Visual Studio solution files that refuse to open

By Luke Bennett | Published: July 23, 2010

I just came across an issue with Visual Studio 2010 solutions not opening directly from the filesystem. When you hover over the icon the tooltip indicates that the version is unrecognised and double clicking / pressing enter results in nothing happening – no error message, nothing. This is despite the fact that 2010 is the only version of Visual Studio that I have on the machine.

Turns out the solution had LF line endings rather than CR/LF (thanks to a mixup with Git’s autocrlf “feature”) and the Visual Studio version selector (which .sln files are mapped to in order to ensure they open in the correct version of the IDE) chokes on this apparently.

Simple bug you might think – easy enough to fix for the next release… except this was first reported back in 2006 (3.5 years and 2 versions ago!) and is deemed by Microsoft as not worth fixing! I know small bugs can sometimes be complicated to resolve, and they also have to take their place in the priority list, but still… Feel free to pop over to the bug report and add your vote for Microsoft to do something about it!

In the meantime, one solution (pardon the pun) is to skip the version selector and map .sln files to devenv.exe directly. Felt a bit hacky to me though, so I manually cleaned up the file by converting the line endings to CR/LF and removing blank whitespace at the top (not sure why it was there or why it mattered but it was and it did!). This resulted in the version selector correctly opening the solution in the IDE.

Posted in Fixes, Visual Studio | 2 Responses

Shedding pounds with Sumatra PDF

By Luke Bennett | Published: June 14, 2010

I recently got a new laptop and have been keen to keep it as bloat-free as possible. The other day I needed to view a PDF for the first time and decided that I really didn’t want to sacrifice 335MB of my nice shiny SSD to Adobe Reader. I figured there had to be a leaner, meaner way of opening PDFs (you’d think Windows would support it natively by now) so I hunted around and came across the open source Sunatra PDF.

Weighing in at under 1.7MB it consists of a single EXE file with no installer required (though one is available if desired). I was able to download it via my mobile and get the PDF up within no time at all – bliss! I’m now going to stick it in my Dropbox folder and on my USB drive so I always have it with me.

If you need pixel-perfect precision then perhaps this isn’t your thing – its rendering isn’t always perfect and doesn’t have as many features as Adobe Reader as you’d expect. But if you just need to view the contents of a PDF and don’t really care about the odd glitch here and there then it’s definitely worth a try.

Posted in Tools | Tagged | 2 Responses

Dealing with UI issues in Visual Studio 2010

By Luke Bennett | Published: June 4, 2010

One of the “features” of Visual Studio 2010 is an overhauled UI, powered by WPF. Whilst this might make for some nice eye candy it’s also led to some incredibly frustrating display issues which I know I’m not alone in experiencing.

I’ve been finding that the file I’m currently working on will randomly stop responding to mouse input – continued keyboard input is fine, and I can access menus, toolbars, other documents etc with the mouse. I often get strange flickering going on, with inactive files randomly flashing and disappearing again. I’ve even had tabs that have refused to close. Generally the UI feels quite laggy and less responsive than Visual Studio 2008.

Oh and in case you think I’m trying to run this on a netbook or something, my workstation is an 8 core Mac Pro with 4GB RAM and an ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT graphics card (whilst not for your hardcore gamer it’s perfectly capable).

I’ve discovered that disabling hardware acceleration within the Visual Studio options appears to speed things up considerably and so far I haven’t experienced any of the aforementioned quirks. The setting in question is:

Environment > General > Visual experience > Use hardware graphics acceleration if available

If the setting “Automatically adjust visual experience based on client performance” is ticked then you will need to untick it first.

As ever, your mileage may vary depending on your hardware capabilities, but this has certainly helped me out and saved me from ripping out any more of my hair!

Posted in Fixes, Visual Studio | 1 Response

Visual Studio silently crashing

By Luke Bennett | Published: April 6, 2010

If you have an issue with Visual Studio 2008 crashing suddenly and without warning, try clearing your native image cache using the following commands at the VS command prompt:

ngen /delete *
ngen update

Worked for me when VS started crashing every time I opened a view after upgrading MVC 2 from RC2 to RTM.

Posted in Fixes, Visual Studio | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Windows Phone 7 Series – the balloon just went pop

By Luke Bennett | Published: March 17, 2010

I’m currently a Windows Mobile user, and whilst the platform has serious shortcomings and annoyances, I’ve been happy to persevere with those due to its openness. Anything I haven’t liked I’ve usually been able to tinker with and address via my own tweaks or third party ones.

Like most WinMo users, I’ve been looking forward with great anticipation to Windows Phone 7 Series which Microsoft recently announced at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. This was the brand new platform that everybody has been hoping for; a complete break from the past, and hence an opportunity to put everything right. From initial impressions, not only had it put those things right, but it actually exceeded all expectations! Microsoft receiving plaudits for their mobile platform, seriously?!

But of course, as ever, the devil is in the detail, and that detail has been gradually trickling out during their MIX conference this week. And whilst much of what they’ve had to say has been very impressive, sadly a lot of the detail is downright depressing. From what I’ve gathered so far there will be no support for:

* It will be possible to side-load applications to your own phone if you’re a developer enrolled in developer program (which costs)

Spot the pattern above – these are all features that WinMo had that other platforms didn’t. This is what prompted people to stick around and use it despite the flashiness of the iPhone. Substance over style. And what are these loyal users getting in return for keeping the platform alive? Two fingers.

Microsoft are basically ditching the entire WinMo community and going chasing after the iPhone users who, ironically, have been gradually receiving many of the much-lacked features like copy and paste that have been the cause of much of its criticisms! It seems to me that Microsoft have basically taken a near-perfect OS and thrown in all the iPhone’s bad points. Consequently I for one no longer feel inclined to buy one when it comes out, and it seems that many others agree. Even though Microsoft have said that some of these issues will be addressed in future versions of the product, are power users really going to wait another year or more for that? Haven’t we had to wait long enough already?

The question is, can anything be done about it? A petition has been set up in response to these problems, but will that be enough? One suspects not. Yet if Microsoft loves its designer and developer community as much as it’s been claiming to at MIX this week, you’d think they’d respect their input. Sadly though, it seems that disenfranchising the people who kept WinMo alive during these last few torrid years is a price they’re happy to pay as they rush to market and  go seeking after the “dumb” consumer.

I thought Microsoft had redeemed themselves with WP7S. Seems I was wrong.

Posted in Rants, Windows Phone | Tagged , | 1 Response