If you already have Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite installed, you can download and install Team Edition for Database Professionals in less than 10 minutes.  Previously I had only seen the Database Professionals edition as a separate 3 gig download on MSDN that included all of Visual Studio along with it, so I never took the time to download it and install it since I already had the rest of the Team Suite installed.

Little did I know, Team Edition for Database Professionals can be installed as an add-on, so you don't have to waste your time re-downloading the rest of Visual Studio along with it.  The add-on is a mere 7.9MB in size and will add all of the database features to your existing Team Suite installation.

The Database Professionals tools are excellent and I highly recommend them.  Microsoft's brief description of the tools:

Tools for building SQL databases in a managed project environment with support for versioning, deployment, unit testing, refactoring, and off-line SQL development.

In addition it also lets you compare the schema or data of two different databases.  A good use of this is to compare the schema/data that exists for databases in different environments (i.e. dev, test, production, etc.)  The entire list of features is far too vast to include in this post . . . maybe another time.

 

Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals Add-on

I have been trying to do development on Vista since I went full time Vista at home during the release candidates.  Until recently it was nearly impossible to get any development done on this platform.  Due to some hard working people at Microsoft, developing on Vista is now a pleasure.  There are a couple of things you will need to do in addition to the normal Visual Studio 2005 install to be successful.

Install SP1 for Visual Studio 2005.  This download is quite large and took me over an hour to install.  Multi-tasking while installing this is not advised.  Also, be sure to uninstall the Web Applications Project add-on, otherwise you will get a half hour into the installation only to have it error out.

Install the Visual Studio 2005 SP1 Update for Windows Vista Beta.  This is the magic update that allows development on Vista to be a great experience.  Before installing this update, whenever I would do ASP.NET development on Vista, the controls that I added to the aspx pages would not automatically be declared in the designer.aspx file.  This made it so that I could not programmatically access any of the controls that I had declared in the aspx page.  Installing this update fixed the issue and it has not happened since.

Setup Visual Studio 2005 to always run as administrator.  Browse to your install dir (C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE) and open the properties for devenv.exe.  Switch to the compatibility tab and select "Run this program as an administrator". 

Read this post and setup the Debugging Assistant if you are on a development machine.  The post details some IIS configuration changes that need to be made as well as provides a link and instructions for setting up the debugging assistant. 

Before installing the debugging assistant I would get the following error message when trying to debug from Visual Studio...

Unable to start debugging on the web server. An authentication error occurred while communicating with the web server. Please see Help for assistance.

Mike's article talks about how this is most commonly due to event handlers in global.asax like BeginRequest; however, I did not have any event handlers in global.asax and I was still getting the error.  The most likely cause that I can think of is that I am using the ASP.NET AJAX Extensions (Atlas) RC1 and it is probably subscribing to pipeline notifications prior to AuthenticateRequest.  Setting up Mike's Debugging Assistant fixed the issue that I was having and I am now successfully able to debug.

For some other interesting articles on working with ASP.NET and Vista/IIS7 check out this post from Rick Strahl and this post from Scott Guthrie.

One of the challenging things about debugging an AJAX application is that it isn't obvious how to view the html source that is being rendered by the browser after you have made modifications to it via an AJAX callback.  If you use the browser's built-in View Source command then it will show you the source that was used to render the original page, but it will not include any modifications made via javascript/AJAX calls.

To figure out how to view the generated source I turned to Google and found Rumen Stankov's post on telerik blogs. 

If you are trying to view the generated source in Firefox, the simplest way is to first download and install the Web Developer extension.  Then go to the View Source menu item and select "View Generated Source".

To view the generated source in IE you can type the following in the address bar

javascript:'<xmp>' + window.document.body.outerHTML+ '</xmp>'

Or you can use this bookmarklet (Drag to links bar or add to Favorites): View Generated Source

I figured this one out via this post on Mitch Denny's blog.  To be able to install the Web Application Projects add-in for Visual Studio 2005 on Windows Vista Beta 2 or 5536 you need to run the installer as an administrator. 

The easiest way to do this is to hit the windows key, type command, right-click on Command Prompt at the top of the list, and select Run as administrator.  This will launch the command prompt, then all you have to do is run the installer from this command window and the administrator privileges will be granted to the WAP installer.

As a side note, I am loving Vista's instant search that occurs when you hit the windows key.  I have been using it as an application launcher for the last couple of days.

 

Today I came across an excellent list of VSTS add-ons/add-ins/widgets/clients/etc. The list can be found at http://teamsystemexperts.com/widgets.aspx.

One of the more interesting sections in the list is the list of additional clients that are available for the Team Foundation Server source control repository. The list includes integrated clients for Visual Studio .Net 2003, Eclipse, SQL Server Management Studio, and there is even a Tortoise client. Tortoise source control clients are shell extensions that fit seamlessly into Windows Explorer and is my favorite way to work with cvs and subversion repositories.

Also in the list of utilities is the Team Foundation PowerToys. The PowerToys add some additional capabilities to VSTS that did not ship with the initial release. Added functionality includes things like Unshelve + Merge, Rollbacks, Undo Unchanged, and Get Changeset. The PowerToys were written by a Microsoft dev but are not officially supported by Microsoft.

If you are using Visual Studio Team System I highly recommend checking out this list of add-ons. There are many more tools on the site that I didn't highlight here including tools for Continuous Integration and MSBuild.

It was this post by Paul Stamatiou that inspired me to redesign my site. I had actually been working on it for a while, but I liked his new design so much that inspired me to create one of my own. If you compare our two sites you'll notice how mine was influenced by his. Like Paul I was also inspired by the following . . . Cameron Olthuis, 43folders, Vague Dream, and 37signals.

For the first time I have completely customized just about everything in the site design, and you probably can not even tell by the layout that I'm using dasblog as my underlying blogging engine. ericappel.net now has a much clearer focus and purpose. It highlights the things in my tech and development life that are important to me, as well as my photography.

In the top right corner of the site you will see the latest five photos from my "Highlights" set on flickr. I decided to move the search box to the archives page, so if you are looking for a certain post, that will be your best bet. In the future I would like to create a custom projects page to highlight my projects in a more structured way. Future enhancements may also include a cleaner looking archives page, a site dashboard, and a redesigned side nav bar with additional content.

Flickr Sprinklr is an asp.net app I wrote to allow Flickr users to quickly add their photos to multiple groups. Flickr users often submit photos to 20 or more different groups, and the interface in Flickr currently requires you to submit a photo to each group one at a time. Sprinklr loads all of a user's groups into a table and then allows them to check off checkboxes for each group they would like to submit the photo to. If you save the Sprinklr Boomarklet to your browser's Links bar (Internet Explorer) or Bookmark Toolbar (Firefox) and then browse to any of your photos on Flickr, when you click the bookmarklet it will take you to the photo on Sprinklr so you can add it to groups.  If you hover over any of the group descriptions, Sprinklr will display a tooltip showing the group’s description so you can quickly see the rules for posting in each group.  To use Groupr you must of course have a Flickr account, and belonging to some groups helps as well.

Sprinklr has been linked to by the Great Flickr Tools Collection

WebPing is a Windows app I created to refresh a specified site every 19 minutes. Why would anyone want to do this you ask? This is why. Basically if an ASP.NET application stays idle for 20 minutes on IIS6, the worker process for the application will be shutdown. When my site was in the early stages and not getting hit once every 20 minutes, dasblog would be restarted all the time and take a really long time to load on startup. Running WebPing on my Media Center alleviates this problem by hitting my site every 19 minutes and keeping the site active.

System Requirements: .NET Framework 2.0 beta 2

Instructions: Download the exe and place it in the location of your choice. The app takes a command line parameter to specify the URL you would like to have loaded every 19 minutes. Example command line call:
WebPing.exe http://ericappel.net/blog
You can also create a shortcut to the exe and place the URL at the end of the Target line in the shortcut's properties.

Download: WebPing.exe