Visual Studio Setup

Installation and containerization of the Visual Studio family of products

Setting up Visual Studio 2005 to Download Debug Symbols

In Getting Debug Symbols even for Retail Builds I detailed how to set up your machine and Visual Studio .NET to download public symbols from Microsoft's symbol server. This process has changed for Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2. When debugging your projects it's often helpful or even necessary to see the functions in the call stack. Without symbols...

Getting Debug Symbols even for Retail Builds

Here inside Microsoft we of course have access to private debug symbols to help debug issues like I do in Windows Script as a member of the Customer Product-lifecycle Experience (CPX) team. We use a host of debugging tools like Windbg.exe, ntsd.exe, and even Visual Studio .NET. You can even download some of these debugging tools and related ...

x64 Windows Platforms have Shipped

Not so long ago, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 for x64 were released to manufacturing (RTM'd). Today, they have finally shipped and are available to consumers, but you won't find these yet on retail sales shelves.Windows XP Professional x64 Edition is available on x64 machines now, and users with x64 machines now can exchange their 32-bit...

Themes Fixed in .NET Framework 2.0 Beta 2

Surely by now you've seen the news on the Blogs.msdn.com homepage that both .NET Framework 2.0 Beta 2 and Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 (both also known as "Whidbey Beta 2") have been released, so I won't mention it. ;)I do want to share, however, after having written an article a long time ago entitled Windows XP Visual Styles for Windows Forms1...

Windows Installer 3.1 Redistributable Available

Windows Installer 3.1 is now available as a redistributable from the Microsoft Download Center. Among the changes are support for MSIs targeting x64 platforms, which I described in a previous blog entry; some fixes for source resolution problems; and opt-in behavior for flyweight patching, which would've been a major burden for the Customer ...

64-bit Windows is Here

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...

We're Hiring

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

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

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

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 ...