Download Tips
Thrilling downloads for .NET developers.
You urgently need a tool to undelete files you accidentally deleted?
I had the situation and was quite happy with Undelete Plus. It's free and you don't need to install it.
Enjoy!
Microsoft released a hotfix [1] for Visual Studio 2008 (also targeting Visual Web Developer Express) that corrects several issues with the web development features.
At this time the hotfix is only available for the English and Japanese versions.
List of things that were corrected according to this post [2] by Vinaya Reddy:
HTML Source view performance
- Source editor freezes for a few seconds when typing in a page with a custom control that has more than two levels of sub-properties.
- “View Code” right-click context menu command takes a long time to appear with web application projects.
- Visual Studio has very slow behavior when opening large HTML documents.
- Visual Studio has responsiveness issues when working with big HTML files with certain markup.
- The Tab/Shift-Tab (Indent/Un-indent) operation is slow with large HTML selections.
Design view performance
- Slow typing in design view with certain page markup configurations.
HTML editing
- Quotes are not inserted after Class or CssClass attribute even when the option is enabled.
- Visual Studio crashes when ServiceReference element points back to the current web page.
JavaScript editing
- When opening a JavaScript file, colorization of the client script is sometimes delayed several seconds.
- JavaScript Intellisense does not work if an empty string property is encountered before the current line of editing.
Web Site build performance
- Build is very slow when Bin folder contains large number of assemblies and .refresh files with web-site projects.
Make sure to read the installation instructions at [2].
Enjoy!
[1] https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=10826
[2] http://blogs.msdn.com/webdevtools/archive/2008/02/09/downloadable-hotfix-performance-and-editor-fixes-for-microsoft-visual-studio-2008-and-visual-web-developer-express-2008.aspx
Forwarded this great news from the Official SBS Blog:
[Today's post comes to us courtesy of Mark Stanfill]
There is a new patch available for Outlook 2007 that fixes performance issues with large PSTs/OSTs. We highly recommend applying this patch on all systems with Outlook 2007 installed. If you are preparing a new installation, this patch should be applied in addition to the steps outlined in http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;926505 .
Direct Download:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c262bcfd-1e09-49b6-9003-c4c47539df66&DisplayLang=en
KB article:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=933493
The Power Tools are always a must-have download. Although they are 'officially unspported' they give you funcionality upfront that is probably going to be in the next version of Visual Studio.
New and added features include:
- Team Foundation Server Power Tool Commands (tfpt.exe) - A command-line tool with enhanced functionality for Team Foundation Version Control with graphical user interfaces for some commands.
- Process Template Editor - A tool integrated with Visual Studio for authoring custom work item types and some of the associated process template components.
- Check-In Policy Pack - A set of handy check-in policies to address needs customers have expressed. These include Custom Path Policy, Forbidden Patterns Policy, Changeset Comments Policy, and Work Item Query Policy.
- Test Tools Build Task - A tool that allows running unit tests by simply specifying the DLLs, or by specifying a file name pattern in TfsBuild.proj, instead of using .vsmdi files to specify tests to run.
Read more here.
Download here.
Discuss here.
Working inside of MS Project and getting your data synchronized with TFS is a great thing. But there might be a reason why you want to access the work item details form and until now you needed to start Visual Studio 2005, invoke the Team Explorer, look for the exact same work item etc.
Ognjen Bajic, a fellow VSTS MVP, made that easier for uns with his great add-in for MS Project.
If you use MS Project today to work with TFS you'll love it.
If you build DirectX applications or serious games using DirectX and want to use the benefits of the .NET Framework, then XNA is the way to go.
The XNA Framework is a class library built upon the .NET Framework 2.0. Right now only the Express Edition of the Developer IDE is available. XNA can target Windows as well as XBox.
(Note: the previous Managed DirectX class library was depricated by Microsoft.)
- Microsoft XNA Game Studio Express 1.0
XNA Game Studio Express enables hobbyists, academics, and small, independent game developers to easily create video games for Windows and the Xbox 360 console. Requires an Express Edition of Visual Studio. - Microsoft XNA Framework Redistributable 1.0
The XNA Framework Redistributable provides game developers with the XNA Framework runtime libraries that they can include with their product for redistribution on Windows XP.
As Tim Sneath puts it [1], the WPF team made a very special announcement in their WPF3D Team Blog [2] and released the 3D Tools for the Windows Presentation Foundation [3] as a free, open-source download on CodePlex.
These tools allow you to create WPF applications with 3D user interfaces - where you can use the well-known controls like sliders, text boxes, etc. and hit testing, hovering etc. just works!
Hopefully people we will not get the same effect which appeared after the first version of Visual Basic where all buttons got pink just because all of a sudden it was extremly easy to specifiy a color for it...
So use the new feature set wisely and in a decent manner!
[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2006/12/13/new-in-wpf-build-a-true-3d-application.aspx
[2] http://blogs.msdn.com/wpf3d/archive/2006/12/12/interacting-with-2d-on-3d-in-wpf.aspx
[3] http://www.codeplex.com/3DTools
Now available for download:
WARNING: Before Installing TFS SP1
Install the following tool that will stop the TFS service sprior to updating them (otherwise your database might get corrupted as explained here):
Microsoft released an update for enabling .NET Framework 1.1 applications to use the SendKeys command under Windows Vista without experiencing the "Hook cannot be created" error message (as explained in this KB article).
... by downloading:
Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats
Open, edit, and save documents, workbooks, and presentations in the file formats new to Microsoft Office Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007.
from here.
There were a lot of requests in the past months since the PowerToys for the Visual Studio 2005 Class Designer and Distributed System Designers were released, because there were issues with localized, non-US versions of Visual Studio 2005 that these add-in handle correctly.
The great news comes directly from the author dmitriv:
I've just uploaded a Nov 2006 update to release section which should fix the language dependency issue.
To verify that, I did a clean install of Visual Studio 2005 Professional (German) on top of German Windows XP SP2 and verified that it works.
Download the November 2006 release
Read about it, downloaded it, added plug-ins from here, here and here, and love it. :-)
via Christoph Wille's blog:
EasyBCD [1] is a must-have tool for Windows Vista to manage the new bootloader:
[1] http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1
Since Microsoft introduced free versions of the well-known Visual Studio-IDE and SQL Server under the name "Express Editions" other software vendors took the idea and integrated it into their product lines as well. The recent addition is Vanatec's OpenAccess Express [1]: a free version of the professional O/R mapping tool for Visual Studio.
Limitations compared with full version: It supports free databases (SQL Express, Oracle Express, MySQL) only.
[1] www.vanatec.com/express
Finally it's there: the first Version of Microsoft's Anti-Spyware tool called "Windows Defender" which is an integral part of Windows Vista and can now be downloaded separately for Windows XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003 SP1.
Brief Description
Windows Defender is a free program that helps you stay productive by protecting your computer against pop-ups, slow performance and security threats caused by spyware and other potentially unwanted software. Windows Defender no longer supports Windows 2000 as mainstream support ended in June 2005.
[Download] [Homepage]
This is a cross-post from my dedicated VSTS blog.
Included in this release:
-
DSL Tools V1 RTM
-
IronPython web site and web project samples
-
Updated contents and samples for TFS extensibility and Team Test extensibility
-
Managed parser & lexer generator tools
-
Many more IDE integration samples
-
5 new cool PowerToys, including Source Outliner
-
Much more!
Team System-specific content in bold.
[Download]
Team Foundation Power Toys is a collection of productivity tools for Team Foundation Server. Borne from practical experience using Team Foundation Server, they are a mix of command-line and Visual Studio integrated tools for users of version control and work item tracking.
[Download here]
Recommended Reading:
After years of waiting we finally have our own developer font - specially designed for the needs for developers.
The installation package automatically configures it as default font for Visual Studio 2005:
"Consolas is a monospaced font (like an old typewriter) and good for programmers setting code (its core purpose). "
via Damir's Blog
Addendum: Using Consolas as the Windows Console Font
[Download]
WSCF offers a simple yet powerful WSDL Wizard that abstracts away all the nitty-gritty details of WSDL and therefore does not give room for making errors and wrong assumptions just by trying to use and applying everything that can be done stated by the original WSDL specification.
- Full support for Visual Studio 2005 and .NET Framework 2.0
- Generation of partial classes
- Support for Nullable types
- Support for SOAP 1.2 binding
- Pascal case conversion is now optional
- Improved support for generating code from SSL-hosted WSDLs
- The parameter ?wsdl can be configured to return the modeled WSDL
- Option for generating different styles of async calling code
- Option for generating improved data binding code available
- Option for generating List types instead of Collections
- As always - it's free!
Link