devnotebook

VS 2008 - Microsoft Visual Studio Web Authoring Components install failed

Juan Ignacio Gelos — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 06:27:44 GMT

Receiving an installation error as soon as Visual Studio 2008 starts to install Microsoft Visual Studio Web Authoring Components?

If you're lucky, you just need to uninstall "Microsoft Office InfoPath MUI (language) 2007 (Beta)"

To uninstall:

msiexec /x {30120000-0044-0C0A-0000-0000000FF1CE}

In our case, this package was installed by the Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007 *SPANISH* installer, which includes a beta version of it:
"Microsoft Office InfoPath MUI (Spanish) 2007 (Beta)"

In other cases, you may need to uninstall other Office 2007 components, specially the MUI packages.

Credits: Jaime Cardona, from
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/vssetup/thread/15c14d44-592a-420c-9c2a-75c5803e9f18/#page:2

Delete / Remove TFS Work Item Type

Juan Ignacio Gelos — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 07:35:55 GMT

This functionality was added to TFS 2008, and you need the Power Tools to do it:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/tfs2008/bb980963.aspx

DestroyWITD Command
Use the destroywitd command to destroy a work item type. Currently, work item types can only be deleted. Destroying a work item type means that work items of that type are physically deleted and cannot be restored.

Visual Studio 2008 Will NOT Support SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services projects (until you install SQL Server 2008)

Juan Ignacio Gelos — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 22:52:22 GMT

Sadly, this is Microsoft's official position.

http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2473242&SiteID=1

From MVP Teo Lachev: "VS.NET itself doesn't support BI project types. They get added to VS.NET when you install the SQL Server client tools. Since SQL Server 2005 client tools don't know anything about VS.NET 2008, nothing gets integrated with VS.NET 2008.

I believe that working with SQL Server 2005 projects will require you stick with BIDS 2005 or VS.NET 2005. That's because when you open a RS 2005 project in BIDS 2008, the report definitions will get converted to the new RDL format so you won't be able to publish them back to SQL Server 2005. I hope someone from the RS team reads and confirm this."

From Microsoft's Robert Bruckner: "In CTP November, BIDS 2008 is essentially equivalent to BIDS 2005 (based on RDL 2005).

However, this will change in future CTP's as BIDS 2008 receives all the updates for a new and improved report design experience. It will then also use the RDL 2008 format and upgrade old reports on loading into BIDS."

Conclusion: You need to keep a side-by-side installation of Visual Studio 2005 in order to open/edit SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services projects, until you are able to install the SQL Server 2008 Client components on your machine.

Consolas Font Pack for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005

Juan Ignacio Gelos — Sun, 08 Oct 2006 14:34:00 GMT

I can no longer write code in Visual Studio with New Courier without sorely missing this font:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=22e69ae4-7e40-4807-8a86-b3d36fab68d3&displaylang=en

"Consolas is intended for use in programming environments and other circumstances where a monospaced font is specified. All characters have the same width, like old typewriters, making it a good choice for personal and business correspondence. Optimizing the font specifically for ClearType allowed a design with proportions closer to normal text than traditional monospaced fonts like Courier. This allows for more comfortable reading of extended text on-screen.

The package will change the default text face in Visual Studio to the Consolas family.

This package is only intended for licensed users of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005."

If You Don't Want to Return to a Cave of Bushevik Propaganda, Help Save the Internet Now!

Juan Ignacio Gelos — Thu, 18 May 2006 17:34:00 GMT

Quasi LINQ today

Juan Ignacio Gelos — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 00:18:00 GMT

If the following snippet catches your attention, you ought to check The Last Component. It's real, and they don't touch the compiler, they do it overloading operators. Brilliant.

PostXING: .TEXT desktop blog publishing tool

Juan Ignacio Gelos — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 00:20:00 GMT

In case you've been looking for a decent .Text blogging tool for the desktop, you should check PostXING.

It's a WYSIWYG editor tool that outputs decent HTML (at least tags are lowercase, etc.), and allows you to edit previous posts, unlike "IMHO Instant Blogger" which was my previous choice. It includes built-in syntax high-lighting for C#, VB.Net, JScript and XML.

Some of its other features include:

customizable CSS stylesheet for the preview function,
a crosspost function to publish the post to several blogs at once,
an Upload function to a configurable FTP server, which allows you to automatically insert a link to the file on your post or insert it as an image.
extensible by means of plugins and IBlogExtensions
and WMP plugin integration.

Version 2 is currently in alpha mode, and you can find recent news about the development in the author's blog, or the brand new PostXING's website.

HOW TO Enable ClickOnce Compression on IIS

Juan Ignacio Gelos — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 13:11:00 GMT

ClickOnce supports using HTTP compression for the file downloads, a Web server technology that uses the GZIP algorithm to compress a data stream before sending it to the client. The client—in this case, ClickOnce—decompresses the stream before reading the files. This results in shorter download times for your ClickOnce deployments.

If you are using Internet Information Services (IIS), you can enable HTTP compression easily.

Enable Compression in IIS

From the IIS snap-in, right-click on the Web Sites node and click on Properties
Select the Service tab - Enable Compress application files
Enable Compress static files
Change Temporary Directory to a folder that you created (the IUSR_{machinename} will need write permission to the folder), or leave it at it's default
Set the max size of the temp folder to something that the hard drive can handle. i.e. 1000.
Save and close the Web Site Properties dialog

However, this only activates it for certain file types—namely, HTML and text files. In order to activate compression for assemblies (.dll), XML (.xml), deployment manifests (.deploy) and application manifests (.manifest), you must add these file types to IIS's list of types to compress. Until you do this, none of the files in your deployment except text and HTML files will be compressed.

To add the document types for ClickOnce deployment files (.application, .manifest, .deploy, .dll, .exe, etc.), follow these steps:

NOTE: The commands in step 3 replace the previously defined file extensions. It does not append them to the existing file extensions.

1. Open a command prompt session. To do this, click Start, click Run, type CMD, and the click OK.
2. Change the directory to your \InetPub\AdminScripts folder. To do this, type CD \Inetpub\AdminScripts, and then press ENTER.
3. Type the following commands:

CSCRIPT.EXE ADSUTIL.VBS SET W3Svc/Filters/Compression/GZIP/HcFileExtensions "htm" "html" "txt" "application" "manifest" "deploy" "exe" "dll"

CSCRIPT.EXE ADSUTIL.VBS SET W3Svc/Filters/Compression/DEFLATE/HcFileExtensions "htm" "html" "txt" "application" "manifest" "deploy" "exe" "dll"

IISRESET.EXE (this will reset Web services)

In case you also want to enable compression for ASP.NET Web pages and Web services, drop in these (extra) two lines before the IISRESET:

CSCRIPT.EXE ADSUTIL.VBS SET W3Svc/Filters/Compression/GZIP/HcScriptFileExtensions "asp" "dll" "exe" "aspx" "asmx"

CSCRIPT.EXE ADSUTIL.VBS SET W3Svc/Filters/Compression/DEFLATE/HcScriptFileExtensions "asp" "dll" "exe" "aspx" "asmx"

Testing

To test the web server is compressing you can do two things:

1. Check the "...WINDOWS\IIS Temporary Compressed Files" folder on the server and see if new files are added as you go through the ClickOnce installation process.

2. Use netcat (yes, yes, from the old days of hackerish "security tools", nothing beats netcat yet) to manually send an HTTP request to the server and see if the HTTP response contains the header "Content-Encoding: gzip"

A sample HTTP request header you would send is:

GET /clientes/ventas/Ventas_1_0_0_8/Ventas.exe.deploy HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Accept-Language: es-ar
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Host: youhost.yourdomain.com
Connection: Keep-Alive

where the "replaceable parameters" are "youhost.yourdomain.com" for your webserver HOST, and "/clientes/ventas/Ventas_1_0_0_8/Ventas.exe.deploy" for the URL path to your application's exe .deploy file

Sources

IIS Compression in IIS6.0
http://www.wwwcoder.com/main/parentid/170/site/3669/68/default.aspx

HOW TO: Enable ASPX Compression in IIS
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;322603

Troubleshooting ClickOnce Deployments
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/library/fb94w1t5(en-us,vs.80).aspx

HOW TO remap your keys (and their shift-states) by creating a new Keyboard Layout

Juan Ignacio Gelos — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 13:09:00 GMT

Yesterday I was reading Jeff Atwood's blog (on Keyboarding) and I thought I´d try one more time to find a nice tool to remap the keyboard.

See, when you use non-english keyboards you tend to start wondering about why would you need to press Ctll-Alt and 2 just to type the @ char, while you have keys mapped to symbols you never use: the spanish keyboard, for example, has keys mapped to º, ª, ç, Ç, and so-called "dead-keys" so you can press them and then type a, e, i, o, u and get the accented version of those chars, THREE of them we never use in spanish: `, ^ and ~; ç and Ç are only used in portuguese!

I always wanted the ability to remap these keys into characters that would be a lot more useful while coding, so I had tried several approachs before, including Chris Sells Scancode Mapper, but those only allow you to remap entire keys, they don't really allow to modify the characters that appear when you 'modify' them with Shift or Ctrl-Alt (AltGr).

Enter the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (MSKLC). KLC allows you to create a new Windows keyboard layout from scratch or customize a preexisting one, and build an MSI installer for it. You can then simply install it and configure Windows to use your custom layout.

The main window presents you with the representation of a standard keyboard (if your keyboard has an L shaped enter key you can change the physical layout so it represents your keyboard in the View... Options menu).

You can then double click any key to enter the new character that should be sent to Windows when it's pressed. If you changed the state by marking "Shift" on the main window, when you do this you'll be changing the character that will be sent when Shift and that key are pressed.

You can either simply enter the new character that should be sent, or enter it's Unicode number (UTF-16 code point).

If you want to go deeper, you can expand the key properties window (by pressing the All... button), so you get access to change the normal, shift, ctrl+alt (AltGr), shift+ctrl+alt, SGCAPS, etc, and to define your own Dead-keys.

Defining a dead key is straight-forward: just enter the normal characters that should be pressed after the dead-key, and the resulting characters that should be sent.

You can preload any installed Windows keyboard layout so you don't don't forget about any essential character.

Once you've defined your own keyboard layout, you can build the installer for it (Project... Build DLL and Setup Package), and proceed to install it.

Once you have it installed, all you need to do is open Regional and Language Options in the Control Panel, and configure Windows to use your new layout.

"The test form is only available for requests from the local machine"

Juan Ignacio Gelos — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 19:57:00 GMT

If you simply open the web config file and add the following, you will be able to access the test form outside of the localhost:

Krypton Tookit

Juan Ignacio Gelos — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 21:18:00 GMT

Component Factory has released a free set of Windows Forms user interface controls. It's called the Krypton Toolkit and it's targeted at Visual Studio 2005 and .NET Framework 2.0.

It's free for commercial use. It includes several controls:

Krypton Button
Krypton Group
Krypton Header
Krypton HeaderGroup
Krypton SplitContainer
Krypton Panel
Krypton Label

How to make custom assemblies visible in Visual Studio (eg the Add Reference dialog box, or make control Designers available to the IDE)

Juan Ignacio Gelos — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 21:08:00 GMT

From http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;306149:

"...you can add a registry key, such as the following, which points to the location of the assembly

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\.NETFramework\AssemblyFolders\MyAssemblies]@="C:\\MyAssemblies"

where MyAssemblies is the name of the folder in which the assemblies reside.

NOTE: You can create the this registry entry under the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE hive. This will change the setting for all of the users on the system. If you create this registry entry under HKEY_CURRENT_USER, this entry will affect the setting for only the current user.

Restart Visual Studio .NET after you have added the key."

Translated:

Create a new key (eg "My Company assemblies") under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\.NETFramework\AssemblyFolders\, and set its "(default)" value to the path of a folder where you'll put all the assemblies you want to make visible to Visual Studio.

Free XP Themed Common Controls

Juan Ignacio Gelos — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 19:30:00 GMT

The SteepValley.NET: XP Common Controls are a collection of themed and unthemed controls that are currently missing from the Visual Studio IDE.

This project is available for free including the source code.

HOWTO Install Windows Media Player 10 on Windows Server 2003

Juan Ignacio Gelos — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 19:21:00 GMT

I'm copypasting this from: http://www.neowin.net/forum/lofiversion/index.php/t245309.html

1. Copy the MP10Setup.exe to the root of your C:\ drive.
2. Go to Start -> Run -> and type in C:\MP10Setup.exe /C /T:C:\TEMP and press enter.
3.Go to C:\TEMP and open file control.xml in notepad.
4. Search for words "oobinf" and change those to "advinf". Then search for words "5.1.2600" and change those to "5.2.3790". Lastly, save control.xml file.
5. Reboot into Safe Mode With Comand Prompt (Press F8 upon booting).
6. Once the Command Prompt has loaded, type C: followed by enter, then type CD TEMP followed by enter.
7. Type setup_wm.exe followed by enter to install Media Player
8. When setup is complete you will get error saying that install failed but it only says that because it couldn't start service called Windows User Mode Framework in services.msc, everything is installed fine and that service loads on reboot. Now Lastly reboot.

That's it enjoy and remember to ZIP C:\TEMP directory so you don't have to do steps 1-4 again.

Windows Media Player 10 Series (for Windows XP) (11.6mb)

Server Performance Advisor

Juan Ignacio Gelos — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 19:18:00 GMT

Server Performance Advisor

"Service Performance Advisor is a server performance diagnostic tool developed to diagnose root causes of performance problems in a Microsoft® Windows Server™ 2003 operating system, particularly performance problems for Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0 and the Active Directory® directory service. Server Performance Advisor measures the performance and use of resources by your computer to report on the parts that are stressed under workload.

Other server roles include system overview (hot files, hot TCP clients, top CPU consumed), print spooler, context switch data and preliminary File Server trace data."