The MSI installer for Castle Visual Studio Integration runs both VS2005 and VS2008 with the /setup switch to configure the new Visual Studio package. Because this process can take a while, I tried to work out how to display custom status text while the custom action was running, but had no luck in finding any documentation about how to do this until just recently.
If you have a custom action like:
<CustomAction Id="CA_DevEnv2008Setup" Property="DEVENV2008_EXE_PATH" ExeCommand="/setup" Impersonate="no" Execute="deferred" />
Then a ProgressText element like the following will set the status text while it is running:
<UI>
<ProgressText Action="CA_DevEnv2008Setup">Configuring Visual Studio 2008... (this may take a few minutes</ProgressText>
</UI>
I found the details of how to do this in a forum post on the WiX sourceforge mailing list.
Announcing Castle Visual Studio Integration 0.3 with Visual Studio 2008 support.
Also arriving in the 0.3 release is:
- a new MSI/WiX installer that will install Castle Visual Studio Integration for both VS2005 and VS2008;
- basic XHTML IntelliSense; and
- a few minor IntelliSense bug fixes.
Download Castle Visual Studio Integration 0.3
Recently, I spent some time getting Castle Visual Studio Integration working on Visual Studio 2008.
James Curran got it working a while back (as mentioned in CONTRIB-57 of the Castle Project's issue tracker), however this was using the VS2005 compatibility mode. I decided that it would be a better idea to move to the 2008 binaries and conditional compile CVSI, so that I could continue to support both Visual Studio releases without problems. JetBrains does this with ReSharper so I thought it must be a better solution.
After getting it mostly working I decided to consult Google, where these 2 blog posts by James Lau helped get everything work right:
Upgrading VS 2005 Packages to VS 2008: A Basic Guide
Upgrading VS 2005 Packages to VS 2008: A more Advanced Guide
If you are working on Visual Studio packages, James' blog contains heaps of useful information. Thanks James.
Scott Guthrie recently announced the release of Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 Beta.
I think it is good and all that they are building some nice new features, but I get this feeling that the naming of this release is going to cause problems. I suspect that most developers/users assume a service pack will contain bug fixes and maybe a few very minor features. I can see this becoming confusing for people where they have the .NET Framework 3.5 and can't run something because they need SP1. This same issue has started to become a problem with .NET Framework 2.0/2.0 SP1, so I'm sure the same problem will occur on a much larger scale with 3.5/3.5 SP1.
Is it just me or should Microsoft really be going to .NET Framework 3.6 or something similar? Maybe developers will just have to start referring to 3.5 SP1 as 3.5.1.
I have been planning to build a standalone hardware firewall for my home network for quite a long time. I brought a 1Ghz VIA ITX 17cm x 17cm motherboard towards the end of last year for the firewall but couldn't find a decent case to mount the board in. Here is the board below:
I have been looking on eBay for months for a cheap old rackmount network switch or router that I can gut and mount the board inside, but nothing has come up cheap. Yesterday I won an eBay auction for a brand new 1U rackmount case, a little flashy for a firewall, but I got the case cheap and it has plenty of space for all the components compared to an old network switch.
I was always planning to install IPCop, but after some research I found both m0n0wall and one of its children pfSense seem more polished. I know from playing around with IPCop that it wasn't the easiest firewall to configure and with m0n0wall/pfSense having a single configuration XML file that I can commit into Subversion it is shaping up nicely. pfSense is a fork of m0n0wall and has more features but requires a slightly more powerful chip and more RAM. pfSense has several features I am interested in that m0n0wall doesn't, including a traffic shaper and installable packages, which includes both snort and squid. I am now planning to install pfSense because it seems a lot more polished than IPCop, but I haven't tried out pfSense myself.
Once I get all the hardware together I'll post further details of my experience. If you have done something similar yourself or just want to voice your opinion then I am interested in hearing your comments.