Free Download: Hot-Fixes for Visual Studio 2008 (Web Development)

Microsoft has released a Hot-Fix Roll-up for Visual Studio 2008 available on Connect.

The hot-fixes address the following issues:

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.
• JavaScript IntelliSense does not work when jQuery is used.

Web Site build performance

• Build is very slow when Bin folder contains large number of assemblies and .refresh files with web-site projects.
  

Installation Notes
For more information on how to download and install the above patch, please check the webdevtools blog post here. In particular, if you are using Windows Vista with UAC enabled, make sure to extract the patch to a directory other than "c:\" (otherwise you'll see an access denied error).

To verify that this hot-fix patch successfully installed, launch VS 2008 and select the Help->About menu item. Make sure that there is an entry that says Hotfix for Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite – ENU (KB946581).

If you ever want to remove the patch, go to Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs and select Hotfix for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 – KB946581 under Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 (or Visual Web Developer Express 2008) and click “Remove".

Team Foundation Build Recipes

Grant Holiday, Team System MVP has came out with a wonderful site, Team Foundation Build Recipes.

As a Build Master you've been put in charge of coming up with a central build system for your team. It can be quite daunting at first and you wonder "Where do I start?".

The purpose of this site is to create and share build recipes with other build masters so that we can all learn and benefit from each other's experience.

Since the site is called TFSBuild.com, there is a particular focus on MSBuild and Team Foundation Build scripts. But if you have a NAnt script or similar that you think others might find useful post it up.

The site is published as a wiki and the idea is that anybody can register to add & update content.

Thanks Grant for the great addition.

TFS Admin Tool 1.3 Released For TFS 2008 on CodePlex!

An updated version of the TFS Admin tool (v 1.3) has been released on CodePlex.

This version of the tool supports TFS 2008 and WSS 3.0. It can be used to help manage User and Permission settings across TFS, SharePoint and SQL Server Reporting Services platforms.

Source Code Outliner PowerToy for Visual Studio 2008

The Source Outliner PowerToy is a Visual Studio 2008 extension that provides a tree view of your source code's types and members and lets you quickly navigate to them with filtering inside the editor is available on MS Download Center.

The project source code (in both C# and Visual Basic) can be found on the SourceCodeOutliner project on CodePlex.com.

Team Build: Modify TFSBuild.proj Template File

One of the usually made changes in all TFS Builds are setting some Targets and Properties for each and every build. Changing the Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.targets is not a supported and risky scenario as it can be changed from version to another (as happened between TFS05 & TFS08) so the best option is customizing the Template file that generates the TFSBuild.proj file to include those changes by default.

The template can be found in:

• [VS2005] C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies\1033\tfsbuild.proj
• [VS2008] C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies\1033\tfsbuild.proj

Note that those templates are found in the PrivateAssemblies folders which can be overwritten by Maintenance and/or Updates so always make sure the output file is correct

All you have to do is to add your Custom/Overriden Targets, Properties or ItemGroups in their needed locations and Copy the file to each Machine that will create a Team Build.

Hope that helps.

Thanks to Steve for the info

VSTS 2008 VPCs

2 new VSTS 2008 VPCs are now available on MS Download.

The first one is running Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition, SP2. It contains a full installation of Team Foundation Server 2008, Team Build 2008, Team Explorer 2008, Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite and all necessary prerequisites. Team Foundation Server is installed in workgroup authentication mode and thus does not require a domain controller. The image is over 11 GB uncompressed.

The second one is is running Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition, SP2. It contains a full installation of Team Foundation Server 2008, Team Explorer 2008, and all necessary prerequisites. Team Foundation Server is installed in workgroup authentication mode and thus does not require a domain controller. The image is under 7 GB uncompressed.

Have fun :)