Nov
30
2007

How to: Prepare IIS for Deployment of Office Solutions (2007 System)

Users can install Microsoft Office solutions by opening the deployment manifest from the Web. However, a secured installation of Internet Information Services (IIS) will block the .vsto file name extension. The MIME type must be defined in IIS before you deploy Office solutions by using IIS.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb608629(VS.90).aspx

Nov
30
2007

Nice feature of Visual Studio 2005/2008

I am currently migrating Tech Head Brothers Authoring tool to Visual Studio 2008! And found this cool feature, it is crazy that you use a tool for quite some time (VS05) and always find little trick like that.

I found it on Visual Studio 2008 and tested it on Visual Studio 2005 and was surprised to see that it was already there and that I never realized about it.

So you can from Solution Explorer show all files that are on the directory of your project and include those easily.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This makes my life really easier in porting my tool to VS08 and know I hope the ClickOnce for VSTO will work good.

Nov
30
2007

Linked files in Visual Studio projects

Following my post "Visual Studio and PowerShell Trick" I had another little issue, I have one mapping file, mapping.xml, that I want to use on my website and with my data access layer unit tests project.

I used to solve this using the linked file possibility of Visual Studio. Point the target folder, and click Add Existing item, browse to your source folder, choose the original file, and at the bottom of the dialog you will have the Add button showing a dropdown, you juste then need to use Add As Link.

Now I have the same mapping file used in both locations.


 

 

And I can run and watch the results of my unit tests happily!

Nov
30
2007

Visual Studio and PowerShell Trick

This end of afternoon I worked on the mapping part of my new project for innoveo solutions, a blog engine.

Till now I was using the XML Persistence Engine of Euss but it was time to go to a real mapping and a database.

I ended up with some .bat file in my solution.

For example diffMapping.bat uses WinMerge to compare the mapping I currently use to one that I just generated out of my Domain assembly.

Then I wanted to be able to run this .bat script from the IDE, without having it in Visual Studio 2005 External Tools menu (not tried with 2008 currently). So I tried the right click on the .bat Open With, then gave the path of cmd.exe. That's was not working, it just opened a cmd prompt.

Then I pointed Open With to PowerShell exe and it works!!! It will run you .bat file from Solution Explorer. You can even define it as the default program for .bat and double clicking on a .bat file in Solution Explorer will run it.

Nice no ?!

Nov
30
2007

New web application deployment framework for IIS 7

This announcement from Scott sounds really cool:

We will also shortly begin sharing details of a new web application deployment framework for IIS that enables you to easily automate the deployment of web applications on either a single server or across a web farm of machines.  It will make it easy to version your web applications (including allowing you to quickly roll back to previous versions), as well as automatically provision them across multiple servers.  It also enables the full automation of deployment tasks (including via both command-line and PowerShell scripting APIs).  The combination of IIS7 with this web deployment framework will enable you to deploy and scale your ASP.NET server applications better than ever before.

Ok the rest of the post also, Silverlight 2.0, ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Release...

Nov
28
2007

Migration of Tech Head Brothers portal to .NET Framework 3.5

I started yesterday the migration of Tech Head Brothers portal to .NET Framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008.

The automatic migration of the solution went straight without any error. During the process I was asked if I want to now target .NET Framework 3.5, replying yes seems not to have changed all things needed, for example in the solution properties I had to do the change manually, but it seems that the web.config was updated correctly.

Being ready to see the application running I started a compilation and got my first issue, and finally the only one.

It seems that the compiler is making more check than the older one.

On my data access layer I use Euss, "an extensible programming model and runtime components for building data aware solutions on the .Net platform" . So I rely on that framework on my data access layer and for sure I reference it.

Compiling the business layer I got the following compilation error:

How can it be:

  1. It compiles on Visual Studio 2005 without any error
  2. The business layer doesn't have a reference to Euss for sure, it is one of the goal of my DAL to encapsulate it

The link to the error didn't really helped because the code was absolutely correct!

After some research I found the issue in the data access layer, in which I have a generic Repository class for all CRUD operations that I parameterize with a business entity of my domain. The code look like this:

namespace TechHeadBrothers.Portal.DAL
{
    public class Repository<T>
        where T : class
    {

        /// <summary>
        /// Reads from the specified query.
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="query">The query.</param>
        /// <returns></returns>
        protected static IList<T> Read(Query query)
        {
            return PersistenceFactory.Context.Load<T>(query);
        }

The issue is that in one method, one of the Read operation, I use the Query class. This class is coming from Euss framework. As Query is a parameter of a method in a public class and this method is marked as protected, it might be inherited in another layer and override. Then the issue is that Query parameter in this other layer is not known because we want to have the Euss framework encapsulated on the data access layer. So we got the error.

Update: The fix is as following:

        internal static IList<T> Read(Query query)
        {
            return PersistenceFactory.Context.Load<T>(query);
        }

Weird thing is that the same thing works without any issue on Visual Studio 2005.

So now I can't wait to test some ideas, like "Business entity and C# extension methods".

I am still currently missing VS Web Deployment Add-In, but it was announced by Scott Guthrie on his blog :

Silverlight Tools and VS Web Deployment Project Add-Ins

Two popular add-ins to Visual Studio are not yet available to download for the final VS 2008 release.  These are the Silverlight 1.1 Tools Alpha for Visual Studio and the Web Deployment Project add-in for Visual Studio.  Our hope is to post updates to both of them to work with the final VS 2008 release in the next two weeks.  If you are doing Silverlight 1.1 development using VS 2008 Beta2 you'll want to stick with with VS 2008 Beta2 until this updated Silverlight Tools Add-In is available. 

Nov
24
2007

ReSharper and Visual Studio 2008

Ilya Ryzhenkov just published a post about "ReSharper and Visual Studio 2008".

If you want to know more about what is coming you definitely have to read his post!

ReSharper 4 is in very active development. Its main purpose is to support C# 3.0 in all of its beauty. This means not only parsing and code intelligence, but also new analysis, refactorings, context actions and quick fixes. We are concentrated on making your development experience with C# 3.0 as smooth and pleasant as possible.
Currently, we have support for implicity typed variables and arrays, extension methods, object and collection initializers and automatic properties. As soon as we complete support for lambdas, queries and anonymous types, we will open Early Access Program. We plan to achieve this goal in January, 2008.
From this point you will be able to download EAP or even nightly builds and try full power of ReSharper 4 with your new C# 3.0 code.

Nov
18
2007

innoveo solutions new office almost ready!

On Friday I was doing home office but it seems that our new innoveo solutions office went a step further!

Didier took some pictures of our new office in Zurich! We will move there end of this month!

innoveo solutions new office

innoveo solutions new office

Really nice place to work, and move will be much easier because we move from 6th floor to 2nd! Nevertheless I will miss the view to the Swiss Alps!

Nov
18
2007

Le Web 3 in Paris

Le Web 3 '07I will be in Paris for Le Web 3 '07 from Monday 10 December 2007 evening to Thursday 13 December 2007 mid-day.

I will attend the conference with Didier which was to the 2005 and 2006 editions.

We will travel with the TGV, if there are no strikes at that time and will be staying at the hotel Daunou Opera.

If you want to meet during that time just send me an email.

About Laurent

Laurent Kempé

Laurent Kempé is the editor, founder, and primary contributor of Tech Head Brothers, a French portal about Microsoft .NET technologies.

He is currently employed by Innoveo Solutions since 10/2007 as a Senior Solution Architect and certified Scrum Master.

Founder, owner and Managing Partner of Jobping, which provides a unique and efficient platform for connecting Microsoft skilled job seekers with employers using Microsoft technologies.

Laurent was awarded Most Valuable Professional (MVP) by Microsoft from April 2002 to April 2012.

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