Posts by John Robbins

Since Microsoft hasn’t released an MSDN Library that includes .NET 3.0 and Vista documentation, it’s frustrating because you can’t get F1 help on all the new and shiny bits. If you’ve installed the Vista Platform SDK, you can open MSDN Library and past the following link into the URL field: ms-help://MS.VSCC.v80/dv_vscccommon/local/CollectionManager.htm. From there you can…

If you have an Apple Mac Pro, instead of wrestling getting the 32-bit version of Vista (or XP) on the machine, where you can only access 2GB of RAM, just put the Vista x64 version on! It works phenomenally well right out of the box. Here’s a few pointers on what I did on my…

Edited: I messed up the value name While I’m probably a Luddite, I prefer to read my mail as plain text. However, Outlook 2007 removed the option to set that in the Reading Pane. Poking around a bit, I found if you add a DWORD value, ReadAsPlain, and set the value to 1 in HCKUSoftwareMicrosoftOffice12.0OutlookOptionsMail, you’ll…

Like most people, I didn’t realize that the VERSIONINFO resource was only a 16-bit number. Consequently, using my GenerateAssemblyFileVersionTask in the brand spanking new year produces date numbers of 70103, which will produce a CS167 compiler error. To continue to use a “date” like format, I updated VersionFile.cs (in Wintellect.Build.Tasks) to use a scheme like…

I botched the upgrade install. I changed the name of the property in MainInstall.WiX I used in the upgrade detection to 30610172VERSIONBEINGUPGRADED at the last minute. Being an idiot, I did all my install testing with the wrong build (long, sad story). I got numerous reports of MSI 2717 errors, which were custom action failures.…

A minor update to the existing code, but added all the cool MSBuild tasks for working offline with TFS as discussed here.  Moved everything to Visual Studio 2005 SP1  Removed mssccprj.scc installed with Wintellect.Visualizers, which obviously wasn’t supposed to be installed. Added RemoveVersionControlBindingsTask, RestoreVersionControlBindingsTask, and TFPowerToyOnlineTask. You can read about them in the here and learn how…

Chris Jackson was very kind enough to point out that the discussion of debugging services in Chapter 4 of my Debugging Microsoft .NET 2.0 Applications doesn’t work on Vista because of session zero isolation. He’s absolutely right and I really appreciate him pointing out the error and a great write up on how to make it work. If you…

Fifteen minutes ago I sent in the last PDF chapter review of Debugging Microsoft .NET 2.0 Applications. That means I’m done! The book still has to go through production, but it’s out of my hands so I can finally get a bit of life back. As always, finishing writing a book is an adventure and…

Business is going great at Wintellect for both consulting and training. Consequently, we have run out of all the people we know and need to start looking outside our circle for more. I thought it might be a good idea to go directly to our blog readers to see if any of you are interested…

Grab the new WinDBG while it’s fresh. I was told they were going to include the Source Server tools for Team Foundation System, but I don’t see them in either the x64 or x86 installations. Also, it looks like CVS support isn’t included any more. At least those of you using SourceSafe, Perforce, and Subversion…

As someone who’s a zealot about always running LUA, the following error message really ticks me off. What the heck were they thinking?!