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October 2007 - Posts

Tuesday, October 30, 2007 5:48 PM

How I was able to get Virtual Server 2005 to work on Windows Vista

Recently, I needed to configure and use a virtual server image that was provided to me by another team here at Microsoft. In order to do this, I had to install and configure Virtual Server 2005 to host this image on my desktop OS. I am running Windows
Posted by astebner | 11 Comments
Sunday, October 28, 2007 6:57 PM

Link to public beta of XSSDetect cross-site scripting code analysis plug-in for Visual Studio 2005

I ran across a few interesting posts on the Application Consulting and Engineering (ACE) team's blog that I wanted to link to here so that more folks will hopefully see them. The ACE team announced a public beta this past week for a tool created by their
Posted by astebner | 2 Comments
Friday, October 26, 2007 7:38 PM

Updated instructions for building patches using the new WiX v3.0 patch building system

My new team is using WiX v3.0 to create the MSI-based setups for the upcoming XNA Game Studio 2.0 product . One of the readiness activities we're working on prior to shipping is testing the process of building and installing patches for these MSIs. Our
Posted by astebner | 3 Comments
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Thursday, October 25, 2007 7:27 PM

Mailbag: Can the .NET Framework verification tool be run in silent mode?

Question: I would like to try to automate the instructions for removing and reinstalling the .NET Framework that are described in this blog post . I saw your previous blog post about running the .NET Framework cleanup tool in silent mode. Are there also
Posted by astebner | 7 Comments
Wednesday, October 24, 2007 5:09 PM

Link to .NET Framework 3.0 release notes with known installation issues

I have gotten several questions from customers about how to resolve installation problems with the .NET Framework 3.0 since it was released last year. In many of these cases, the installation problems and options for workarounds were described in the
Posted by astebner | 0 Comments
Tuesday, October 23, 2007 7:57 PM

Microsoft Tester Center is now live on MSDN

A new portal with information about software testing has been posted this week on MSDN. You can check it out at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/testing/default.aspx . To summarize the launch note on this page: At the Tester Center, our goal is to provide a
Posted by astebner | 0 Comments
Monday, October 22, 2007 9:03 AM

Link to analysis of possible issues with EXE custom actions in Windows Installer

Robert Flaming has posted a helpful analysis of the issues that need to be considered when using EXEs in Windows Installer custom actions . You can find this analysis at http://blogs.msdn.com/windows_installer_team/archive/2007/10/20/integration-hurdles-for-exe-custom-actions.aspx
Posted by astebner | 1 Comments
Friday, October 19, 2007 5:29 PM

More details about how to use extensions when authoring and building MSIs in WiX v3.0

I have seen questions pop up fairly frequently both on internal Microsoft mailing lists and on the WiX mailing lists on SourceForge about how to use the built-in custom actions included in extension DLLs in WiX v3.0. This is one of the big changes that
Posted by astebner | 4 Comments
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Thursday, October 18, 2007 7:34 PM

How to determine whether a VS 2008 product is installed on a computer

I previously posted a list of registry values that can be used to detect Visual Studio 2005 editions. I've started getting asked more often about how to detect Visual Studio 2008, so I decided to create a separate post with an equivalent list of registry
Posted by astebner | 3 Comments
Wednesday, October 17, 2007 5:48 PM

PE header setting that can cause an application to fail to launch on Windows 2000

Over the past couple of weeks, I've heard from a few users who tried to run the .NET Framework cleanup tool on Windows 2000 but were unable to. On these systems, users received errors stating that the program named cleanup_tool.exe could not be run because
Posted by astebner | 3 Comments
Monday, October 15, 2007 9:17 PM

Narrowing down odd behavior in the Program Compatibility Assistant on Windows Vista

Recently, a fellow Microsoft employee found this blog post that I wrote a while back, and he contacted me with a question regarding some odd behavior he was seeing with the Program Compatibility Assistant (PCA) on Windows Vista. He found that a specific
Posted by astebner | 8 Comments
Monday, October 15, 2007 7:24 PM

How to update DuaScriptGen to run correctly on Windows Vista

I recently received a comment on my blog asking how to get the DuaScriptGen tool to work on Windows Vista. I looked into this in more detail, and I found that the duascriptgen.exe.config file included with the tool only listed the .NET Framework 1.0 and
Posted by astebner | 2 Comments
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Friday, October 12, 2007 12:41 PM

Corrections to some errors in the .NET Framework 3.0 deployment documentation

I recently heard from a customer who ran into a series of issues while attempting to deploy the .NET Framework 3.0 to the computers in their network. This customer was able to resolve each of the issues, but their experience revealed several inaccuracies
Posted by astebner | 4 Comments
Thursday, October 11, 2007 7:14 PM

Link to Media Center Show #126 with Niall Ginsbourg

Ian Dixon has published episode 126 of the Media Center Show , and Niall Ginsbourg is Ian's guest on this episode. Niall has developed several Windows Media Center applications (such as Big Screen Photos and Big Screen Headlines among others). In addition,
Posted by astebner | 0 Comments
Thursday, October 04, 2007 7:15 PM

Updated supplemental set of Windows Vista Media Center project templates now available

I previously wrote a blog post describing a set of supplemental Windows Vista Media Center project templates for Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 that can be installed on a system that already has the Windows Vista Media Center SDK installed to give you some
Posted by astebner | 3 Comments
Wednesday, October 03, 2007 12:04 PM

October 2007 Cumulative Update for Media Center for Windows Vista available for download

A new cumulative update package for Windows Vista Media Center has been released this week. This update is called the October 2007 Cumulative Update for Media Center for Windows Vista and is also known as KB941229. It is available for download in x86
Posted by astebner | 4 Comments
Wednesday, October 03, 2007 8:38 AM

PowerPlaylist for Windows Vista Media Center released on CodePlex

As announced last night on the Media Center Sandbox blog, a new application for Windows Vista Media Center has been released. The application, named PowerPlaylist , adds a custom strip to the Windows Vista Media Center start menu with up to five tiles.
Posted by astebner | 0 Comments
Tuesday, October 02, 2007 6:25 PM

Error trying to deploy Visual Studio using a relative path to the unattended INI file

I have heard from a couple of customers recently who have hit an error while trying to install Visual Studio 2005 in unattended mode using an INI file. In their scenarios, the setup process started and then almost immediately exited and VS ended up not
Posted by astebner | 3 Comments
Monday, October 01, 2007 6:28 PM

I have joined the XNA Community Gaming Platform team here at Microsoft

Recently, I started in a new role here at Microsoft - I have moved to the XNA Community Gaming Platform (CGP) team. At a really high level, the XNA CGP team creates a set of tools and libraries to enable rapid development of games for the PC and the Xbox
Posted by astebner | 3 Comments
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