As expected (wait a second, does that mean Microsoft actually stuck to the announced release schedule? I guess they did...) the first Service Pack for Visual Studio 2005 was released at the end of last week. From the Visual Studio Developer Center web site you can get to the download links for the different Visual Studio Editions (including Express) as well as the Service Pack for Team Foundation Server (TFS) which was released at the same time. Update: While trying to find more information on the actual bugs that have been fixed in the Service Pack I stumbled over Leslie Giblett's blog...

In an unexpected move Microsoft created a website with download links for available Visual Studio 2005 hot fixes that were previously available only through Microsoft Developer Support. This is great news because there was little visibility over what hot fixes existed for certain problems with Visual Studio. The list of available hot fixes for download can be found here. Some of them address corner cases which don't affect a lot of people, but if you are one of the corner case users it's great to finally get it fixed. As a side note, Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2005 has...

This post describes how to compile and debug a web application using IIS7 instead of the built-in web server that comes with Visual Studio 2005. The built-in server should work right out of the box without any further configuration. While this post can pretty much be applied to any ASP.NET web application, I am writing it specifically for the source code of the open source blogging engine Subtext and as a third installment on my blog posts about how to install Subtext on Windows Vista and IIS7. Most people that set up Subtext on a machine are likely to compile...

Mary Jo Foley is currently doing a series of blog articles every day in December where she writes about a codename for an upcoming (or rumored about) Microsoft product. My plan is to distill her articles into this posting with the most interesting facts, which will be updated once a week or so as she adds more codenames to the list. It will be interesting to see a year from now which projects made it into a final product. Update: The article series is now done and this posting is complete. While codenames have been used for all kinds of products...

After writing my lengthy installation post on how to get Subtext up and running on IIS7 using a Virtual Directory, I want to follow up now with some quick instructions on how to configure a new web site in IIS7 for use with Subtext. It seems like Microsoft heard the pleas of all web application developers who were asking for the same thing: To not cripple IIS for the desktop versions of the operating system. While in previous versions the ability to configure more than one website on IIS was limited to the server versions of the respective operating systems (Windows...

Introduction Since I am into cutting edge technology I would like to showcase something that has caught my attention periodically (meaning whenever I have time to write about it without actually setting a fixed interval) to give everyone a snapshot of cool/new emerging technologies which might become the standards of tomorrow and which might be worth considering for future projects. For this showcase I have chosen Microsoft WPF/E, which has garnered a lot of attention lately in blogs [1], [2] and press [3] and which marks an important milestone with the recent release of the December CTP [4]. WPF What? One of the pillars of the...

After going through some trouble to get my Subtext blog running on a Windows Vista installation with SQL Server 2005 I decided to write this how-to so that hopefully other people don't have to go through the same problems. The instructions explain how to set up Subtext as a Virtual Directory. I also wrote two other articles related to Subtext installation: How to set up Subtext with its own web site instance (like I did with blog.needforgeek.com) on IIS7, and How to compile and debug the Subtext source code on Vista using Visual Studio 2005. This how-to is split into two parts: Part 1...

Here we go, yet another blog to add to the blogosphere! I say add because I hope and believe that I can add something to the community with my posts and thoughts. What community you ask? Well, being a software developer in Silicon Valley most of my posts will be about development problems that I have proudly solved, or other tidbits that I found interesting enough to write about. But I will also mix in more personal posts about riding my motorcycle or my travels throughout the world. We will see how it goes! In the title of this post I...