Makiwa

I rely a lot on tools like the IE Developer toolbar. Recently after uninstalling IE 8 Beta 1 and returning to IE 7, the toolbar just stopped working. I could launch it, but all the options were greyed out.

It took me a while to fix this, yet the solution is embarrassingly simple. I found it on the Internet Explorer Web Development forum.

1. Go to Tools | Internet Options | Programs, and choose Manage add-ons.

2. Find IE Developer Toolbar BHO in the add-ons list and enable it.

3. Finally, restart IE for the change to take effect. And debug in IE to your heart’s content…

I’ve just downloaded a new font for Visual Studio. It’s called Consolas and I think I like it. You can get it here.

According to the blurb:

Consolas is intended for use in programming environments and other circumstances where a monospaced font is specified. All characters have the same width, like old typewriters, making it a good choice for personal and business correspondence. Optimizing the font specifically for ClearType allowed a design with proportions closer to normal text than traditional monospaced fonts like Courier. This allows for more comfortable reading of extended text on-screen.

And it does what it says on the tin. I also like the fact that it is more compact so you can fit more code on the screen.

Here is trusty old Courier New 10pt:

And here is the same text in Consolas 10pt :

Since installing Vista SP1 (even since the release candidate I think) my system would fail to hibernate.

It would look like it had hibernated, but the next time I booted I would get a “Windows did not shut down successfully”. And then it would boot normally as though it hadn’t been hibernated.

Anyway, found this thread and thought I’d link it because it worked like a charm.

Hope it helps.

IE8 Beta 1 has some cool features, but, as I still need to develop for IE7, I only installed it over IE7 because it has an IE7 emulation mode. Problem is, that mode doesn’t quite work.

Oh. Oh. Oh. See Gmail puke. Look Microsoft! Look!

What is going on with the left navigation? It’s usually more compact than that…and the chat widget has disappeared.

I’m not sure yet if it’s a rendering issue or whether the user agent isn’t being reported as IE7 and Google isn’t formatting it accordingly.

Either way, you can’t trust IE8 Beta 1 to emulate IE7 properly.

I sometimes need to edit a *.csproj file as XML. However, there isn’t an option for doing so in Visual Studio. Or so I thought.

I often end up opening the *.csproj as a text file from explorer, but then of course, I lose all the Intellisense goodness.

Perhaps I’m slow but it wasn’t until today that found out how to do it in Visual Studio:

1. Simply right-click the project and choose "Unload Project".
2. Right-click the "unavailable project" and choose "Edit {project filename}"

Once you’ve done that you get the joys of syntax highlighting and Intellisense.

I’ve just had a bit of a pain uninstalling Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 on Vista. I followed Scott Guthrie’s steps for uninstalling it, but when I tried to uninstall VS 2008 itself I got the following error:

Error 1325.’WebDesignerCore’ is not a valid short file name.

Needless to say, a brief episode of profanity ensued. But fear not: after a bit of googling and struggling, I managed to sort it out. Hopefully, if you are having the same problem then this will help you.

1. Open your temp folder. The easiest way is to hit Windows+R and type "%temp%" and hit OK.
   
2. In that folder look for files matching VSMsiLog*.txt. You are looking for the log file that was created when you installed VS2008 Beta 2. Check the Date Modified field if there are several - although I imagine there should only be one of these at this point. Open it in WordPad (Notepad seems to struggle with the size of this file - mine was 47 MB).
3. Search through the file for the term "WebDesignerCore" until you find a match that looks like a file path. In my case it was:
   

   MSI (s) (7C:48) [07:38:56:490]: PROPERTY CHANGE: Adding wcu_VWD.3643236F_FC70_11D3_A536_0090278A1BB8 property. Its value is ‘K:\WCU\WebDesignerCore\’.

   The VS uninstall script is looking here so if doesn’t exist it will fail. In my case it didn’t exist because K was the drive letter I used when I mounted the VS 2008 Beta 2 ISO image for installation and I had since unmounted it.

4. Put the original VS 2008 Beta 2 setup media in place so that that path exists. In my case I had to mount the ISO image (using Daemon Tools) and change the drive letter to K.
5. Now uninstall Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2!

Good luck!

This is not easy if you have thumbs as big as mine! But the phone looks cool!

I was having problems using the a command line Subversion client on Windows XP to export from the repository. The problem was mainly my own stupidity but I’ll share the "solution" anyway.

The Subversion help describes the "export" command as follows:

export: Create an unversioned copy of a tree.
usage: 1. export [-r REV] URL[@PEGREV] [PATH]
       2. export [-r REV] PATH1[@PEGREV] [PATH2]

I mistakenly assumed that URL or PATH1 was required before the first path parameter. Alas, this is not the case and it took me a while to work out what I was doing wrong.

To export the HEAD of a path from the repository to a path on the C: drive you would use something like the following:

svn export svn://server/path c:\path –username stu
–password pwd –force

To export from the working copy to a path on the C: drive you would use something like the following:

svn export c:\workingcopy\path c:\path –username stu
–password pwd –force

Simple really. A bit like me.

I’ve been tearing out what hair I have left, trying to work out why the mp3 files aren’t updated when I change the metadata in Windows Media Player 11 on Vista.

I spent hours updating my music metadata, only to find that the metadata isn’t persisted to the underlying mp3 files. I tried using "Apply Media Information Changes" (AMI) but it didn’t seem to make a difference.

As it happens, all AMI does is raise the priority of the background task that persists all the queued media information changes.

But no matter how many times I ran it, and no matter how long I waited, the file metadata was never updated.

The solution, in my case, was to do with permissions: in my set up, the Music folder is redirected to the D: drive. I wondered if that was causing problems for WMP when it was trying to update the files. I loosened up the permissions on the folder, just in case,  and hey presto it works! (jeez, do people still say that?)

All I did was give Everyone full control to the Music folder. Then I ran AMI again and all of my metadata was written to the mp3 files.

This is obviously a pretty coarse-grain solution: it would be better to find the exact user that the AMI task runs as and the least privilege it needs. But it’s late, and I’ve had far too much wine. If I find out which user to grant the permission to I’ll be sure to update this post.

I recently re-installed Vista and had this weird problem where I could connect to some websites, but not others. I solved the problem by explicitly setting the DNS addresses to the ones used by the router. If you are having this problem this might work for you too.

1. In the online status page of the router configuration screen you should see the Primary and Secondary DNS addresses.

 

1. To set those DNS settings up in Vista, go to Control Panel | “View network status and tasks”

 

1. Then click “Manage network connections”.

 

1. Select your network connection and choose Properties.

 

1. Select the IPv4 binding, and click Properties.

 

1. Finally, choose “Use the following DNS server addresses” and set the Preferred and Alternate servers to the Primary and Secondary ones obtained from the router in step 1, and press OK.

Hope this helped.