I have spent the last few days trying to install Visual Studio 2008 a.k.a. Orcas Beta 2. The download page is here.

The basic idea is that you download a virtual machine that has both the OS (Windows Server 2003) and Orcas preloaded. First, you download a base file called VSCTPBase.exe, which you unpack to get a virtual hard drive. Then, you download 7 RAR files. The first one is self extracting and extracts itself and the rest of them, and then builds a differencing disk which is added to the initial virtual hard drive to create the final virtual drive. At least, that was the theory!

As the whole setup uses a lot of space, and I am almost out of space (as usual) on my laptop, I borrowed a 300 Gb external disk from work to put the VPC on. I downloaded the files mentioned above onto that disk. I then unpacked the base image, and started unpacking the 7 RARS. Well - somewhere in the middle of the third one, I get an error message saying

"Write error in the file OrcasBeta2_VSTS.vhd. Probably the disk is full."

Not! I had about 250 Gb free on the disk. OrcasBeta2_VSTS.vhd is the differencing disk that was being merged from the RARS. So, I scratched my head, googled, couldn't find anyone else with the same problem, tried downloading the file again, rebooted, tried again, sacrificed a goat. No luck.

So I tried searching for the message above as "Write error in the file" and "Probably the disk is full." Now I got lots of hits, this seems to happen a lot to people. Finally, I stumbled across a post saying that there is a file size limit on FAT32 volumes, somewhere around 4Gb.

FAT32? I had forgotten about that evil stuff, along with win.ini, config.sys, thunking, himem, edlin, floppy disks and gorilla.bas! And sure enough, the 300Gb external drive was formatted as FAT32. Duh!

So, a quick command brought my external I: drive out of the bronze age:

convert I:/FS:NTFS 

And now the extraction worked.

Can you believe that? Poor Microsoft trying to get it's developers to beta test their latest and greatest development tools, and you run into FAT32! Talk about a blast from the past. Tonight I will dream nightmares about 640K memory limits and 16 bit operating systems... and the turbo button.

While having some fun with the Visual Studio SDK I ran across a great example of a Navigation window by Gaston Milano.  It's a great sample to start with if you would like to dive into Visual Studio Package development.  One item of note that I found while using the navigation window on a very large project is that Visual Studio 2005 kept crashing everytime the window would be brought up.  I noticed that before VS crashed it had a difficult time drawing things. I immediately thought of a GDI leak.  I opened up Task Manager and checked the GDI objects and sure enough every time I openned the window the GDI object count would skyrocket upwards, never to return to a sane GDI count again.  VS crashed after reaching a count of about 10,000 GDI objects and I don't blame it for doing that either :) 

The offending routine, the getter for the HierarchyItem::Icon property in HierarchyItem.cs, calls a method NativeMethods.ImageList_GetIcon() which merely vectors off into the win32 version of ImageList_GetIcon().  Looking at the MSDN documentation for this routine you'll notice that the remarks at the end state

"It is the responsibility of the calling application to destroy the icon returned from this function using the DestroyIcon function"

Looking at the code you'll notice that DestroyIcon is never called on the temporary HICON returned from this call so every time this routine is called I noted 2 HICONs being leaked.  And on my large project, this really started adding up.

The fix?

Change the following code in HierarchyItem.cs:

      int handleIcon = NativeMethods.ImageList_GetIcon((int)imageList, (int)index, hbmMask);
      try {
          this.icon = (Icon)Icon.FromHandle((IntPtr)handleIcon).Clone();
      }
      catch (ArgumentException) {
      }
To:

int handleIcon = NativeMethods.ImageList_GetIcon((int)imageList, (int)index, hbmMask);
try {
     this.icon = (Icon)Icon.FromHandle((IntPtr)handleIcon).Clone();
     NativeMethods.DestroyIcon(handleIcon); // <== added to destroy the temp HICON
    } catch (ArgumentException) {
    }

And add a reference to DestroyIcon in the NativeMethods class like so:

        [DllImport("USER32")]
        public static extern int DestroyIcon(int HICON);

Hope that helps any of you running into similar problems.

While working with Visual Studio and wishing that feature X existed, I decided to delve into the Visual Studio Extensibility layer and see what it can do.  There are 3 main ways to extend the VSIDE which are Macros, Plugins, and Packages so I opted to play with managed packages (I like C# and wanted full integration into the IDE).

After downloading the Visual Studio 2005 SDK and completing development of my package I needed to deploy it.  I ran into a number of issues deploying my package, mostly related to issues with the Package Load Key.  Following are the steps that I came up with for deploying a package.

1. Create a new VSIP membership account if you do not already have one (go to the VSIP affiliate site to sign up if you are not a member yet)
2. Login using your passport account at the vsip members
3. Once logged in, you must Create a new product
   1. Click on the Products link
   2. Click on the Create New Product link and fill out the information for your package
4. After your product is created, click on the View/Request PLK link
5. Fill in the information as it appears in your VSPackage and click the Request PLK button
6. Microsoft will review your product and notify you that the PLK has been approved or denied
7. If the PLK has been approved, log back into your VSIP member account, click on Products and then View/Request PLK
8. Add a new numbered resource to your package with the PLK as its value
9. Modify the ProvideLoadKey attribute in your package source to reference the resource number for your PLK

Microsoft requires that each deployed Package be given a key generated by and registered with Microsoft.  The generated key is called a Visual Studio Package Load Key, or PLK and must be requested from your VSIP, or Visual Studio Industry Partner, account (Note that if you are not a VSIP member you must sign up).  The PLK is a digest based on information specific to the Package that you have created (Package GUID, Package Name, Product Name, Company Name) allowing for a higher probability of unique values between packages.  The PLK also allows Microsoft to keep track of all released 3rd-party packages via their signature.  Be aware that PLKs are finicky so you must be sure to use the EXACT same information for both the Package and what was used to generated a PLK.

• Adding a Package Load Key
• VSPackages
• How To: Install a PLK (C#)
• PLK TroubleShooting: Visual Studio SDK
• Dr. Ex's WebLog: Debugging Package Load Failures

This is one of those little things I'm looking forward to getting out of C# 3.0: inferred types. I've always throught to myself, "I just declared the variable to be that type, can't you figure it out without me spelling it out for you, C# compiler?" Well, the compiler can't figure it out yet, but here's a little snippet I cooked up so at least I don't have to type the type name twice:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<CodeSnippets xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/2005/CodeSnippet">
  <CodeSnippet Format="1.0.0">
    <Header>
      <Title>var</Title>
      <Shortcut>var</Shortcut>
      <Description>Code snippet for declaring and initializing a variable with a type cast</Description>
      <Author>Adam Anderson</Author>
      <SnippetTypes>
        <SnippetType>Expansion</SnippetType>
      </SnippetTypes>
    </Header>
    <Snippet>
      <Declarations>
        <Literal>
          <ID>type</ID>
          <ToolTip>Variable type</ToolTip>
          <Default>Type</Default>
        </Literal>
        <Literal>
          <ID>name</ID>
          <ToolTip>Variable name</ToolTip>
          <Default>Name</Default>
        </Literal>
        <Object>
          <ID>value</ID>
          <ToolTip>Initial value</ToolTip>
          <Default>Value</Default>
          <Type>System.Object</Type>
        </Object>
      </Declarations>
      <Code Language="csharp">
        <![CDATA[$type$ $name$ = ($type$) $value$;
        $end$]]>
      </Code>
    </Snippet>
  </CodeSnippet>
</CodeSnippets>

To install, copy and paste the above XML into a file and save it with a .snippet extension to your code snippets directory (My Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Code Snippets\Visual C#\My Code Snippets). To use, simply type "var" and press Tab.

Now as you type the type name, it will be duplicated for you in the type cast.

Every little annoyance eliminated is productivity gained. Enjoy!

You might overlook the JavaScript debugging utility that's already built in to Visual Studio 2005: the Script Explorer window.  The Script Explorer can take care of the usual debugging tasks like stepping through code, adding watches and evaluating variables. 

To use the debugger in Internet Explorer navigate to the browser Tools | Internet Options | Advanced tab and make sure that "Disable script debugging" is turned off. 

Run your web application in Visual Studio 2005.  Then select the menu option for Debug | Windows | Script Explorer.  Notice in the background the tags for telerik RadEditor controls...

The first thing you notice in the Script Explorer window is a series of JavaScript and resource files that are currently loaded.  Double click on the aspx file you're currently working with and you will see the evaluated HTML returned from the server.  The RadEditor control now shows as its computed HTML, CSS and JavaScript that will actually be functioning in the browser. 

You can also navigate up to the script for the page and set breakpoints and watches.  When the JavaScript executes and hits your breakpoint you get all the usual Visual Studio debugging capabilities for free.

Next blog I'll show the excellent "Firebug" debugging utility for Firefox.  Firebug doesn't stop at just JavaScript but works with the entire stack of AJAX related technologies (and has a high cool-factor).