Friday 26 February 2010

Upcoming talks

I will be doing a couple of talks in the upcoming months. I am scheduled to do 3 talks in Ireland in March and 1 talk in Scotland in May.

So in Ireland its the following.

When

Where

What

29-March-2010 Derry MTUG Visual Studio 2010 Overview
30-March-2010 Dublin MTUG Dynamic User controls, creating a data bound wizard with the AJAX control toolkit and data bound user controls
31-March-2010 Cork MTUG Dynamic User controls, creating a data bound wizard with the AJAX control toolkit and data bound user controls

And in Scotland, I am talking at Developer Days 2010 which is on 08-May-2010 in Scotland. The difference here is that my talk was decided by a voting procedure to be included in the conference. This is a pretty cool model as it means that the attendees decide what they want to hear. So at that conference, I will be giving a talk on Defensive Programming 101.

You can register for Developer Days Scotland 2010 here and get the full agenda here.

Sunday 21 February 2010

Fixing Error MSB4019 when trying to load a dbproj

I recently re-installed my Visual Studio 2008 including Visual Studio Database Edition. I opened a project from TFS that included some database project (.dbproj) files. As the solution loaded I got some errors relating to the dbproj

The imported project "C:\Program Files(x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v9.0\TeamData\Microsoft.Data.Schema.SqlTasks.targets " was not found. Confirm that the path in the <Import> declaration is correct, and that the file exists on disk.

The issue in this case was that the version of my Visual Studio Database Edition was not the same as the one that had created the database projects. The fix for this was to install the GDR 2 for Visual Studio 2008 Database Edition. Thankfully quite simple.

The SSD Experience

c01498631 My new laptop arrived at work on Friday, a shiny new HP Elite Book 8530w. A nice new Centrino vPro and 4 gigs of RAM to play with. Its a quite capable machine for development.

So the stuff now is to get the machine upgraded to a better spec as I will be doing a lot of SharePoint 2010 development. So the RAM has been ordered and I ordered a new Intel X-25M SSD 160 gigabyte disk.

I installed the new drive and paved the machine with Windows 7 Enterprise x64. Once the machine had been setup it was time to get the installs of SQL Server and Visual Studio running. This is what usually takes all the time. The install time for Visual Studio 2008 service pack 1 can take 90 minutes.

 

I installed SQL Server 2008 Developer Edition x64 and it took about 10 minutes, the service pack install took another 5. I then copied the ISO file for Visual Studio 2008 Team Edition for Developers to the hard disk from our local NAS and mounted it and began the install. I choose the custom install andIntel_X25-M_G2_SSD_40751a didn’t install Visual C++ or SQL Server Express edition but all the other tools were installed. It took a total of 4 minutes to install Visual Studio 2008. Four minutes!!! I was on twitter when I began the install and tweeted when it was finished. You can see from the timestamps how long there was between the tweets. Installing SP1 took 8 minutes in total.

The response time for the disk is very very quick. Opening VS2010 or VS2008 takes a couple of seconds from the initial click to being able to open a solution file. General build times are down. To quote my colleague Glenn Henriksen, everything just seems snappier.

Talk about an increased developer experience. When you do something and compile, build, there is so little lag that you can continue just where you left off. The performance boost is simply outstanding. Coding Horror has a nice blog post on it

Looking at the Windows Experience Index (WEI) scores for the new machine, I clocked a 5.9 with the slowest component, the memory dictating the score. The SSD scored a scary 7.8 and it definitely shows it.

WEI

If you want to see the biggest bang for your buck, upgrade you primary disk to SSD and you won’t know yourself afterwards. The only downside, is going back to anything else, you will be wondering why you are waiting!

MCTS .NET 2.0 Web-based Client Development – 70-528 – Objectives List Part 3

This is the third post (first, second) in another collection of posts that have links to the different objectives covered in the 70-528 exam. There is also a series on ASP.NET 3.5 exam 70-562 (here)

Creating custom Web controls

You can also find some information on preparing for your exams here and here, in the actual exam for 70-528. Also errata for the MS Press training kit

Wednesday 17 February 2010

MCTS .NET 2.0 Web-based Client Development – 70-528 – Objectives List Part 2

This is the second post (first) in another collection of posts that have links to the different objectives covered in the 70-528 exam. There is also a series on ASP.NET 3.5 exam 70-562 (here)

Integrating data in a Web application by using ADO.NET, XML, and data-bound controls

You can also find some information on preparing for your exams here and here, in the actual exam for 70-528. Also errata for the MS Press training kit

 

Sunday 14 February 2010

Fixing Error 1402 Access denied on a registry key

While uninstalling Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 today, I ran into this issue whereby the installer failed to uninstall due to be unable to access a particular registry key.

SetUp

To fix this issue, you need to click on the start button and type “regedit” without the quotes and then right click on the program and run as administrator. Accept the UAC prompt if it appears.

Press F3 to bring up the search box and search for the first five or six characters of the GUID so that you can find the registry key that’s causing all the problem

 

 

Error Opening Key dialog

 

Clicking on the key will cause the following error

 

 

 

Initial Permissions dialog

 

You can then right click on the click and click permissions. This will bring up a warning that you don’t have permissions to view the current ones, you can reset the permissions on the key.

As you can see you cannot see the current permissions on the key.

Clicking on the the advanced button will bring up a new dialog to allow you to reset or add new permissions to the key.

 

 

 

 

Owner

 

Click on the owner tab and you should notice the text that the current owner cannot be displayed. You can then click on one of the user groups or users to change the current owner. If there are many sub keys, you can also apply the owner to the those.

Once you have applied the new owner you can apply the correct permissions to the key and continue.

However you will need to finish the uninstall and then restart it to completely remove Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2

Thursday 11 February 2010

.NET 4.0 Beta exams

aa496123.NET_logo(en-us,MSDN.10) As expected, the exams for Visual Studio 2010 / .NET 4.0 will be going into beta in the end of March, March 31st to be exact through to April 20th. This will mean that given previous exam schedules the exams should go live around 8 to 10 weeks from the end of the beta period so expect to mid to end of June 2010.

Beta exams allow you to take the exam for free in its raw unfinished state and help set the bar for the exams when the go live. As part of getting the exam for free, you should give feedback on the exam and item quality.

 

The exams currently slated for beta in this timeframe are

  • 70-511 TS: Windows Applications Development with Microsoft® .NET Framework 4
  • 70-513 TS: Windows Communication Foundation Development with Microsoft® .NET Framework 4
  • 70-515 TS: Web Applications Development with Microsoft® .NET Framework 4
  • 70-516 TS: Accessing Data with Microsoft® .NET Framework 4
  • 70-519 Pro: Designing and Developing Web Applications using Microsoft® .NET Framework 4

With 70-518 Pro: Designing and Developing Windows® Applications using Microsoft .NET Framework 4 being scheduled for sometime in April.

While all exams will go into beta, some may not be available in your country or territory. Beta exam codes will be posted on the Beta Exam blog and the Microsoft Learning Born To Learn blog

Wednesday 10 February 2010

Visual Studio 2010 RC Released

Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate has now been released to the general public. It has been available since Monday to MSDN subscribers. The road to final release is getting shorter and shorter. The main reason for the RC is to get broad customer feedback on performance and stability since the Beta 2 release. If you do find an issue put it on the Microsoft Connect site and also email Scott Guthrie (scottgu at microsoft.com)

For those upgrading from the Beta 2 there are some known issues (via Scott Gu’s blog)

  • You should remove previous versions of VS 2010 Beta 2 and .NET 4.0 Beta 2 before installing the RC. You can install VS2010 side by side with VS 2005 and VS 2008.
  • Silverlight 3 projects are supported in the RC but SL 4 projects are not (yet!). Silverlight 4 support will be added with the next Silverlight 4 release.
  • There is a crash bug with certain systems that have multi-touch and some screen readers enabled. They are working on a patch at the moment for that
  • Some project upgrades may take quite a long time to complete if the project contains XSD files. Again another patch forthcoming.

Looking forward to road testing this myself!