.NET General

VS 2008 - Microsoft Visual Studio Web Authoring Components install failed

Juan Ignacio Gelos — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 04:27:44 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

Consolas Font Pack for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005

Juan Ignacio Gelos — Sun, 08 Oct 2006 12:34:00 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."

Quasi LINQ today

Juan Ignacio Gelos — Mon, 05 Dec 2005 21:18:00 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.

HOW TO Enable ClickOnce Compression on IIS

Juan Ignacio Gelos — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 10:11:00 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

Krypton Tookit

Juan Ignacio Gelos — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 18:18:00 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 18:08:00 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.

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

Juan Ignacio Gelos — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 16:57:00 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:

Free XP Themed Common Controls

Juan Ignacio Gelos — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 16:30:00 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.

Google Deskbar Plug-in Development Kit FOR .NET!

Juan Ignacio Gelos — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 13:58:00 GMT

With the Google Deskbar API, you can write plug-ins to add your own features to the Google Deskbar. Plug-ins can be written in any .NET language, such as C# or Visual Basic.NET.

Code Snippets functions suggestion

Juan Ignacio Gelos — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 13:54:00 GMT

I've posted a suggestion for the Visual Studio team about Code Snippets. This would allow to generate the whole definition for a class Property having the user only enter its type and name, by means of converting the entered name to camelCase and ProperCase (checking the property name is properly cased while on it).

So if you like the suggestion or already thought of it, click on "Vote on this suggestion" (an rate it as important!) in the following link:

Suggestion Details: Code snippet Function for parsing input fields