Thomas Gifford: Protector

I started reading Thomas Gifford quite a while ago and delayed to finish the book somewhere in the second part.

As I think to remember, the story was quite interesting at the beginning, but was a bit boring when Rodger Godwin told what he has done when he lived in Paris somewhen in the late 1920s. While toiling myself to read through this part the story gets a new drive at some point at gets more interesting till it was so interesting that I even can't stop reading.

But let's look a bit at the story. It's basically playing in the time of World War 2. The main person is a journalist, called Rodger Goodwin who is from Iowa in the US. Together with his old friend Max Hood who is working for the english intelligence service, he starts an attack on the Wüstenfuchs Erwin Rommel. This attack is quite a disaster. Max Hood and all the other people in this operation die. Only Rodger Goodwin survives the attack. The whole operation was betrayed at the Germans. Now the story gets really interesting as Rodger is under suspicion, but the reader knows that there are maybe at least two other persons involved: Cilla Hood, the wife of Max and also the concubine of Rodger and Monk Vardan, the helping hand of the premier Winston Churchill and also a good friend of Max and Rodger.

At the end, I really enjoyed this story and I think it was worth buying.

How to remove a WebPart from SharePoint page with errors

I just ran into the problem that I added a WebPart to my SharePoint page that causes an error. With this error I'm not able to remove the WebPart from the page because I cannot access the administration page.

I found some working hints in Coskun Cavusoglu's blog.

So just add ?contents=1 to your url and you'll be redirected to the managing mode of the page. Another way would be to call /_layouts/spcontnt.aspx?&url=[relative url to the page with errors].

Solved WiX v3 - votive problems

I now solved my wix v3 votive problems with newer builds of wix. The problem was that from a specific wix build on, the standard configuration was changed from any cpu to x86 and any cpu was not longer supported. I used my old .wixproj without change in newer version without discovering any problems.

When I changed to 3.0.4220.0, the TFS source control was not working any longer for the wix project itself but also causes the automatic checkout of items in other project types to not work.

After changing all any cpu references to x86 in my .wixproject everything worked fine.

It's really weird that this caused the TFS source control to not work correctly anymore.

Btw this is reproducable, so it's not just a hazard that it works now.

Robert Harris: Imperium

Imperium, a novel of ancient rome, is the next great novel from Robert Harris which plays in the time of Caesar, Cicero and Pompeijus Magnus. It shows the way of Cicero from first getting a senator and his way upwards in the hierarchy of ancient Rome. A major point is the process against Verres.

Personally, I really loved this novel. It's one of the best titles from Robert Harris. It is perfectly combinig fictional elements with real history.

Visual Studio Developer Clinic

If you ever get the chance to go to the Visual Studio Developer Clinic at Microsoft in Redmond use it! It's a fantastic event. You'll get to know a lot of people working on all the stuff, we're complaining about ;-) And they know that it's painful to work with it and they know really great hacks.

IzPack now supports InstallerRequirements

The current trunk version of IzPack now supports the so called installer requirements. This means that it's now possible to define requirements for being able to start the installation. E.g. if a certain user has to start the installer, this will be checked by using a UserCondition with an installer requirement. If the condition is not fulfilled, a message will be shown and the installer exits.

WiX v3 - votive problems

The newest weekly build of WiX v3 3.0.4220.0 causes some problems in Visual Studio 2008 if you're using the votive integration.
In my installation, votive reproducable causes problems with sourcecontrol integration. I'm using the TFS Client. After installing votive, automatic checkout while editing is not working anymore in any project. In the votive project itself, almost every button for TFS is disabled.

Hope the next version of WiX is better, as WiX is a fantastic installer generator for the windows world.

Article Flexible installations with IzPack in Java Magazin 07.08

I published an article about flexible installations with IzPack 3.11 in the current issue (07.08) of Java Magazin. Full quellcode for a sample project is included.

IzPack 4.0 released

The next version of IzPack was released today. It's the first one developed within the codehaus infrastructure.
For a feature overview click here.

Visual Studio 2008 SDK Goodies #3

Here's another goodie from the Visual Studio 2008 SDK. In
ProjectNode.CopyPaste.cs in the namespace Microsoft.VisualStudio.Package you'll find the following code snippet:

StringBuilder selectionContent = null;

// If there is a selection package the data
if (selectedNodes.Count > 1)
{
foreach (HierarchyNode node in selectedNodes)
{
selectionContent = node.PrepareSelectedNodesForClipBoard();
if (selectionContent != null)
{
sb.Append(selectionContent);
}
}
}
else if (selectedNodes.Count == 1)
{
HierarchyNode selectedNode = selectedNodes[0];
selectionContent = selectedNode.PrepareSelectedNodesForClipBoard();
if (selectionContent != null)
{
sb.Append(selectionContent);
}
}


Why do we need this if - else if construct? Does the foreach for a list with zero or one element not work?

How to add a Wizard to a Visual Studio 2008 Project Template

Following the description in How to: Use Wizards with Project Templates I always got this "Error: this template attempted to load an untrusted component" error.

I added my assembly to the GAC and built it with a strong name. I finally found a solution to this problem. My -tag was missing processorArchitecture=msil part.

CustomWizard, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=Neutral, PublicKeyToken=74329847392 didn't work, but
CustomWizard, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=Neutral, PublicKeyToken=74329847392,processorArchitecture=MSIL did just fine.

Visual Studio 2008 SDK Goodies #2

In ProjectOptions.cs in the Managed Package Framework of Visual Studio 2008 SDK you'll find funny field definitions, e.g.:

/// must be an int if not null
public object CodePage;

Why don't they just define it as an int and define some value or exception indicating, that CodePage is not set?

Visual Studio 2008 SDK Goodies #1

When working with the Visual Studio 2008 SDK I found several remarkable places in the documentation and also in the source code of the MPF (Managed Package Framework). I'll post them in this blog the next days.

Today's Goodie can be found in several differnt Interfaces which have to be implemented for integrating into Visual Studio. You'll find a whole bunch of interfaces with reserved1() to reserved10() and unused1() to unused10() methods.

E.g. in IVsTextLines:

Reserved1	Reserved in the Vtable for future use. (Inherited from IVsTextBuffer.)
Reserved2	Reserved in the Vtable for future use. (Inherited from IVsTextBuffer.)
...	...
Reserved10	Reserved in the Vtable for future use. (Inherited from IVsTextBuffer.)

That's really awesome. Don't the guy's in the different teams at Microsoft know each other?

How to identify menus and commands in Visual Studio 2008

From Visual Studio 2005 SP1 on, there's an undocumented registry switch to enable debug messages which show the guid and id of a selected menu or command. To enable this hidden switch, you'll have to add a dword registry entry under [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\General] which is called EnableVSIPLogging. It should have a value of 0x00000001 (hexadecimal 1).

After restarting Visual Studio 2008, you can now identify menus and commands by pressing STRG+SHIFT and clicking on the menu or command.

For instructions on enabling this for Visual Studio 2005, see this article.

VSCT file format in Visual Studio 2008 SDK

Hilton Giesenow has made a fantastic How to video about the new vsct-file format which Microsoft is using in Visual Studio 2008 SDK. In contrast to other how to videos, just showing how to use the VsPackage wizard, Hilton shows every step manually. So you'll get a fare good understanding on each part.

You can find the video here.