constructive nonconformist

Help for the Visual Studio 2010 Help

With Visual Studio 2010 the Visual Studio documentation viewer has been completely redesigned. And apparently it is unfinished. The final viewer won’t ship until later, maybe VS 2010 SP1.

The interim solution is fairly awful.

Help and documentation is viewable in a browser window. For local help a ‘Help Library Agent’ must be started first. The agent creates an HTTP service at 127.0.0.1:47873. Each time that the agent is started the host and port remain the same but the URL path contains an ID that is different. So local help can not be bookmarked. I can think of some interesting reasons for creating a local server for the local help but with what the local help currently provides I see no evidence that the local server is needed. It seems to serve no purpose, except that it breaks bookmarks.

For local help a full table of contents and index are missing. If you are accustomed to browsing the TOC or using the index, you will be frustrated.

You can get a full table of contents with the online help. With the online help click the Preferences link in the upper right corner and choose ‘Classic’. The Classic view provides a full table of contents.

For local help there are the following two tools:

• H3Viewer.exe is a third party “traditional help viewer” with full TOC and index.
• HelpViewerKeywordIndex VS 2010 Extension is an extnesion for Visual Studio that provides help integration within the IDE.

links for 2010-03-17

• IE9 preview – Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report

  via Daring Fireball

  (tags: microsoft browser ie9 web)

Trial Phone Apps

From the department of ‘Oh, I want that in the Apple App Store’:

For Windows Phone 7 applications, the Microsoft Windows Phone Marketplace will support trial versions.

The Windows Phone Marketplace: A different shopping experience for a different kind of phone - Windows Phone Developer Blog - The Windows Blog:

“Marketplace now adds a new Trial API that gives every application or game developer the option, but not the requirement, to enable a single instance of their code to include trial usage limitations (like time or level) so that users can test drive the app/game they are considering.”

Update:

Clearly I’ve not been paying attention: Apple opens door to iPhone ‘freemium’ apps - Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal:

.Net Stopwatch Returns Negative Elapsed Time

The System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch class in the .Net runtime can be used to time operations. Bit there’s a problem in .Net 3.5 and earlier. The Elapsed* properties (Elapsed, ElapsedMilliseconds, ElapsedTicks) will sometimes return a negative value.

There’s a note in the documentation:

On a multiprocessor computer, it does not matter which processor the thread runs on. However, because of bugs in the BIOS or the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL), you can get different timing results on different processors. To specify processor affinity for a thread, use the ProcessThread.ProcessorAffinity method.

Some advocate setting processor affinity to eliminate the possibility of a negative elapsed time. But a common work-around is to simply use zero whenever the elapsed time is negative.

In recent work I used the Stopwatch class to time operations performed by Threads in a ThreadPool and I was getting false timings because of the negative elapsed time issue. I was leery of messing with the threads’ processor affinities because the ThreadPool is a shared resource. But I had concerns about the ‘convert to zero’ work-around.

Through a Microsoft contact I was able to confirm that the work-around of checking for ‘elapsed < 0’ is adequate. The negative time issue occurs only when measuring very small time periods. The issue is fixed in .Net 4.0 and the fix in the Stopwatch is to check that if elapsed < 0 then set elapsed to zero.

Hacking SLN Files to Improve Visual Studio/Visual Source Safe Integration

There are some who think Microsoft Visual Source Safe (VSS) is great. There are some who think that it’s not great but it is pretty good. And there are some who think Source Safe is just good enough. I am not among any of those groups.

One pain point with Source Safe in a Microsoft tool chain is integration with Visual Studio. Historically Visual Studio has stored source control information directly in the solution and project files. This reveals itself to be a really terrible idea the first time a project or solution file is shared in Source Safe. Checkouts from within the IDE will use the the source control bindings in the solution or project. If the solution or project file has been shared and not changed the bindings will be pointing to the original location in Source Safe. Checking out through Visual Studio will checkout the wrong file.

Yes, the solution and project files can be branched and the bindings updated. That’s sub-optimal. It means branching just to fix a tool problem and not because of any actual divergence in the code base. Any non-divergent changes to the solution or project must then be manually propagated to all the branched versions. Ugh.

The problem has not gone unnoticed at Microsoft. Over time and new releases of VStudio and VSS, improvements have been made.

My current position of employment is not using the latest and greatest. We’re on Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Source Safe 2005. The code base is in C#. I worked out a way to have shared solution and project files for non-web projects. Web projects in 2005 are different beasts and don’t follow the same rules. If you are using different versions of Visual Studio or Visual Source Safe your mileage will vary.

When getting files from VSS into a working directory, Visual Source Safe 2005 will create or update a mssccprj.scc file if any of the files present include a solution (.sln) or project file (for C#, .csproj). The mssccprj.scc file is a text file and it will contain the VSS bindings for the solution and project files that are in the same directory as the mssccprj.scc file.

In Visual Studio 2005, project files by default use the special ‘SAK’ string in the project file settings for VSS bindings. SAK indicates to Visual Studio that the bindings in the mssccprj.scc file should be used. The mssccprj.scc bindings are based on the directory retrieved from Source Safe. This means that shared project files just work. Yay.

In 2005 the problem is with solution files.

More specifically the problem is with solution files that include project files that are not in the same directory as the solution file. Creating a MyHelloWorld project will create a MyHelloWorld.sln and a MyHelloWorld.csproj in a MyHelloWorld directory. The .sln will reference the .csproj by name only and both files will have bindings in the mssccprj.scc file in the same directory and that all works without issue. But create a blank solution and add multiple existing projects to it and Visual Studio 2005 reverts to storing specific VSS bindings for the projects in the solution file.

There’s a work-around but it doesn’t work for parenting paths. Any time a solution references a project where the path to the project file starts with ‘..’, Visual Studio will revert to storing a VSS binding in the solution file. Because of this limitation it becomes convenient to have a convention that solution files generally go in the root of the code base tree.

The goal is to get the VSS bindings out of the solution file and have Visual Studio rely on the mssccprj.scc file. I haven’t found a reliable way to do this from within the IDE with existing projects but the solution (.sln) files are just text files, so I hack them.

Here’s a snippet from a .sln file. In Source Safe, the solution file is in “$/CodeBase v1”. There are two projects: a class library and a windows application. The SccProjectName<N> values are bindings to specific locations in the source safe repository. These are the bindings that need to be removed.

Global
	GlobalSection(SourceCodeControl) = preSolution
		SccNumberOfProjects = 3
		SccLocalPath0 = .
		SccProjectUniqueName1 = ClassLibrary1\\ClassLibrary1.csproj
		SccProjectName1 = \u0022$/CodeBase\u0020v1/ClassLibrary1\u0022,\u0020TAAAAAAA
		SccLocalPath1 = ClassLibrary1
		SccProjectUniqueName2 = WindowsApplication1\\WindowsApplication1.csproj
		SccProjectName2 = \u0022$/CodeBase\u0020v1/WindowsApplication1\u0022,\u0020WAAAAAAA
		SccLocalPath2 = WindowsApplication1
	EndGlobalSection

The .sln file can be edited to remove the SccProjectName<N> values but the SccLocalPath<N> must be updated to ‘.’ and a new property, SccProjectFilePathRelativizedFromConnection<N>, must be added with the old local path value and an appended directory separator.

Global
	GlobalSection(SourceCodeControl) = preSolution
		SccNumberOfProjects = 3
		SccLocalPath0 = .
		SccProjectUniqueName1 = ClassLibrary1\\ClassLibrary1.csproj
		SccLocalPath1 = .
		SccProjectFilePathRelativizedFromConnection1 = ClassLibrary1\\
		SccProjectUniqueName2 = WindowsApplication1\\WindowsApplication1.csproj
		SccLocalPath2 = .
		SccProjectFilePathRelativizedFromConnection2 = WindowsApplication1\\
	EndGlobalSection

Reference: Alin Constantin’s blog: The SAK source control strings in Visual Studio’s project files

Internet Explorer's Maximum URL Length

Note to self: Internet Explorer has a maximum URL size limit of 2,083 characters. Passing a longer URL (like maybe a URL with a dynamically built query string) to IE 7.0 will produce a cryptic error page (even with ‘Friendly’ turned off) that says “Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage” and then misleadingly suggests that the server can not be reached. Don’t waste time troubleshooting network connections or DNS lookups. Don’t be puzzled by why the same URL works in FireFox and Safari.

GrokLaw on Microsoft's Patent threats

Link: Groklaw - Ooh, ooh, the bogeyman is gonna getcha with his stupid patents. Or maybe not..

Microsoft Takes on the Free World

Link: Microsoft claims software like Linux violates its patents - May 28, 2007.

Mark Pilgrim on Apollo and Silverlight

Link: Silly season [dive into mark].

(Via Daring Fireball.)

Quickly Generating a Microsoft Connection String

From the backup brain department:

When I need a connection string or a DSN, a UDL file is a handy way to quickly and accurately generate it. But I can never remember the UDL file extension when I need it.

Link: Creating and Configuring Universal Data Link (.udl) Files.