Monday, July 30, 2007
Microsoft apparently didn't resign all the tools in the SDK supplied with Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2008.  This is actually documented in the readme that UISpy has this issue, which of course, I didn't read..
 
SVCUtil.exe also has this problem and it causes any proxy-generation from VS.NET 2008 to fail (as well as killing the client tester process which is spawned for WCF testing).  You'll know you've hit this error when the program crashes with a "System.IO.FileException" and indicates that it has failed strong-name validation.
 
It's easy enough to fix ..
 
1) Open a command prompt with full admin rights
2) CD to the C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\V6.0a\bin directory
3) execute "SN -Vr svcutil.exe"
 
This turns off strong-name validation for svcutil.exe.
 
posted on 7/30/2007 4:20:15 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)  #   
 Monday, July 16, 2007

I've been playing a bit with VS.NET '08 June CTP lately and noticing several nice improvements - the Cider WPF add-in especially seems to have better integration with the code window.  For example, double clicking on an element now creates the code-behind handler (finally!).

The layout support is much better as well - you finally get the drag handles and positioning lines.

 

The property sheet seems a bit sketchy right now - I see how Blend has certainly influenced it (as the code apparently is coming from that product), but I find Blend to be easier to work with there.  No support for Data Providers either which is a bummer.

Bindings are still not as nice as Blend; manual addition seems to be the only way to do them at this point, however Intellisense is *much* better now.  There's also a nice zoom bar present which allows fine-detail work to be done when drawing graphical elements (such as Control Templates or even just 2D/3D shapes).

Overall, I'm seeing some good progress - here's hoping for more as the product matures!

posted on 7/16/2007 12:26:30 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)  #   
 Friday, July 13, 2007

Sales of the TSP++ products have steadily fallen over the past 5 years, so much so that I decided two years ago to release the 2.x product into the open-source community, and now I am doing the same for the server edition. 

The download is available here and requires a key to install it - use 

J35M-3KXo-q60T

which will let you install the full product.  Documentation and samples are all part of the image so have fun!

posted on 7/13/2007 3:46:33 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)  #