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IIS Express is a great addition to the tools for .NET web developers; it allow a slightly cut down copy of IIS 7.5 to be run without administrative privileges on a developer’s PC. This means we can hopefully get away from the problems associated by either Using Cassini – which is not IIS and does not do any clever Using full IIS which means Visual Studio has to run as administrator to debug it and also causes source control issues when a project is shared between multiple developers (their IIS setup must match up) If you install Visual Studio 2010 SP1 and IIS express you now get a new option, that is to use IIS express as your web server. This, via a few clicks, can be configured for SSL and should address 90%+ of the needs of most developers. Once a project is set to use IIS express the key properties are set via the VS Property windows ...

I got round to installing Visual Studio 2010 SP1 on my laptop last night; well I started last night via the Web Platform Installer method. It downloaded the bits fast but sat for ages on the first step, installing the actual service pack. There was no obvious activity on the CPU or disk. In the end I gave waiting and went to bed. I was pleased to see it was finished this morning. ...

If you try to create an automated TFS build of a Windows Phone 7 Silverlight application on a ‘default installed’ build agent you will see errors along the lines of The imported project “C:Program FilesMSBuildMicrosoftSilverlight for Phonev4.0Microsoft.Silverlight.WindowsPhone.Overrides.targets” was not found. Confirm that the path in the declaration is correct, and that the file exists on disk. This is because the PC your build agent is running on does not have the WP7 SDK installed. ...

For those who have not noticed, DDD Scotland’s registration is now open at http://developerdeveloperdeveloper.com/scotland2011/Default.aspx. Sad to say my proposed session did not get accepted, but that just means I have the chance to see more sessions myself!

At the end of the month I will be speaking at a series of free Microsoft events in Belfast and Dublin. There going to be two session at each location Managing application lifecycle “From requirements to retirement” with Team Foundation Server 2010 Dublin - 31/03/2011 (AM): https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032480694&Culture=en-IE Belfast – 01/04/2011 (AM): https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032480760&Culture=en-IE Better testing with lower costs - Saving your teams time and resources using Visual Studio 2010 and Microsoft Test Manager ...

Further to yesterdays post on new bits for VS and TFS 2010, there is now some guidance to what order to apply SP1 to server and clients.

I am doing some work on VS2008 at present and I when I started my VS2008, which I had not used for a while, I was plagued by errors along the lines of “The operation could not be completed”. These occurred when running major features such as: Loading LINQ to SQL Designer Running the SQL 2008 Project Wizard The fix turned out to be resetting the package skip loading flag. It seems a number of add-ins were not being loaded on startup. This command is run from the “Visual Studio 2008 Command Prompt” by typing ...

Today we have seen the release of the Visual Studio 2010 SP1 and the TFS-Project Server Integration Feature Pack. Both are available on the MSDN download site. As well was the new downloads they have announced a change to licensing over Load Test Agent. This gives Visual Studio Ultimate with MSDN users the ability to do unlimited load testing. No longer do you need to purchase Load Test Packs, thus making load testing an option for more teams. ...

Many development teams hit the problem that they have dependencies on libraries that they do not want to have as part of their solutions. If these dependencies are open source projects then there are options using technologies like NuGet or OpenWrap. However, in many cases the dependency is to an internal project, such as the company standard logging library, which it is never going to put up into a centralised repository. So normally you end up with either: ...

The March 2011 version of the TFS Power Tools has been released. There are plenty of fixes and enhancements, especially to the TFS backup tool. For more details have a look at Brian Harry’s blog.