Visual Studio Setup

Installation and containerization of the Visual Studio family of products

March 2005 - Visual Studio Setup

64-bit Windows is Here

March 31, 2005 Mar 31, 2005 03/31/05
Heath Stewart
Yesterday was a truly remarkable day. Not since Windows NT 3.1 released in 1993 have we seen such a shift in computing on Windows to another architecture. Windows Server 2003 SP1 for x64 and Windows XP Professional for x64 were released to manufacturing (RTM). While Windows Server 2003 was RTM'd for the Intel Itanium (ia64) in March of 2003 as...

Thawte Notary

March 29, 2005 Mar 29, 2005 03/29/05
Heath Stewart
I'm now a Thawte Web of Trust (WOT) notrary and am able to make assertions in person of your identity in order to get your own name on a free Thawte Freemail S/MIME certificate. This is a certificate that allows you to encrypt and sign email message using most email applications available.How does it work? You start by signing up for a free ...

We're Hiring

March 29, 2005 Mar 29, 2005 03/29/05
Heath Stewart
The Customer Product-Lifecycle Experience team - part of the Developer Division of Microsoft - is hiring full time software design engineers (SDEs). We're the team responsible for continuing support for products Developer Division has shipped, as well as a few other projects from Microsoft.We are responsible for not only the patch build system...

Guidelines for COM Interoperability from .NET

March 9, 2005 Mar 9, 2005 03/9/05
Heath Stewart
In developer forums in which I participate I often read and respond to questions asking about COM interoperability (interop) and my reply is almost always the same. There are guidelines - if not rules - for exposing .NET Framework components to COM and they are all based on guidelines for COM development. If you have experience writing COM ...

The Dangers of RunOnce and Run Registry Keys

March 6, 2005 Mar 6, 2005 03/6/05
Heath Stewart
A recent project I worked on was to replace functionality for part of our patching process that runs commands after reboot, a task not too uncommon for installers - most notably because files were in use when the installers ran. Typically when files are in use installers such as Windows Installer and many proprietary installers will schedule a...

New Locale-dependent C Runtime Functions

March 6, 2005 Mar 6, 2005 03/6/05
Heath Stewart
In "POSIX" style locale support on Windows?, Michael Kaplan, the Technical Lead for Windows Globalization, describes the existing locale-dependent functions in the C Runtime (CRT) as "unwieldy". To compare strings, for example, using a different locale than is currently set for the process or thread you must call setlocale() to ...