Visual Studio 2008 RTM Installed

November 20, 2007 @ 2:05 pm- from Maui, Hawaii

Downloaded Visual Studio 2008 late yesterday and I'm happy to report that installation went fairly painlessly. Amazingly the downloads were coming down at a 500+kb/sec so the actual 3.5 gig download only took a few hours. That's some bandwidth Microsoft must be throwing at these downloads <g>.

I've done a bunch of uninstalls and reinstalls from Beta 2 (to RC and now to RTM) and they've all gone pretty well with a few minor hiccups.

The best way I've found to do the Beta 2 uninstall is to:

Uninstall the Sql Server Compact 3.5 stuff
Uninstall all the .NET 3.5 Compact Framework stuff
Uninstall the Visual Studio Web Authoring Component

then..

Uninstall Visual Studio

I've found that the separate uninstalls ensure that you don't start the monster un-install process before dependent components that are required have been cleared out <s>...

I also ran into a weird problem with the Beta 2 uninstall both on my dev machine and on my live server: When the .NET 3.5 Framework uninstalls a dialog pops up that complains about running applications. The list of programs includes - itself. Setup.exe and the installer runtimes show up. Nice! If you see this dialog clear out any other things (such as Internet Explorer, Outlook etc.) and Retry and you should be able to get past this even though the list is not cleared. The first time I did this I made the mistake of killing the requested PIDs with ProcessManager and it of course killed the running executables. Ooops. Luckily by that time only the 3.5 framework needs to be uninstalled so it was quick to do that last uninstall. If you see that dialog make sure to just Retry if the setup is on the list.

Up and running

Good news for add ins and tools installed during Beta 2: It seems like anything that was installed with Beta 2 still runs without reinstalling. I use CodeRush and Refactor!, Visual SVN and a couple of small plug-ins as well as some of my own plug-ins and all of them worked without any changes in the RTM install. Yay. That saves another hour on reinstalls!

I checked out several existing apps that ran under 3.5 and there are a some issues that require updating especially related to LINQ to SQL. A number of things have changed there - more on that in another post soon.

However, otherwise things are working very well with all of the small little things that were annoying little bugs in Beta 2 fixed. To my huge relief RTM also works with ASP.NET pages that use alternate non-ASPX extensions, which didn't work in Beta 2 and RC. I use that extensively in my FoxPro Web framework tool Web Connection and I'm glad that this was addressed at the last minute. Thanks to Jeff and Omar for getting that in - Phew!

Performance of the environment has also improved considerably especially for the Web designer which is vastly faster loading Web forms including those that require rendering with master pages. First load is still very, very slow as the designer fires up for the first time (especially if you have master pages in your layout), but any subsequent loads of pages - even fairly complex ones - is very fast with only short hesitation. It also looks like Microsoft has finally fixed the property sheet focus issues that have plagued the visual editor since VS 2005 where when you navigated to a new control the property sheet would not reflect the new control (and you often had to explicitly select Properties from the shortcut menu). There's still a significant lag there, but at least it works.

Another final Html Editor/Designer adjustment that I'm really happy about: Microsoft finally changed the behavior of HTML, CSS and JavaScript to be warnings by default with an option to flag them as errors (which was the default before). I vastly prefer not seeing non-build related errors in the error list without having to completely give up the ability to see client side markup and script errors.

Another nice thing is that you can also use the property sheet from markup (this was actually added to VS 2005 with SP1) so when you are editing a control in the markup editor it also shows up in the the property sheet. However, this doesn't provide full access to functionality such as extension properties and other designer features which is kind of a bummer - still need the designer for some tasks (like my wwDatabinder which is an ASP.NET extender control).

Overall the process of upgrading has been smooth and I'm glad that VS 2008 has shipped and I can pretty much ditch VS 2005. Going back to VS 2005 in the last few months have been few and everytime I did I immediately missed some of the new features. With the ability to work on pure .NET 2.0 projects in addition to 3.0 and 3.5 projects with the multi-targeting support there's been very little reason to go back to VS 2005. Now it's official...

I guess I'm going to be a busy for the next few days fixing up a few sample projects for RTM.

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re: Visual Studio 2008 RTM Installed
by Kevin Davis November 21, 2007 @ 8:26 am

Rick,

Your installation experience was the same as mine. The only issue/problem I had was how long it took me to uninstall all the Beta stuff. Once that completed the install of VS 2008 was relatively painless.

Really enjoyed you talks and meeting you (albetit briefly) at DevConnections. If you ever get to Oahu, look me up.

Aloha,

Kevin

re: Visual Studio 2008 RTM Installed
by yaip November 21, 2007 @ 10:49 am

Even for me it went pretty smoothly. However, this is on my DEV box. What steps do I need for upgrading my PRD box? Just install the new Framework and configure IIS? Do I need to change anything in my existing web.config?

re: Visual Studio 2008 RTM Installed
by Rick Strahl November 21, 2007 @ 11:47 am

The process on a production box is just to install the 3.5 framework. You shouldn't have to do anything to configure since .NET 3.5 is just .NET Framework 2.0 with additional libraries. As long as any 3.5 project reference the new 3.5 assemblies that's all you need.

I'll be moving over one application hopefully this weekend - I have more detail then, but I think it should be painless.

re: Visual Studio 2008 RTM Installed
by yaip November 21, 2007 @ 5:39 pm

I would be interested in knowing if it replaces 2.0 or does it just install the new one - in which case I would assume that you have configure your app in IIS to point to the right version.

Also, do you recommend any web host for 3.5. My host (http://www.webhost4life.com/) supports upto 3.0 (1.1, 2.0 & 3.0). I am on 2.0.

re: Visual Studio 2008 RTM Installed
by Rick Strahl November 22, 2007 @ 1:24 am

3.5 is just runtime libraries that run on the 2.0 runtime. It doesn't replace the 2.0 runtimes any more than the 3.0 libraries do. It's really .NET 2.0 plus additional libraries, plus the new language compilers.

I suspect ISPs are going to start supporting .NET 3.5 shortly. Give it a little time.

re: Visual Studio 2008 RTM Installed
by yaip November 22, 2007 @ 3:37 pm

I get the following:
The type 'System.Web.UI.ScriptManager' is ambiguous: itcould come from assembly'C:\WINDOWS\assembly\GAC_MSIL\System.Web.Extensions\1.0.61025.0__31bf3856ad364e35\System.Web.Extensions.dll'or from assembly'C:\WINDOWS\assembly\GAC_MSIL\System.Web.Extensions\3.5.0.0__31bf3856ad364e35\System.Web.Extensions.dll'.Please specify the assembly explicitly in the type name.
Description: Anunhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current webrequest. Please review the stack trace for more information about theerror and where it originated in the code.

Exception Details: System.Web.HttpException:The type 'System.Web.UI.ScriptManager' is ambiguous: it could come fromassembly'C:\WINDOWS\assembly\GAC_MSIL\System.Web.Extensions\1.0.61025.0__31bf3856ad364e35\System.Web.Extensions.dll'or from assembly'C:\WINDOWS\assembly\GAC_MSIL\System.Web.Extensions\3.5.0.0__31bf3856ad364e35\System.Web.Extensions.dll'.Please specify the assembly explicitly in the type name.

I commented the assembly entry in my web.config



It then started to work. Eventually, I'kk have to change all 1.0.61025.0 entries. But this is probably the faster way. Also, I am afraid that I might break the previous version :)

re: Visual Studio 2008 RTM Installed
by Russ November 27, 2007 @ 10:58 am

Rick, I've been using Re-Sharper for a while now. If you have any experience with Re-Sharper, how do you feel CodeRush compares?

re: Visual Studio 2008 RTM Installed
by Matt T November 29, 2007 @ 5:29 pm

Hi Rick,
I'm wondering if you've tried getting VS 2008 to debug asp.net applications running on a remote IIS7 server.

I've spent all day trying to get Visual Studio 2008 x64 running as Administrator to attach to a asp.net process on my remote dedicated Windows 2008 x64 server running IIS7. I've installed the IIS6 compatibility services, the x64 FrontPage extensions for IIS7, windows authentication, and I have msvsmon x64 running as Administrator on the server.

Here's what happens. I open up visual studio on my client machine. I dont have a project open or anything. I click on attach to process and give it the ip address of the server.

If msvsmon is configured to be no authentication mode with allow any user to debug, then visual studio is able to get through to the machine. (MSVSMON even displays my user name and say "username connected". But Visual Studio gives the following error:

Unable to connect to .... . Windows authentication is disabled in MSVSMON. To connect, choose one of the following options:

1) Enable Windows authentication in MSVSMON

2) Reconfigure the project to disable Windows authentication

3) Use the Remote(native with no authentication) transport in the 'Attach to Process' dialog.

3) doesnt work since I am trying to debug managed code.

2) doesnt make sense, since I dont have a project loaded up in visual studio when i hit attach to process

wrt 1) I tried creating an administrator on the server with the same user name as my user name on the client and adding it to MSVSMON , but then when i do attach to process to the same IP, I get the following error:

Unable to connect to MSVSMON named 'ip address'. MSVSMON.exe does not appear to be running on the remote computer.

This is really strange since it was able to find MSVSMON when there was no authentication. As far as I can tell, its becuase my user name is not being authenticated. How do i get the remote server to authenticate me.

This is with me trying to do a manual attach. I'm not even sure how I would get F5 auto attach debugging working, but thats what I want. Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks

Matt T