New OS from Microsoft!

After reading this post. I’m seriously thinking about upgrading my main dev machine to the new OS from Microsoft.

Edit NAnt build file in Visual Studio 2005 with intellisense

1. install lastest nant from http://nant.sourceforge.net/. Install help: http://nant.sourceforge.net/release/latest/help/introduction/installation.html or search nant.bat.
2. Copy schema file from nant/schema/nant.xsd to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\Packages\schemas\xml\nant.xsd
3. Navigate to  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\Editors\{412B8852-4F21-413B-9B47-0C9751D3EBFB}\Extensions
4. Add a DWORD name of build and value of 29 hex.
5. Create the build file by convention it’s named as project_name.build.
6. Use Visual Studio to open the file and add the following:
   <?xml version=”1.0″?>
   <project name=”your_project_name” default=”build” basedir=”.” xmlns=”http://nant.sf.net/release/0.85/nant.xsd”>
   </project> Make sure the xmlns attribute matches your namespace in the nand.xsd file.
7. Save and close it then open it again. Now you should have intellisense

Visual Studio Productivity Tools

1. Power Toys for Visual Studio http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/aa718340.aspx.

Visual Studio 2008 Shell

Started to play with the Visual Studio 2008 Shell, I want to see if I can use it has a base UI for all my internal programs. Immediately I encountered several problems. They are not big problems but it makes me feel that it’s beta quality instead of released product. I’m using released version of both Visual Studio 2008 Professional and Visual Studio 2008 SDK.

Here are the problems that I saw:  

1. Creating new isolation mode project will create two projects with weird names. $ProjectName$ and $ProjectName$UI. These looks like internal names used by the codegen that should have been replaced. Creating a new solution does not have this problem.
2. If the Visual Studio is not an elevated process the build succeeds but when debugging the project there is an error saying component cannot be found. Changing the Visual Studio to run by administrator and rebuilding the projects will fix it.
3. When I try to close the application the first time I debug it, it tries to merge the help files. It took few minutes before I have to kill it. When I ran it again, it closed fine.