Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 just hit the eShelves. It's currently installing, and I'll be sure to give my thoughts when I've started messing with it.

You can get it here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/dd582936.aspx

Enjoy!

Resolved: SQL Server MDF file issue

For the past month or two I have been unable to add a SQL Database to a Visual Studio project because I kept getting a network error. I finally figured out the issue and thought I'd share what I learned.

There are two primary requirements:

1. You must be running SQL Server Express.
   
2. You must have user instances enabled.
   

You have to be running SQL Server Express because of number two. Visual Studio uses a user instance to attach the mdf file to, so if you do not have user instances enabled, it just won't work. User Instances are only supported in the express edition of SQL Server.

Goodbye PayPal

Unless they resolve this issue very soon, I probably won’t ever be using PayPal again. This kind of “support” is just pathetic and unacceptable. It’s unfortunate too, because PayPal is an otherwise very useful service.

If you don’t feel like listening to the clip in that link, basically PayPal’s security system flagged one Oren Eini’s transactions and wouldn’t let him complete it. This is perfectly fine, but when he called PayPal support, they basically told him that they could not and would not do anything about, and that he just wouldn’t be able to complete the transaction (and this was from a manager). How retarded is that?

Debugging with VS 2005 and IE 8

Just as a quick follow up to my post about Microsoft Connect being we-todd-did, after playing around with it enough I did figure out how to get web application debugging working with Visual Studio 2005 and Internet Explorer 8. I was seeing that it would work sometimes, but it didn't seem predictable. I finally realized that if you don't have any IE 8 windows open when you start debugging, it knows which process to attach to and it works just fine.

So if you want to use IE 8, but you're stuck with Visual Studio 2005, you will need to use Firefox or something else for browsing while you're trying to debug.

YSlow

I just found a cool tool from Yahoo! that helps analyze web site performance. It's called YSlow and it integrates with Firebug. It grades your web site - A through F - on each different metric that it tracks such as: how many HTTP requests are required, are your files minified, or do you have duplicated scripts? I've only used it for a few minutes now but it's a quick and easy way to see some useful information about your web sites.