A few things I like about VS2008

January 28, 2008 at 6:18 pm · Filed under .NET

Leaving out all .NET enhancements, here are a few things I like about VS2008:

• Down-level .NET support.  This makes the upgrade much easier for those of us who still support older versions of Windows that don’t support the new versions of .NET.  I wish they had gone a step further — I’ll write that up in a companion post.
• Doesn’t require elevation.  I recently started using UAC again (i.e., I turned it back on) and found it annoying that I couldn’t drop files into VS2005 (since it runs elevated and Explorer does not).  It is important that VS2008 works unelevated, because UAC is important.  If you make it too hard for devs to use UAC, they’ll turn it off.  And as I know from personal experience, they won’t be as motivated to support it. 
• Supports application manifest files as a project property (instead of through custom post-build steps).  We just implemented this manually for the “Certified for Server 2008 Logo” and I was very happy to eliminate that in favor of direct tool support.
• It seems to start about 100 times faster than VS2005. I’m not kidding.
• The Source Control “Annotate” feature — glad it got rolled into the release.  I like the fact that it is available directly from the history menu, making it much easier to find when some line of code was introduced.

Just a few things.  I’m sure I’ll find more soon.

Tags: .NET, Microsoft, TFS, VS2008

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Certified for Windows Server 2008

January 23, 2008 at 7:10 am · Filed under .NET, Grid Computing

We just received our certification for Windows Server 2008.  Or we are about to — it probably isn’t “official” yet.  Anyway, congratulations to the Digipede team and thanks to everyone at Microsoft and Veritest who helped us through the process.

Getting the logo was arduous.  This has less to do with the technical logo requirements and more to do with the complexities of the process itself.  Some of the complexity is inherent in such a process, but much was due to the program itself being a sort of “work in process”.  But hey, that’s why we early certifiers got the testing fees waived.  I think those who begin the process now will find the test requirements and tools are better written and more robust.

As I said, passing the technical requirements was not arduous for us (we were already very close), but passing the tests did require some minor improvements to the Digipede Network that were motivated by the test:

• Support for User Account Control (UAC).
• More useful logging on the Digipede Server and during installations.
• Improved user messaging and event logging during error conditions between server components and the database.
• Improvements to the Installation Guide including new sections on Custom Actions, installation artifacts, and more.

Some of these changes have already made their way into the shipping product, though others won’t be available until the Digipede Network 2.1 (which, while a minor upgrade, contains many features beyond the improvements mentioned above — I think the feature set will be announced soon).

So now we’re ready for the big launch of Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, and SQL Server 2008 in Los Angeles on February 27th.  If you are going to be there, come see us at the Partner Pavilion.  I’m pushing for some kind of Digipede swag — but I’m not in marketing .

Tags: Certified, Digipede, Server 2008, sql, VS2008

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ilasm returned -1073741819

January 10, 2008 at 11:00 am · Filed under .NET

This is a community service post.  When I come across a problem and I can’t find a solution to it on the Internet, I try to put a solution into the public record.  This one is obscure.

When running ilasm I got an exit code of -1073741819 (the fairly generic C0000005 code).  The problem turned out to be due to an incompatible PDB file in the same directory as the input files.  I experienced this running ilasm for .NET 1.1 with a pre-existing .NET 2.0 PDB file from a previous step in our build process.

To be clear: the PDB file that caused the problem had the same base name as the IL being read and assembly being generated.  It appears that ilasm reads the PDB if it already exists, but since the file is incompatible it returns an error.

The solution here was easy: just delete or move the offending PDB.

Note that if you are running ilasm indirectly through the PreEmptive Dotfuscator product, you will see an error like this:

ilasm returned -1073741819

The FAQ at PreEmptive says that this is due to a problem of path depth (i.e., running ilasm too deeply nested in folders).  That may sometimes be the case too.  I don’t know.

Tags: .NET, .NET1.1, Dotrfuscator, ILASM, PreEmptive

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