Hi everyone,

I prepared some new exciting blog posts, especially about XNA and I will post them shortly and also quite a few things will change at this blog. Stay tuned.

Recently one of my companies (namely realis) moved to Hamburg and I have a new PC at the new office, where I installed Visual Studio 2008 and everything else I needed. After I downloaded the latest source code files from Team System, I ran into some problems. BTW: The Team System trial will end next month and I will probably not switch back to SubVersion, but instead go back to Visual SourceSafe since the integration is the best in Visual Studio. Team System is nice to have but absolutely not something important for me as I'm most of the time the only guy using it anyways.

Back to the Problem. After I loaded the main solution the 2 web applications in it were unable to be loaded. The rest of the projects did load fine and worked after a while until I had all the missing Assemblies installed (xunit, Ajax stuff, Silverlight, IronPython, EntitySpaces, etc.). But even after making sure Silverlight and the Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio Alpha was installed and working (checked it by creating a new Silverlight project, which worked fine), I was still unable to load those projects. I thought at first maybe something went wrong when I checked in or out all the files, but after testing it on my laptop this was not the issue, all files are intact. Everything worked just fine on my laptop, where I had done most of my work during the move and first weeks until everything was finally working here.

After digging around a bit I went back to the IIS were those 2 websites should run on and they did not run yet (not compiled yet, no wonder). But even after I pointed to some dummy website the IIS did throw out some errors (first some dlls were missing, they were quickly replaced, then some security issues with Vista, also easy). Then I pointed back to the location of the projects and made sure IIS was working this time. Now I could go back to Visual Studio and finally load the web projects.

If you have such a InteropServices.COMException, try to see if you have missed something like the Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio Alpha and then figure out if your IIS is working. You can also edit the .csproj file and remove the references to IIS at the very end of the file to see if the project can then be loaded (using IIS again is not hard through the project properties).

Hope this helps (phase stolen from ScottGu, btw: really cool stuff going on over there, the ASP.NET MVC framework is nice and the .NET Framework SourceCode is very helpful!)

Great news from ScottGu's blog: The final Visual Studio 2008 version and .NET 3.5 were just released :)

I have been waiting the whole day and kept refreshing the MSDN page, but I could not really believe that they actually ship today ^^

VS 2008 will probably not be much of a change for me because we have been working with the VS 2008 betas for over a year now.

I might also blog a little bit about IronPython, which I have used for smaller projects and plan using for bigger stuff in the future too. The best feed for IronPython News is: IronPython Url's

Btw: Pretty quiet on my blog for a while now, I should continue blogging. Always being too busy to write anything here is not a good thing. Gladly all my current projects work really good and are still fun to maintain, even as they grow bigger and bigger.

Update 2007-11-20: I have to say the ASP.NET Designer in VS2008 is really good again. The designer did not work well for most of my projects in VS2008 beta 2 and it was always annoying to have the million ASP.NET errors poluting the ErrorList (now they are just warnings and can easily be switched off). Overall I'm very pleased with the VS2008 so far, uninstalling VS2008 beta2 was a bit of work, but everything is working nicely now. More info and improvements in VS2008 can be found on ScottGu's blog

Great News, read all about it on Scott Guthries Blog:
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/07/26/
vs-2008-and-net-3-5-beta-2-released.aspx

It features major improvements to ASP.NET Ajax, Linq, the build in Webdesigner and CSS/Javascript.
Seems like nothing for Silverlight yet, still awaiting some updates there :)

Have to check VS 2008 out now ^^

When you try to implement a Silverlight project into an existing ASP.NET Ajax
website you will just click Add Silverlight link to a specific directory in your
website (don't spam everything into your main directory). Then you might want
to use same the html code from your test sites in the ASPX page, like this:

<head runat="server">
  <title>Some title</title>
  <script type="text/javascript" src="Silverlight.js"></script>
  <script type="text/javascript" src="Default.aspx.js"></script>
</head>

And the SilverlightControlHost somewhere in the body (in the form).
You also might want to move the body onload method to a div panel in case you
are using a master page or you want multiple silverlight controls:

        <div id="SilverlightControlHost"
            onload="document.getElementById('SilverlightControl').focus()">
            <script type="text/javascript">
                createSilverlight();
            </script>
        </div>

You might be able to compile and start that without any problems, BUT if you
already have a lot of ASP.NET Ajax code you might end up with this error (and
a bunch more, most of them with Sys.Res in the error description).

Line: 967
Error: Sys.Res.namespaceContainsObject is null or not an object



The problem is that both Silverlight and some generated ASP.NET Ajax javascript
files use the same javascript object (Sys.Res), but overwrite it and disable the
functionality that is needed. You won't find much information on that with
google, but the solution is very simple! Just put the scripts directly into
your ScriptManager of the site like this and remove the scripts from the header:

        <asp:ScriptManager ID="ScriptManager1" runat="server">
            <Scripts>
                <asp:ScriptReference Path="Silverlight.js" />
                <asp:ScriptReference Path="Default.aspx.js" />
            </Scripts>
        </asp:ScriptManager>
        
Hope this helps and saves you some time.

Using a webservice in silverlight can be very problematic. It does not work out of the
box when you just add a web reference and try to use it. You will get a lot of
501 - Internal Server Errors, WebException - Error invoking service, etc.

Instead of repeating what so many people have already reported for Silverlight
and Web services I will just link to them and give you a small comment about
each link. My solution is below (it was something completely different than
the links I present here, but maybe I did not read all of them carefully).

Links:

• Silverlight documentation about using remoting and webservices. Two solutions are presented, but the help is very short and if you have not done it before there can be many problems that are not discussed here. But this two ways are the standard solutions that almost everyone uses.
  http://www.silverlight.net/QuickStarts/Remote/default.aspx
  

• Silverlight board with the System.Net.WebException I mentioned above, the forum posters recomment using a static port.
  http://silverlight.net/forums/p/2575/7132.aspx
  

• Jon Galloway fixes the problem by assigning a static port to the webservice and silverlight app, I couldn't reproduce it in VS Orcas on Vista x64, the webservice always uses a new random port, no matter which one I gave it. But if you can use his technique, it is probably one of the easier solutions. He also explains the main problem very good and give detailed insight on the IsCrossDomainRequest method that causes the problem!
  http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/archive/2007/06/14/
  calling-an-asmx-webservice-from-silverlight-use-a-static-port.aspx
  

• I used another solution to put all websites, web services and silverlight projects onto my IIS 7 server in Vista x64, but I had troubles debugging them. I moved also to IIS because it was annoying to test the website with the fun crashes VS Orcas gives you from time to time and it also has the advantage to show a working version on your colleagues computers by pointing to your computer's IIS.

• The following article might be helpful on which things you have to keep your eyes open for when working with Vista and IIS 7. http://mvolo.com/blogs/serverside/archive/2006/12/28/
  Fix-problems-with-Visual-Studio-F5-debugging-of-ASP.NET-applications-on-IIS7-Vista.aspx

• Here is another quick article on debugging websites on IIS:
  http://ryanfarley.com/blog/archive/2005/08/23/8540.aspx
  

• And another one from MSDN (little bit dated, but can be useful):
  http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dv_vstechart/html/vsdebug.asp
  

• Another MSDN article on Vista and IIS7:
  http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/07/03/IIS7/default.aspx
  

        In short this is what I had to do to get debugging and executing working for web sites and web services in IIS7 with VS Orcas:

• Install IIS (Internet Information Services) first, you can find it in the Control Panel -> Programs/Features -> Turn Windows features on or off.

• Open the IIS tree and select the Web Management Tools (just install all of them). Also make sure you install ASP.NET in World Wide Web Services/  Application Development Features, it will also select all the other required components.
  

• Last but not least select the Basic, IP, URL and Windows Authentications in the Security tree below World Wide Web Services.
  

• After installing it you probably need to restart (it did not work without restarting at my colleagues computer). With the IIS Manager (in Computer Management) navigate to your Default Web Site and go into Authentication. Only Anonymous Authentication will be enabled, also enable Windows Authentication (and whatever else you need). You should also switch from the Default AppPool to the Classic .NET AppPool in the Default Web Site -> Right Click -> Advanced Settings -> Application Pool, else debugging will probably not work (Ctrl+F5 works fine even when you do not do this).

• All websites you create from now will use the Classic .NET AppPool, if you already have websites in IIS, make sure to change them too if you want to debug them.

• If you still cannot debug you probably do not have sufficiant rights for the user account that is used in IIS. I usually create a new account with Admin rights (plus password), set it to the IIS (Anonymous Authentication, click edit to select a new user) and then downgrade the Account until it does not work anymore, then you can set the appropriate rights (directory access, etc.) to the account. If you only use your IIS for yourself, you can also use your own user account for testing and debugging.

• Debugging silverlight and web services, peter uses a different approach, which is not easy to implement, but he can use cross-domain web services and can debug easier.
  http://peterkellner.net/2007/06/18/silverlightdebugwebservicedotnet/
  

• Don't forget to activate Silverlight debugging if you want to debug it (or disable it again for ASP.NET Ajax debugging)
  http://peterkellner.net/2007/06/20/silverlightdebugonemorething/

• General asp.net web services forum:
  http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=46&SiteID=1
  

My problem however was the inability to access the web service via HTTP.
You can access it via SOAP and call the main page and execute the methods,
but directly calling Service.asmx/Method?Parameter=Value was not possible
and lead to the:
WebException - Error invoking service
and Internal Server Error
exceptions (depending on the mood and the way I used web services, I used
mainly the first method (Plain XML Requests over HTTP) as described here:
http://www.silverlight.net/QuickStarts/Remote/default.aspx

To test this I called the website directly the way described in the article
I used something like this:
http://localhost/TestService/Service.asmx/HelloWorld?SomeText=Hi
This returned a 501 Internal Server Error (IIS7) or 404 The Page cannot be found
(IIS6), which means this kind of HTTP gets is not supported in this web service
right now. To fix this you have to activate HTTP get in the web.config file with the following code:

    <webServices>
        <protocols>
            <add name="HttpGet"/>
            <add name="HttpPost"/>
        </protocols>
    </webServices>

From the MSDN Help on activating HTTP Get and HTTP Post for web sites and web services.
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;819267

Hope this helps, make sure to read the articles mentioned above in detail if you still have issues.

Update 2007-07-14: BTW, if you are interested in webservices for ajax and silverlight,
check out this new project from microsoft live labs:
http://astoria.mslivelabs.com/

From the astoria website: "The new wave of web applications are built on technologies such as AJAX and Microsoft Silverlight that enable developers to build better, richer user experiences. These technologies bring a shift in how applications are organized, including a stronger separation of presentation from data.

The goal of Microsoft Codename Astoria is to enable applications to expose data as a data service that can be consumed by web clients within a corporate network and across the internet. The data service is reachable over HTTP, and URIs are used to identify the various pieces of information available through the service. Interactions with the data service happens in terms of HTTP verbs such as GET, POST, PUT and DELETE, and the data exchanged in those interactions is represented in simple formats such as XML and JSON.

We are delivering this first early release of Astoria as a Community Tech Preview you can download and also as an experimental online service you can access over the internet."

I heard about all the Silverlight fuss from the MIX2007 conference last week, but I did not have time to check it out with all the stress and projects I'm currently involved in. I already use VS Orcas for a while (see post from last month) and I played around with WPF in the past (formerly Avalon, now Silverlight, which is still in beta, but will be released this summer finally), but I did not find anything compelling for a game programmer since we use DirectX or XNA anyway. But with the ability to build websites with Silverlight and still allowing the .NET framework to exist in that environment while simplifying the development process and getting away from building static html like pages with some dynamic features (ajax or not, it is still somewhat static and hard to do), Silverlight gets much sexier than just WPF on a windows app by itself.

Why is Silverlight cool? It is .NET, it runs on Firefox, IE, Safari, Mac, etc. it is just 2 MB download, it is amazingly fast, it has many cool new features, it allows many windows-only apps to be developed for the browser in a more natural way, it will be pushed like crazy and a lot of people will have it till the end of this year, there are already some cool tools out there including the Expression toolkit and Visual Studio Orcas, and probably a lot of other reasons you can checkout yourself!

Maybe it is even possible to interop with some DirectX or XNA stuff somehow. I have no idea if this is possible at all or if there are security issues or this kind of functionality is not possible at all, but instead of waiting for another week until I find a few minutes to test this out, why not announce it here first that this would be cool and maybe someone else can test it for me :)

Even for just doing websites, Silverlight will definitely become a BIG competitor to Flash based websites, developing in .NET will be a lot easier than working with Flash/Actionscript/whatever and I would bet that there are more VB/C# developers that can now do some great websites without having to learn much while creating Flash sites or even doing ASP.NET (with or without Ajax) development is much harder and less compelling for certain kinds of applications. Great examples are the FOX Movies site and some widgets on MSDN or some early test controls from Telerik.

BTW: Archor wrote me an email about his Cyber Car XNA game he wanted to submit to the XnaProjects.Net site I made last week. This is actually a Racing Game Mod, I first guessed he used the simple racing game version, but this one is based on the full racing game from the XNA creators website. Pretty cool style in my opinion. Thanks Archor!

http://xbox360.archor.com/

Yeah, blogging every 5 minutes. I'm really trying to blog more again, let's see how this works out.

Ok, here is there problem: Visual Studio Orcas (March CTP) does support ASP.NET web projects and you can even load and use previously created ASP.NET Ajax projects, but you can't create new projects because the Ajax templates are missing!

The solution: Just point the user projects templates directory to your old VS 2005 project templates directory (or copy the templates over to your user projects template directory) like in the following picture. Make you you have ASP.NET Ajax installed and working in your VS 2005 installation.

Path to set:

    C:\Program files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\ProjectTemplates\Web\CSharp\

Btw: The new path in VS Orcas is:

    C:\Program files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\ProjectTemplates\CSharp\Web\

But just copying the files over there will not do it because VS 9.0 will still use the cached templates, which are not updated automatically when you change something there. Just point to the VS 8 template files, that is much easier:

Now you can create new ASP.NET Ajax projects in Visual Studio Orcas with File -> New -> Web Site:

Today I found some time to install Visual Studio Codename Orcas CTP March 2007 (see below for all the download links), which came out last month. I have worked a lot with ASP.NET Atlas (now ASP.NET Ajax) and LINQ (C# 3.0) before, but they are now beautifully integrated in the latest CTP and intellisense works so much better than in the early days of LINQ, so getting this up and running for future projects would be a good thing since I'm an early adopter anyway.

Initially VS Orcas would not even install at all and I thought maybe my Visual Studio 2005 is messed up because I had some problems with ASP.NET Ajax before and had to repair VS 2005 a couple of times this year already. After completely uninstalling VS 2005 and trying again the same fatal error message was still coming up in the Installer:

Microsoft Web Designer Tools failed .. EventType : visualstudio8setup and then a lot of crazy numbers, which do not help (googleing did not return anything).

As usual clicking on the 'view error log' gets you a site not found page, while the installer creates a couple of log files in c:\something or c:\program files\microsoft visual studio 9\logs\ like "dd_vserror80.txt". Those files look interessting, but they only tell me the exact same crazy numbers and that this component failed. After googleing some more and only finding similar problems like this one I uninstalled everything that could even remotely being used by .NET. After restarting and trying again the exact same freaking error message appeared. Grrr ...

To make a long story a little bit shorter: I finally found out that Office 2007 was the root of all the problems, after uninstalling that one (what the hell does this have to do with web designer tools?) the Orcas installer was working and I could launch the new version:

As you can see it looks the same way as Visual Studio 2005, some colors were just enhanced. As you can also see I'm back to Windows XP just because so many games do not work correctly in Vista and many drivers (hello Nvidia) are still shitty and slow.

TestDriven.NET works beautifully in VS Orcas and the developer Jamie Cansdale really does a great job updating the product so often. He even added VS Express support again recently, which might be cool for XNA Express developers. I also like the relatively new 'Go to Reflector' feature and especially the 'Rerun test' I use all the time.

Other plugins I use like CodeRush, VisualSVN, Explorer, LineCounter and whatever do not show up however. And reinstalling them does not help because the developers of those just did not update the installers yet. I can live without most plugins, but not without CodeRush and my CR_Commenter plugin, so I had to get this working. I thought this would be a long day ahead with all the problems even installing VS Orcas, but it turned out to be quite easy to add your existing VS 2005 addins to VS Orcas.

If you install VS Orcas after VS 2005 and have all your addins already installed it will migrate most of them over to VS Orcas, but if you install VS Orcas first (like I did because I killed VS 2005 before, see above) or install new addins, then you will need the following tricks to make them work in VS Orcas. Some addins like CodeRush will not be added by the VS Orcas installation because it misses the "Addins" (CodeRush 1.x) or "PreloadAddinStateManaged" (CodeRush 2.x) registry keys, but you can easily copy them over from VS 2005 (vs 8.0) to VS Orcas (vs 9.0) the following way:

• Open up regedit
• Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\AddIns
• Search for the CodeRush key and export it
• If you can't find a CodeRush key here try (probably CodeRush 2.x specific): [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\PreloadAddinStateManaged]
• If you can't find it there either try the reg installers below!
• Now edit the exported .reg file and just change the \8.0\ to \9.0\ and save.
• Finally doubleclick the file to merge it with your registry (at your own risk btw ^^)
• Start VS Orcas and enjoy the DevExpress menu and the CodeRush functionality :)
  

If you had not installed CodeRush before installing VS Orcas most important registry keys will be missing and you will probably get some "package could not be loaded error" like I did. This will also happen if you install other plugins to VS 2005, which are not installed to VS Orcas like TestDriven.NET does it. Then you have to apply the following process:

• Open up regedit again (you have to repeat this probably a few more times if you miss any important reg key)
• Search for your Addin name or navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\InstalledProducts
• Find your product, it might not be just the name of the product, but something similar (like DXCore for CodeRush).
• You need to open up the key and copy the internal package GUID (the long ugly id) like {BD359A86-BF88-4c4e-A7D2-6CDDA36C3B79} for DXCore
• Now search the whole HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\ namespace for this key and export everything to external files.
• Merge those exported .reg files and replace \8.0\ with \9.0\ like above.
• Save, import again and start Orcas to test. Repeat until it works ^^
  

It would probably be better to write some tool for this, especially since there is almost no addin that will install itself correctly to VS Orcas, but I'm too lazy right now and have no time for that anyway. But here are a couple of .reg files I used to restore the 2 most important addins for me:

• Install CodeRush 2.1.2 to VS Orcas, uses the default paths (english), change if you have installed it somewhere else
• install_coderush2_vs9.reg (3.08 KB)
• Same with german paths (the documents and program files are different in german), change this to other languages if your windows is not english or german:
• install_coderush2_vs9_german_paths.reg (3.08 KB)
• Same for VisualSVN 1.2.1:
• install_visualsvn_vs9.reg (1.23 KB)
• install_visualsvn_vs9_german_paths.reg (1.22 KB)

This will probably only work with the same versions of these addins, but the process is the same if you need other addins to work. I also tested it on vista and it worked there too. Again, if you just installed VS Orcas over your existing VS 2005 installation most addins will be copied and work out of the box. And even addins like CodeRush can easily be fixed with the tricks above. You probably won't need the .reg files here, but they may still be useful for someone and if you need additional addins to work.

I hope this helps if you want to work with VS Orcas too. It did not crash at my computer yet and I did some nasty things to the registry ^^ It only crashed once at my colleagues computer so far (and we both set the AutoRecover to 2 minutes just in case, we were early adopters for VS 2005 too and learned our lessons).


Links:

• A Sneaky Peek At Orcas, short article showing you how to create a new project with lots of screenshots

• LINQ Introduction, very long article, good information, especially if you need a good introduction and overview about all features.

• 101 LINQ Samples: Very useful resource to get started and see some useful examples of the new language features.

• LINQ Samples Update for VS Orcas March CTP

• Download VS Orcas March CTP (self-extracting install) 4.5 GB

• Download VS Orcas March CTP (Virtual Image for Virtual PC or Virtual Server in case you are a pussy) 6.1 GB

• Download VS Orcas March CTP (Team Foundation Server) 860 MB