Mattias Lindberg : Misc

Alla Visual Studio templates försvann när Office 2010 TP installerades

mattlind — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 12:09:44 GMT

Idag tänkte jag pröva en grej med hur jag kan använda RAW-filer från min kamera i en WPF applikation och startade därför Visual Studio 2008. Till min förvåning saknades i princip alla project templates, det enda som fanns kvar var BI templates för SQL Server 2008. En snabb nätsökning tipsade om att man skulle köra devenv /installvstemplates från en VS Command Prompt.

Men det hjälpte inte…

Så jag testade att göra en Repair av VS och efter en låååång stund avslutades ominstallationen med ett fel, det gick inte att ominstallera Visual Studio Tools for Office. Då sade det klick! Jag har nämligen nyligen installerat Office 2010 Technology Preview vilket ju onekligen har en potential att påverka just Visual Studio Tools for Office.

Lösningen blev att göra Add/Remove Features för VS och välja bort Visual Studio Tools for Office. Och när jag sedan startade VS ser jag alla project templates igen :-)

Lite konstigt känns det att ett problem med några project templates gjorde att alla templates togs bort. Att det inte skulle gå att skapa projekt med Visual Studio Tools for Office templates är ju en sak, men att den även skulle störa ut t.ex. WPF Application template är inte självklart…

First IASA meeting in Stockholm

mattlind — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 09:14:52 GMT

On Thuesday evening this week I went to the first IASA (International Association of Software Architects) meeting in Stockholm to see what it was all about. According to the woman managing registrations there were about 170 people attending the event, which I think was quite good for a first gathering. Today I talked to another person who attended the meeting and he described it as "a room full of men in the ages 30-50" which was very much on the spot, I don't recall seeing a single woman there!

Back to the substance of the meeting... As this was the first meeting the chapter president Daniel Aknini (Architect Evangelist at Microsoft) made an introduction to the history and purpose of IASA, then followed a number of short talks by some of the leading architects in the Stockholm region (Sten Sundblad, Per Björkegren and Peter Tallungs). There also one academic guest speaker (Erik Johansson) and Mikael Freidlitz from the central IASA organization.

So, is this something for me? Will it strengthen my professionalism as an architect? My thinking is that this sounds interesting and I would like to follow its progress, so I joined IASA yesterday!

For those of you who understand Swedish you can read more about the the meeting (and download the presentation) at www.iasa.se.

My Experiences from Using Vista

mattlind — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 11:22:00 GMT

I have been a full time user of Windows Vista on my laptop since RC1 and I thought I would share what I like and what don't like, the items are not presented in any particular order.

What I like in Vista

Snipping Tool, this is a tools which allows you to capture free-form, rectangular, window or full-screen screen shots and then save them to disk as JPEG or to the clipboard. I really like this tool and feel that it gives me real value, specifically when writing documentation (and blogs :-) it makes it very easy to capture an area of the screen. I have previously used a tool called SnagIt which has more advanced capturing functionality but I have found myself using it less and less, so when I reinstalled the machine with Vista RTM I did not even bother to install SnagIt...
The Task Manager has been extended to include a Services tab. This is great as I run a lot of services on my laptop, e.g. SQL, BizTalk, Virtual Server, and there is sometimes a need to start/stop them. Previously I always used the Computer Management MMC to do this, but I can now save several mouse clicks (and time) by using Task Manager instead.
IE7, while it is also available outside Vista it is to me a Vista feature.
The Weather gadget is cool, having run this for a couple of month now I still find it interesting that it has such accurate data for my home town on Upplands Väsby, Sweden.
Typing application names in the Start-menu and finding them quickly. If you don't know about this feature it is easily understood by looking at the picture below of the Start menu in Vista. This is to me the number one productivity feature in Vista, it makes it so much easier and quicker to access your programs. As you can see in the picture below it not only searches for programs but also many other types of artifacts on your disk. Simply ingenious!

What I don't like in Vista

I'm a big fan of drag-and-drop file and directory names to the Command Prompt, I use it a lot in XP. However, I just cannot get it to work in Vista. I wonder if this has been turned off due to security?!
I find it hard to quickly see which application is active my looking in the Taskbar. The difference in the Taskbar between the active application and other applications is simply too small.
Short-cuts have changes, I specifically think about Alt+V+H in Explorer which previously gave me Thumbnails. The new keystroke to achieve thumbnails of the same size as before is Alt+V+R, but R is not unique in the View menu so it requires pressing Enter to confirm the selection. I now have more options to choose from with regard to presentations, but I will have to relearn...
Some programs that I use doesn't work by default under Vista, one of them has even blocked installation but that could be resolved by setting the Compatibility mode to XP SP2. That is really primarily not a problem with Vista, but when running Vista my user experience is disturbed. I have in contacted the vendor from whom I bought these program about the problems.

New Year, New Posts

mattlind — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 15:10:36 GMT

It's almost two month since I last posted and the reason for this silence is the start of a new project which has had me completely absorbed. However, we are now on our way and things have settled down so I would like to share some of the experiences from this project with you all.

To start off I have a few posts planned which relate to how we use Team Foundation Server in this project, and then I will see what will be next (perhaps more TFS :-).

Virtual Server on Vista (follow up)

mattlind — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 01:53:26 GMT

Virtual PC Guy describes how you can use Virtual Server on Windows Vista without running IE "as administrator". Even though there are many scenarios in which a developer has to approve elevation of priviledges for common developer tasks, it is always nice to have one less.

SysInternals@TechNet

mattlind — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 15:45:00 GMT

As I noted in a previous post SysInternals is now part of Microsoft, and the tools have finally been made available at TechNet. You can download them at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/default.mspx. My favorite tool is DebugView, I use it all the time and so should you!

Daylight Savings Time and Windows Mobile

mattlind — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 11:57:37 GMT

One of the advantages of using a mobile phone running Windows Mobile is that you no longer need to be bothered with remembering to adjust the clock when daylight savings time changes. At 3AM this morning here in Sweden we put the clock back to 2AM, so last night my wife and I spent 15 minutes adjusting all the watches in the house. The old clock we did not adjust was the one on my Windows Mobile.

When I woke up this morning at 5AM (which used to be 6AM and match my normal alarm time at working days) I noticed that Windows Mobile had adjusted the time correctly, and it also showed a dialog informing me about that it had made this change. This is really nice!

The only problem is that you need to remember that Windows Mobile actually do adjust the time automatically, which is an exception to every other clock. If you do adjust it manually you will get a double adjustment.

Installing Virtual Server on Vista RC1

mattlind — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 09:30:30 GMT

I just installed Virtual Server 2005 R2 on my Vista machine, I'm running Windows Vista Ultimate RC1, to see if I can get a bit more performance than what I have on my laptop. I knew from the start that there would be problems but I was not really prepared for some of the things. Or more to be more precise, I did not read the instructions good enough. I thought I would share my installation experience, it might help someone who makes the same mistakes as me (and I can use it for future reference as well :-).

The best resource I have found is a post by Virtual PC Guy, if you read this carefully you will be fine. I really must emphasize the need to run cmd.exe and IE as Administrator, if you don't it won't work!

The script which should be run from a command line:

start /w pkgmgr /l:log.etw /iu:IIS-WebServerRole;IIS-WebServer;IIS-CommonHttpFeatures;IIS-StaticContent;IIS-DefaultDocument;IIS-DirectoryBrowsing;IIS-HttpErrors;IIS-HttpRedirect;IIS-ApplicationDevelopment;IIS-ASPNET;IIS-NetFxExtensibility;IIS-ASP;IIS-CGI;IIS-ISAPIExtensions;IIS-ISAPIFilter;IIS-ServerSideIncludes;IIS-HealthAndDiagnostics;IIS-HttpLogging;IIS-LoggingLibraries;IIS-RequestMonitor;IIS-HttpTracing;IIS-CustomLogging;IIS-ODBCLogging;IIS-Security;IIS-BasicAuthentication;IIS-WindowsAuthentication;IIS-DigestAuthentication;IIS-ClientCertificateMappingAuthentication;IIS-IISCertificateMappingAuthentication;IIS-URLAuthorization;IIS-RequestFiltering;IIS-IPSecurity;IIS-Performance;IIS-HttpCompressionStatic;IIS-HttpCompressionDynamic;IIS-WebServerManagementTools;IIS-ManagementConsole;IIS-ManagementScriptingTools;IIS-ManagementService;IIS-IIS6ManagementCompatibility;IIS-Metabase;IIS-WMICompatibility;IIS-LegacyScripts;IIS-LegacySnapIn;IIS-FTPPublishingService;IIS-FTPServer;IIS-FTPManagement;WAS-WindowsActivationservice;WAS-ProcessModel;WAS-NetFxEnvironment;WAS-ConfigurationAPI

Running the script

My first few attempts to install failed with an error saying that the IIS Admin service was not started or installed. I had already run the script shown in the Virtual PC Guy post but it didn't seem to work, I could not find any IIS Admin Service in the list of services on the machine.

[UPDATE] This is what it looks like:

After a while I tried starting the Command Prompt (cmd.exe) as administrator. I did this navigating to Command Prompt in the Start menu, right-click, and the select Run as administrator. After the command had completed IIS Admin Service can be found in the list of services and the Virtual Server installation was completed successfully.

It's worth noting that you seem to be able to see if the script executed successfully by looking in one of the dialogs during Virtual Server setup. When IIS Admin was not installed the Website port field was empty and when I later had IIS Admin installed the field had content. I'm not sure if this is a 100% valid check, but you could at least use it to get an indication.

If IIS Admin Still not Installation

[UPDATE] If you have run the big command line and still don't have IIS Admin installed you can install it manually. Today I installed a second Vista machine and this time I could not get IIS Admin to install by running the script. The solution was to manually select the IIS Metabase and IIS 6 configuration compatibility option in Windows Features. The picture below show which options I had selected.

Administrating Virtual Server

The other thing to remember is that you need to start IE as administrator as well when you wish to administrate Virtual Server. If you simply select the Virtual Server Administration Website short-cut in the menu you will get an error saying "Could not connect to Virtual Server. Access is denied.", see example below.

The way to do this is to right-click on IE and select Run as administrator, then you type (or paste) the URL to the Virtual Server website. Preferably you add this URL to Favorites to avoid typing it every time.

Before writing this post I had not found a way to right-click a short-cut and start it as administrator. But the first comment to this post told me to try http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2006/07/24/675346.aspx, and that worked!

Error Starting Admin Website

Depending on which installation options you selected during manual configuration of IIS, if the script didn't work for you, you may encounter an error when starting the administration website. It's not really an error as the dialog asks you what to do with the VSWebApp.exe file: "Do you want to save this file, or find a program online to open it?". However, it's an error in this case as you want to open the Virtual Server admin site.

To resolve this problem you select the CGI option during IIS configuration, see example below.

Postscript

One thing that strikes me is that Virtual Server setup say that my version of IIS does not support multiple web sites (see screenshots above). But in Vista Ultimate (I don't know about other versions of Vista) I can actually create multiple web sites. I did not know this before installing Virtual Server but while trying to resolve my problems I opened the Internet Information Services MMC and noticed that I actually could create a new web site.

In XP it was not possible to create multiple web sites but that seems to have changed with Vista. However, Virtual Server 2003 R2 setup is not yet aware of this new feature in Vista.

UPDATE 2006-09-06: Added some more info on the installation of IIS Admin service.

UPDATE 2006-09-06 (again): Added new section on Error Starting Admin Website, plus link from a comment that solved a problem I had.