VS.Net 2008 becoming more unstable as we speak.
I have recently updated with Silverlight 2.0 and Blend 2.0, I also had to downgrade from the Blend 2.5 preview version as it wont work with the current RTM’s. Last thing I installed was the Express Version of CodeRush (which I really love) and now VS.Net seems to be restarting itself a bit too often for my liking and I am really becoming annoyed with not being able to get the XAML view of some (not all) my Silverlight applications. Bizarro World! Apparently the XAML view problem is a VS.Net bug (something to do with styles in the app.xaml file), however it’s worth noting that I can see everything just fine in Blend. I also have Ruby In Steel installed and I did notice some wacky behaviour around that time as well. I really don’t want to do a rebuild, I will report back soon with whatever my research turns up.
Update: 13th November 2008
I removed the Ruby In Steel plugin for VS.Net and the visual XSD add-in, so far so good (for general stability in VS 2008) however I still don’t get a XAML Preview for a complex project with more than about 12 or so views (user controls).
Creating your own BizTalk 2006 Project Item Templates
From time to time I have the need to create file types within my BizTalk projects that you would think are pretty obvious, like an plain old vanilla XML file for example. Pretty obvious requirement I would have thought? The number of standard out of the box templates for BTS is not that complete so I decided to address that issue and create a few for myself : here’s how.
Locate the BizTalkProjectItems folder on your development machine, which should be often than not located under your program file folder here:
\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006\Developer Tools\BizTalkProjectItems
Create your template file (in my case a plain old XML and Text File (the text file for creating flat file inputs).
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″ ?> <Root></Root>
And the Flat File Template is simply a matter of creating a blank .txt file as a template. Copy the files (in my case BTSXmlFile.xml and BTSFlatFile.txt) to the directory named earlier in this post.
That’s it your done! Now you have two new templates for BizTalk projects in VS.Net.
As you can see the BTSXmlFile and BTSFlatFile are now available in my add new item dialog window.
Visual Studio 2008 Bug Fix
Recently I had installed Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.0 & Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and seemingly for a few days there were no problems. After a couple of days I added Developer Express DX Core and again for a couple of days - no problems. Then suddenly this:
This dialog window was telling me that VS.Net 2008 was not recognising my item templates when I requested "Add New Item" from the context menu in the Solution
Explorer for a a given project. Immediately I checked in the "Options" menu and everything looked fine. After some research I tried restarting Visual Studio in safe mode and also tried resetting Visual Studio by running the startup arguments devenv /ResetSkipPkgs. Sadly both these approaches failed to make any difference. Finally I re-installed Visual Studio 2008 SP 1 and that sorted out the problem and VS was once again recognising my templates. Whew!
