The long awaited sp1 for Visual Studio 2005 is available for download at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=BB4A75AB-E2D4-4C96-B39D-37BAF6B5B1DC&displaylang=en

Wrox has posted a video of a presentation by Scott Hanselman at a .NET user group. Scott is very passionate about productivity. How many times a day do you type 'otepad'? Watch the video and learn how you don't really have to.

I just upgraded to dasBlog 1.8. The main reason was that the texteditor (ftb) in version 1.7 didn't work with IE7.

For those looking to upgrade to 1.8: the page editentry.aspx produces an error when you use IIS on Vista. The error I got was:

   "System.ArgumentException: Item has already been added. 
   Key in dictionary: 'ꆈꌠꁱꂷ (ꍏꉸꏓꂱꇭꉼꇩ)' Key being added: 'አማርኛ (ኢትዮጵያ)' "

The code asssumes that the name of the culture is unique. I vaguely remember an article on changes to the way cultures work in .NET; those changes could be the reason this assumption is not longer valid.

Earlier today I spent some time installing the beta3-version of VSTS on a VPC-image. The entire experience reminded me of first few Biztalk 2004 installs I did: you come very close to finishing the installing, but it fails on the last step.

Some at Microsoft must have felt the pain this was causing. At MSDN-subscriber downloads there is a VPC-image available that contains the entire thing: Windows Server 2003, SQL Server and VSTS. At more than 2 gigabytes the download is sizeable but avoiding having to install all the different items makes it well worth the wait. It unpacks to about 9Gb.

If you intend to dive into all the VSTS-goodness Microsoft has been showing, you should seriously consider avoiding a manual installation downloading this.

For creating (and learning) regular expressions I find The Regulator to be a great help. The tool itself is free but it does have some rough edges:

• It doesn't work when running as non-admin; this can be overcome by starting it with Run As, but this seems a bit much for the task that it is supposed to perform.
  
• Today I ran into a different problem: for some reason it threw a System.TypeInitializationException when I tried to start it. After a quick google I found an entry that suggested reinstalling the entire thing. This also seemed a bit much; because there hadn't major changes to the configuration of my machine, I tried a more deductive approach: something had to have changed since I last ran it. The only files in the folder that had changed were the config-files. After removing the config-files, it automagically started working again.

Don't be fooled into thinking The Regulator isn't worth the effort: I've found it to be a valuable tool in developing and learning about regex. I especially like the interactive manor in which you can create an expression and test it. If you haven't used it, you should give it a try.

After running the latest batch of updates, I got the following error when trying to open a webapp from Visual Studio: ASP.NET version mismatch (screenshot)

Although “aspnet_regiis -lv” reports that framework 1.1 is installed on the webserver, running “aspnet_regiis -i” seems to fix the problem.

With the arrival of my new laptop I have decided to give running (and developing) as a non-admin a try. This is one of those things that everybody agrees on as being important, but very few people actually do.

I've discovered that there are quite a lot of things that you would do on a daily basis require elevated privileges. These include: updating virus-definitions, changing the type of paper in the printer settings and renewing the IP Address. There are situations where selections that I've made didn't stick. One of the most annoying cases was the MS AntiSpyware tool: every time I logged on I was required redo all of the selections I had made. Although this particular product is still in beta, it does show that more people need to start running their systems as non-admin. (Or - at the very least - start testing their applications as one)

Most of the times it is very easy to circumvent the lack of privileges by using “runas”. The biggest problem I encountered was trying debug an ASP.NET-application; because the process that you are trying to debug runs under a different account, access is denied. The way I ended up solving the problem, was configuring the worker process to run under my own user account. This isn't a really elegant solution, but at least I can now debug again. I read somewhere that with Whidbey this would be solved by not using IIS to debug applications. VS would start its own webserver when trying to debug an application. One more reason to look forward to VS2005.

Just recently we've been looking into using one or more of the code blocks that are available from Patterns and Practices. Because of the work that was needed to integrate the different blocks, we decided to wait for the new release of the enterprise library. I just received an email from Pascal with the news that MSDN Patterns and practices just released the new/public version of the Enterprise Library; quite a bit sooner than we had expected.

This release should integrate the following blocks: “Caching Application Block, Configuration Application Block, Cryptography Application Block, Data Access Application Block, Exception Handling Application Block, Logging & Instrumentation Application Block, and Security Application Block“.

Download can be found here.

New version of FxCop available at http://gotdotnet.com/team/fxcop/

Major features of this release: 

• Simplification of report xml.
• New Fix Categories: Each message is marked to indicate if the suggested fix will constitute a breaking change for previously shipped code.
• User Interface Improvements: windowing behavior has been made more consistent
• Auto Update: Sign up to get notified when a new version of FxCop is available.

New Rules:

• Design
  • Avoid excessive parameters on generic types
  • Collections should  implement generic interface
  • Do not declare static members on generic types
  • Do not expose generic lists
  • Do not nest generic types in member signatures
  • Enums should have zero value
  • Generic methods should provide type parameter
  • Members should not expose certain concrete types

Jeffrey Snover explains the principles behind the new Windows shell aka Monad. (video) Next week they'll post the 2nd part of the interview; that will probably contain some demos. If you can't wait that long: Jeffrey also appeared on the .NET-show.

Update: demo is now available

Take a look at the possibilities of designing an UI with WinForms and Visual Studio 2005. Click here for the video. Developer productivity is cranked up another notch.

Now combine this with a SmartClient-scenario where the WinForm-app is started using a href/exe. What would be the reason of using a browser-based application anymore?

Clemens has posted a patch to prevent bad things from happening to your blog. The installation is very simple and should only take a minute or so.

I tend to use code-generation to avoid "dumb" work where possible. Xslt is a valueable tool to create the templates for the code that is to be generated. The available functions in Xpath have been limited in number; with the advent of C# the following becomes possible:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> 
<stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
 xmlns:msxsl="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xslt" xmlns:user="http://pareto.nl/PAS">
  <msxsl:script language="CSharp" implements-prefix="user">
     <![CDATA[ 

 public string CamelCase(string value)
 {
  return value[0].ToString().ToLower() + value.Substring(1);
 }
 
 public string UpperCase(string value)
 {
  return value.ToUpper();
  
 }

Although it'll probably be some time before we can use this within an application as client-side script, it sure does make the Xsl/Xpath-combination a more powerful solution for generating code.

Wondering when Visual Sourcesafe is going to be updated?

Channel 9 has a new video on Visual Studio 2005 Team System: http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=13759

Looks like a very comprehensive set of tools.