GuruStop.NET

This is particularly helpful when you want to copy colour settings / Visual Studio theme from one machine to another or across different versions of VS you have (say at your laptop and some customer’s PC)

Simply get the VS2010 import file, right click, open with, choose a program, and pick any simple editor, say Notepad

Yeah, you got it, what you need is to change:

<UserSettings>
    <ApplicationIdentity version="10.0"/>

To

<UserSettings>
    <ApplicationIdentity version="9.0"/>

Now you can use that in VS2008 Without any problem…

Intro…

Last week I had to re-install Windows. I haven’t done it in a while, so, had to remember all those “1 time” tips I do after reinstall. For example, downloading SQL Server Developer Edition before Visual Studio to get the full Management Studio. Another example, setting Visual Studio to pin to the Start menu, and configuring it for UAC.

The Problem

In the very first year of Windows 7, I used to have many problems with UAC on and always disabled it, later, things started to get better and it became my normal config to leave it on. One problem that remained is that if you have a program set to always “Run AS Administrator”, if this program has associated files (can open files with certain extensions if you click the files), you no longer can open those files directly.

So, like many, I do pin visual studio to the Start menu

I also need to set it to “Run As Administrator” in so many times (for stuff with built-in IIS, not much is on IIS Express).

I right click the shortcut, go to “Compatibility” tab, and check “Run this program as an administrator”.

It is a VISUAL STUDIO 2005 PROJECT! Of course we’re talking about the Windows version here :).

See short note…

More Information

Source: CodeProject Lounge Post.

Very Quick Note: Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 was released finally (in combination with .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 of course).

To sum up for some people, note that VS 2008 SP1 includes ADO.NET Entity framework (and its designer) as well as ADO.NET Data Services, but NOT ASP.NEt MVC framework (but does include ASP.NET Dynamic Data & ASP.NET AJAX history control and script combining). It also includes some WCF enhancements as well as major VS performance and scalability fixes.

• ISO Donwload (and instructions)
  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=27673C47-B3B5-4C67-BD99-84E525B5CE61&displaylang=en
• Readme (MUST READ: There`re many ridiculous known issues)
  http://download.microsoft.com/download/A/2/8/A2807F78-C861-4B66-9B31-9205C3F22252/VS2008SP1Readme.htm
• Official Page (Read for list of new stuff included)
  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/products/cc533447.aspx
• ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 Page (Details and Videos for most big features – RECOMMENDED)
  http://www.asp.net/downloads/3.5-sp1/
• Soma’s Announcement
  http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2008/08/11/service-pack-1-for-vs-2008-and-net-fx-3-5-released.aspx

P.S.

SQL Server 2008 also was released earlier last week.

See official page for SQL Server 2008: http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/default.aspx

Background (skip if you know Web Application Projects)

In VS 2002/2003, the web project model for a website was similar to “class library” projects, where you have a .CSPROJ or .VBPROJ file that keeps track of files “included” in the project, and compiles all the pages and controls code behind to a single assembly under “bin”. Each page/control has an automatically generated .DESIGNER.CS or .DESIGNER.VB file, which contains objects mapping to the server controls in the page/control markup (the generation of those files was not always in synch with markup, and that was problematic).

With VS 2005, there was a new “website” model for web projects that compiles each page/control individually as a separate assembly (or each folder, depending on optimization features), and applies this to all files in a given directory and its sub folders. This was a total mess in most “real world” projects, as VS takes so long to build the entire website, and even at deployment, you get sometimes many problems when you have pages that “reference” other pages/controls when IIS it trying to dynamically load the right assemblies to reference, and many other problems.