SQL Server 2008 Install Problems with VS2008 SP1 installed

• Posted by mcbeev on October 30, 2008
• 0 comments

Phew! That's quite the title for a blog post. This week I decided to take the plunge and upgrade my main work machine to SQL Server 2008 because SSIS finally supports C# Script Tasks in it.

So After hunting and pecking through all the install screens I finally got to the main pre-install tests. And to my surprise the installer died on the VSShellInstalledRule rule. This is strange because its telling me that I don't have the RTM SP1 installed for Studio, which I have had for a couple months now.

So after checking out this blog post, I still was having no luck,  and no I have never installed any express editions on this machine.

Now this was starting to annoy me. Other fixes I found, including this MSKB support article told me I should uninstall VS 2008 all the way and start over, or not install the BI tools with SQL 2008. Ummm I don't think so.

You see I work various .Net projects for multiple clients. The headache of uninstalling Studio and re-setting up everything gives me nightmares. And the tools are one of the great reasons to upgrade in the first place.

After searching through a ton of install logs, I finally found it referencing some registry keys (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\DevDiv\VS\Servicing\9.0) that said RTM and not SP1. Ah ha I thought. I manually changed them to SP1 and re-ran the check. It worked! or so I thought. The check passed but after running the installation it errored on installing the tools.

After more googling I saw that someone had problems with the TFS plugin to studio. That was the next to go, but again the install errored.

So I started checking other plugins and after un-installing Visual Studio Tools for Applications the installation actually worked.

Wow what a headache.

So if you have the same problem the summary is, un-install any express editions, and / or any old plugins to 2008.

Google's Browser: Chrome

• Posted by Mcbeev on September 2, 2008
• 0 comments

This morning when I saw the news about a new browser being released I thought to myself.  Awww #$%^%, thats all's I need is another stupid rendering engine to write code for. Not even 20 mins later my client came in and said hey did you see the thing about the new Google browser ? Again @#$$#@, and I waived him out of the room and told him not to get excited about such things because it would just cause him to have to have me work more.

However, I was wrong, dead wrong.

After reading the introduction here. I was impressed, even if was in comic book style.

So I fired up the download over at google.com, and got it installed on my home machine here.

I have more testing to do, but so far it seems snappy, and I really like the start page and UI improvements. It would be real interesting to see if I could hookup the Visual Studio debugger or something to this and see what the performance is really like. More review to come later.

Edit 1: Just found a problem with ASP.NET's AJAX Extensions. Modal Popup doesnt quite work right. Maybe I shouldnt get so excited. 

Edit 2: It does have a built in DOM Inspector, Memory Footprint viewer and Javascript console. So many points for that.

Edit 3: The opening speed is very impressive, and I like the default home page with the 9 most recent viewed pages as well.

Very true

• Posted by mcbeev on September 2, 2008
• 0 comments

C# KeyValuePair Tip: where are my keys again...

• Posted by Mcbeev on July 9, 2008
• 0 comments

I had a small crazy issue today with a web app that I'm working on dealing with looking up keys and values in a C# KeyValuePair<string, Guid> generic object.

I was using it to look in a Dictionary<string, Guid> of users. Makes sense to populate dropdowns with on the server, and use as a callback in cache to not have to look at the database every page load right ?

For some reason it was not finding some Keys, or users in my case, and finding others. I narrowed it down to when you log in, what you type might not match the case that the system has for you.

And sure enough when I logged in with mcbeev it was not finding Mcbeev. That's pretty strange I thought, SQL isn't case sensitive. Ah but the default Dictionary<T, T> uses whatever the default comparison operator for string is.

I was using the following

C#-Code:

Dictionary<string, Guid> dict = new Dictionary<string, Guid>();

And after switching to

C#-Code:

Dictionary<string, Guid> dict = new Dictionary<string, Guid>(StringComparer.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase);

Viola! it worked. I had never bothered looking at the other constructors for Dictionary<T,T>. One of them allows you to pass whatever kind of comparer your heart desires.