How is your VS 2010 Experience?

The team back in Redmond is really interested in hearing your feedback on any experiences you are willing to share about Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2. To facilitate this they have created a survey that you can access here.

For more information refer to Jeff Beehler's blog posting.

Documentation Problem VSTS 2010 Beta 2

During the install of Visual Studio 2010 Beta I ran into a problem when I tried to install the documentation. This would be the big blue button that comes after the product has completed installing. I didn't grab a screenshot but if you've installed the product you should know what I'm talking about. When I tried to install the documentation I received an error complaining about not being able to find the files despite them being exactly where I said they were. Harumph.

So after this I tried to correct the problem by selecting the "Manage Help Settings" from the "Help" menu in Visual Studio. I got the following error:


After clicking the "OK" button the "Help Library Manager" opened with only the top menu option available to me.

Clicking the "Choose Online or Local Help" option took me to the following screen which didn't really help me out at all. Neither option made any difference.

I was fortunate enough to have some other help available in the form of a Microsoft Help engineer that showed me a nice little addition. If you browse to C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Help\v3.0 you should see a file named HelpLibManager.exe.config. This is the configuration file for the help manager. Open this configuration file and check the "FirstTimeRun" setting. If it's False change it to True and then run the HelpLibManager.exe found in the dame directory.

With the change in setting when I ran the HelpLibManager this time I got the fully enabled menu selection and was able select the "Find content on disk" option, point it to my installation file location and it ran to completion.

I now have the full help enabled in my shiny new Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2. It is a work of art!

Wireless Network on Windows Server 2008 R2

Problems getting Wireless adapters working on Windows Server 2008 R2? Here's my story that might help.

This past week I was staying with my friends the Sterlings in Redmond WA while attending the

Development Tools Ecosystem Summit. After checking into Hotel Sterling I opened my laptop to install Visual Studio 2010 B2, which is AWESOME, and Chuck asked my why I was using Server 2008 and not Server 2008 R2! Good grief I am behind the times. Sheesh!

So that became another of my tasks while I was there. I downloaded the media for R2 and proceeded to install R2 on a new partition so that I could dual boot into my old OS as well as the new one. The installation went very well and we were eventually faced with an installed and mostly operative laptop (Lenovo W500) but I didn't have any wireless access.

These days, when not in the office, I work almost exclusively off of a wireless connection. At home I'm on a wireless network exclusively and at the conference and the Sterlings I was also on a wireless network. It's just the way things are now. So when I didn't have the right drivers for my wireless card that was priority number 1! Chuck was on the Lenovo/IBM site immediately and pulled down the driver for me and we installed it. Reboot. No Wireless. Hmmm, it shows up correctly when looking at the adapters but there wasn't any options to select any wireless connections.

So we tried a different driver. Same thing. Both drivers we tried identified the adapter exactly the same. We booted back into my other OS to check the settings and it was exactly the same. What's going on here? This went on for some time until I eventually called it a night.

The next day, always sleep on these things, it will help, Chuck came to me and asked if I had added the wireless service to my laptop. Wireless service? What I had been missing this entire time was the Wireless Lan Feature on my install! D'oh!

Once that was installed all was as it should be.