So I've been dealing with my Visual Studio 2008 "Freezing" on occasion when I'm trying to check-in or check-out files from Team Foundation Server. Basically every time I would try and do it VS 2008 would become unresponsive but it would never actually stop responding according to Task Manager and today I finally put 2 and 2 together. THE DIALOG IS POPING UP OFF THE SCREEN!!! I like many people I know use a dual monitor setup and I also happen to use it with a laptop docking station and every now and then my screen switch sides hence making our smart little dialog that remembers its location appear off the screen. So here's my fix. Whenever this happens I have to go to my screen settings and swap the positions of the monitors and bam! there is my dialog just waiting for me to click ok.

This has been extremely frustrating! Why couldn't they just have it popup in the center of the parent or check if it's off screen and popup in the center of the parent if it is... At least I know how to fix it now.

Hope this help someone else...

Finally! I was very surprised to see they finally have Windows Vista SP1 on MSDN and TechNet subscriber downloads. Currently you can only get the Windows Vista with SP1 pre-installed ISO's in the normal download section but it looks like that might be changing soon. For everything else they have this apparently new (to me at least) section called "Top Subscriber Downloads" that appears to be driven by Akamai. you can find that page here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/bb608344.aspx.

Hope that helps someone... Happy installing!

I was pleased to see that Windows Server 2008 has been posted on MSDN downloads today. Unfortunately not all of the editions are currently available. Right now all they have is Datacenter, Enterprise and Standard for the x64 platform. They also have a word document there explaining what's available now and what's still coming if your interested in knowing more.

I'm still excited none the less and look forward to setting up a test machine ASAP.

Like a lot of people out there I have multiple versions of Visual Studio installed on my system. I also keep there shortcuts in my quick launch like a lot of people I know and every now and then I end up opening the wrong versions... This can be extremely annoying! So I set out to look for the "versioned" icons that the VSLauncher uses for the .sln files and I finally found them...

So if you would like to change your icons you can find them in this DLL: "%ProgramFiles%\Common Files\microsoft shared\MSEnv\VSFileHandler.dll" (I've added a little screen shot so you can see what icon's it has just for fun).

Hope this helps someone...

I'm a bit late on this news but one of my favorite add-in's for Visual Studio 2005, the Property Manager has been updated to work with Visual Studio 2008. I haven't had to worry about it much but I've started using 2008 a lot more lately and realized how addicting that add-in is.

For those of you that don't know what it does, basically it can take as many fields as you would like to select and turn them into properties on your clipboard, then you simple paste them where ever you want in your code. For me this is much better for creating new properties than the built in refactoring (Encapsulate Field...) because you can do it in bulk. It's not without it's downsides though, it wont update any references to the field if you need to take existing fields and make properties so for that the built in refactoring is your best bet.

Here's some screen shots to show you the flow:

(Selecting the fields, right clicking and clicking on Create Property, you can also use Ctrl + Alt + P)

(Pasting the properties from the clipboard into my class)

Because of my code formatting settings (the defaults) I've also come up with the following steps to get my properties formatted how I like them:

(Add a new line before each of the property's get methods)

(Hit Ctrl + K, Ctrl + D to format my document)

So stop writing your properties yourself and do download this add-in here. It's saved me a ton of time and I'm sure it'll do the same for you.

Their finally tired of teasing us and have release the preview for the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions! These are the extensions that include the MVC framework. For those of you that are interested you can download it here.

I for one am extremely excited about it so I thought I would help spread the word to the few that actually read this crap.

I can’t wait to dig deeper in it, maybe I’ll find more interesting things to post about.

I was fortunate enough to be able to attend this year’s Dev Connections conference in Las Vegas. This is my second Dev Connections and I must say its getting better with time. Logistically the conference was very smooth with the exception of wireless internet access but the sessions we’re (for the most part) excellent! I spent most of my time learning about the upcoming changes to TFS, WF, and WCF but I did manage to catch a couple other sessions.

I was also blown away by Juval Lowy’s session on Service-oriented Development Processes, in the 90 minutes of that session he basically explained all of the problems we have at my work with our development process and how we can fix them. I would highly recommend attending any of Juval’s similar talks in the future…

Here’s a quick recap of some of my notes (This is probably more useful to me but I thought I would post it anyways):

• Changes/Additions to Visual Studio Team Systems.
  • Code Metrics.
  • A new profiler.
  • Web test enhancements.
  • Now supports AJAX.
  • Build Queues.
  • Power Toys are now included.
  • Auto deletion of builds.
  • Check-in policy overrides have been added to the reporting cube.
• Microsoft’s New Sync Framework.
  • Provides synchronization between providers.
  • Comes with a Rational (Database) and file system provider.
  • Might be getting support for SSE (Simple Sharing Extensions).
  • Can sync any kind of data.
• Service-oriented Development Process
  • Use lots of small teams (no more than 7 people).
  • 1 service to 1 developer to avoid developers stepping on each other’s toes.
  • Good design minimizes communication.
  • If the developers work well together the services will work well together.
  • Don’t make Developer A create a service for Developer B to use if Developer A and B don’t get along.
  • Architects constantly plans/integrates, Project Managers constantly track tasks.
  • Tell people you’ll get back to them to force them to come up with itemized tasks for better estimations.
  • Finish the previous project before you start a new one! Developers need closure to move on.
  • Create an integration plan.
  • Juval has a new book coming out on this topic (Must get it!).
• Windows Workflow Foundation
  • Use GetActivityByName instead of the activity’s property if you need the current instance because the property is a clone.
  • Transactions require a persistence service.
  • You can’t join external transactions (None WF transactions).
  • You can’t call InvokeWorkflow from within a transaction.
  • WF requires full trust in CAS to run.
  • The workflow role membership is completely separate from all of the other membership providers in .Net so you will have to tie them together yourself.
• ASP.NetMichele
  •  Leroux Bustamante has a good article about creating custom Expression Builders.
• Windows Communication Foundation
  • Increase the transaction timeout on development machines (in the machine.config) to help with debugging.
  • Look into the iDesign Transactional<T> API.
    

Overall it was an awesome conference and I look forward to attending it again in the future.

For those of you that have known me for awhile you probably remember some of my old blog posts from back in my .Text days (Most of those posts unfortunately went down with a failing hard drive and because I was too lazy to do decent backups). Because of some recent promptings to find them I've however decided try and resurrect them from the mass grave of the internet known as archive.org so for the next little while you might start to see some of the popping up here and there. I’m going to try and post them at their original post dates but because I’ve never done that before I can’t promise anything so I’m sorry if I screw up your news readers.

We started a new open source project on Codeplex called nScreen. Basically it's a framework built on top of the standard console output that adds screens and controls somewhat like windows forms.

It's still in the early alpha phase but we're working on some cool new features and controls. Eventually we hope to have a rich control set and a solid cross-platform framework.

Feel free to check it out and give us your feedback.