-aacf-a7633f706ba5&DisplayLang=en Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Service Pack 1 (x64): http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=029196ed-04eb-471e-8a99-3c61d19a4c5a&DisplayLang=en Note that the 2.0 Service Pack is actually a full Framework install. If you uninstall .NET 2.0 SP1 (even if you had .NET 2.0 installed beforehand) the whole .NET Framework is removed. It does NOT revert you back to .NET 2.0 RTM. Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 Service Pack 1: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ec2ca85d-b255-4425-9e65-1e88a0bdb72a&DisplayLang=en When you install the .NET Framework 3.5, these service packs are required prerequisites and are installed automatically; these are available as separate downloads for those who aren't ready to deploy .NET Framework 3.5. If you are installing Visual Studio 2008, you don't ne...

"The kind of pictures they're making today, I'll stick with toilet paper" -- Dick Wilson (Mr. Whipple, R.I.P.) Well, it's Monday AM Nov 19th and the good news is that VS 2008 RTM is available for download by MSDN subscribers. The bad news is that the traffic jam has long since started, so it's not likely too many people will be able to get their copy today. (Oops - spoke too soon, just got an FTM going at 8:50 AM)! Also available is the Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Training kit. http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=7602397 (120MB). This includes presentations, hands-on labs and demos -- and is designed to help you learn how to utilize the Visual Studio 2008 features and a variety of framework technologies including LINQ, C# 3.0, Visual Basic 9, WCF, WF, WPF, ASP.NET AJAX, VSTO, CardSpace, SilverLight, Mobile and Application Lifecycle Management. There are some very specific instructions on what to do if you have pre-release versions of VS or any rela...

For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three. -- Alice Kahn This is due to some assembly redirects that are added to the devenv.exe.config file by installing the GAX (Guidance Automation Extensions). Here is the fix, and it's an easy one: 1) Navigate to: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE in Windows Explorer 2) Load devenv.exe.config in your favorite text editor. 3) Find this string: "Microsoft.VisualStudio.TemplateWizardInterface" 4) Comment out the element so it looks like this: <dependentAssembly> <!--assemblyIdentity name="Microsoft.VisualStudio.TemplateWizardInterface" publicKeyToken="b03f5f7f11d50a3a" culture="neutral" /--> <bindingRedirect oldVersion="0.0.0.0-8.9.9.9" newVersion="9.0.0.0" /> </dependentAssembly> 5) Restart Visual Studio 2008. All fixed!

The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it. -- George Orwell I'm posting this fix because it is extremely difficult to find on the web. In certain situations, the underlying COM dll's or type libraries that "help" the Visual Studio IDE perform its various functions get unregistered, causing any number of different symptoms. This can happen for example if you've installed an Orcas Beta (which does it's own set of "stuff"), then uninstalled or done a repair or upgrade on Visual Studio 2005 on the same machine. Most of these COM Server "helper" dlls and tlbs can be found here: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE You need to re-register those of these that are COM Servers. Of course, you cannot know which are and which are not, but running REGSVR32.EXE on all of them cannot hurt anything. What I did to make this easy is first to create a list of all of them. You can do this from a DOS window with the command: dir /b *.dl...

"A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history - with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila." -- Anonymous Well, I downloaded Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2. I mounted the image as a virtual DVD with the free VCDControl Tool on Windows Vista Ultimate, 32-bit. I uninstalled the Orcas BETA 1 from Control Panel "Programs and Features", which does a chain uninstall of all the bits. Now I am ready to install the BETA2. I click on the SETUP.EXE from off the virtual DVD drive and nothing happens. Try several times. OK, that doesn't work. Let's try executing the .msi instead. Uh-Oh. The msi tells me I have to install with Setup.exe, which I already know doesn't work. Reboot, try again, same BS. FIX: Copy everything from the VCD drive onto a folder on your phyiscal hard drive, and run Setup.exe from there. That should fix it. Everything else about my install went perfectly, and I didn't even need to repair Visual Stud...

A man speaks to his doctor after an operation. He says, "Doc, now that the surgery is done, will I be able to program in C#?" The doctor replies, "Of course!" The man says, "Good, because I couldn't before!" Yes, Tech-Ed is in Orlando once again! Q. Are you going to be there? A. No, but I do live in the Orlando area so I'll be at the Influencers party at Margaritaville Wednesday evening Q. Then why did you post "Greetings from Orlando". A. Every other slob in the Universe seems to think it's important, and so i didn't want to be left out. Q. Why aren't you going to be at Tech-Ed? A. I'm very busy. I'm writing code. And frankly, I'm "conferenced to death" and need a break. To illustrate my point, I went over to the Convention Center to pick up my ticket to the influencers party. I saw a lot of .Netters walking around at Tech-Ed. Most of them looked downright tired! Besides, Dr. Dotnetsky told me not to go,...