Blog Archives
Blurry WPF editor in Visual Studio 2008
A short post this time…
Ever wondered why Visual Studio 2008’s WPF editor shows up kinda blurry on your CRT monitor? It turns out it’s a WPF control itself (as you had probably already guessed). But did you know that this also means it makes use of ClearType, even if you haven’t got an LCD monitor hooked up? Read all about it at Todd Mancini’s blog.
Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2005 Business Intelligence Development Studio
As soon as Visual Studio 2008 went RTM I installed it and removed Visual Studio 2005 from my system. As you might know VS2008’s new multi-targeting feature can target .NET Framework 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5 and should be fully backwards compatible with VS2005, so in theory there shouldn’t be any need for keeping VS2005 around*.
However, today I encountered an unexpected situation where I did need VS2005. I tried to launch the SQL Server 2005 Business Intelligence Studio, which failed miserably… As you may know Business Intelligence Studio makes use of the VS2005 IDE (it uses either an existing “normal” Visual Studio installation or it installs the Visual Studio Premier Partner Edition). I knew this, but I had expected it to somehow automatically (or magically :-)) switch to the VS2008 IDE, which ofcourse it did not.
Unwilling to re-install SQL Server 2005 I searched the internet for a solution to this problem and stumbled on a thread on the MSDN forums discussing this exact same issue. It contains an interesting reply by Microsoft employee Dan Jones. There he explains a way to install the VS2005 files need without the need for re-installing SQL Server 2005. Here’s the trick:
- Go to the location for SQL Server setup and run .ToolsSetupvs_setup.exe. This will install the VS Shell.
- Repair the Business Intelligence Studio installation by running the following command from the command line from the .Tools directory (note: this should be typed on one line):
start /wait setup.exe /qb REINSTALL=SQL_WarehouseDevWorkbench REINSTALLMODE=OMUS
I hope this helps some of you facing this same issue.
* In practice I recommend you still keep VS2005 installed, especially when doing team development. If you open a VS2005 solution in VS2008, it will ask you to convert existing solution files to the new VS2008 format. Once converted, these updated solution files cannot be used in VS2005 anymore.I actually asked Scott Guthrie a question about this on his blog and even got a reply from him. Here’s what he had to say (for the original reply search the comments on this blog posting):
Hi Leon,
> Hey Scott, I noticed VS2008 wants to
> convert my existing VS2005 solutions.
> Why? The problem is that the converted
> solutions cannot be opened in VS2005 anymore,
> which some of my team members still use. I
> thought VS2008’s multi-targeting support didn’t
> require me to have VS2005 installed anymore,
> but now I still have to install them side-by-side.VS 2008 allows you to target .NET 2.0 projects, but does make some changes to your solution file (that prevents it from being opened with VS 2005). What you can do, though, is maintain two solution files that point to the same projects and have them work with both VS 2005 and VS 2008.
Here are some blog posts that cover this more:
www.west-wind.com/…/122975.aspx
stevenharman.net/…/multi-targeting-vs2005-and-vs2008-web-application-projects-a-gotcha.aspx
codebetter.com/…/enabling-team-development-with-vs2008-2005-mix.aspx
Hope this helps,
Scott
Yeah Scott, it did!
Updated VS2008 Beta 2 VPC’s released
Microsoft has re-released the expiring Visual Studio 2008 VPC’s that I blogged about before. Get them while they’re hot!
VS2008 Beta 2 VPC’s expiring!
Looks like someone at Microsoft made a small error: the Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 and TFS 2008 Beta 2 VPC’s are expiring on November 1, 2007. That’s much earlier than expected!
The good news is that Microsoft will release updated versions of these VPC’s some time this week. I sure hope all the speakers at TechEd have their VPC’s updated, since I think many are going to be using a VPC with VS2008 Beta 2 to demo their stuff 😉
LeonZandman.com 