Many thanks to Robert W. Anderson for this solution.

In his post VS2005 PowerShell Prompt, Robert details how to create your PowerShell profile script which will add the VS2005 environment variables to the PowerShell process. Quite nifty.

As a note, after setting this up, you may get a message about how your script isn't signed so it won't run. One solution is to run "Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned". I wouldn't recommend going farther than that, though. It will allow local scripts to run unsigned and will warn you if a script that was downloaded tries to run. There are still vulnerabilities, so be careful. The other alternative is to sign your script.

I just found another nifty shortcut to finding items in Desktop Search. Let's assume you want to find an email with test in the subject in body. If you're like me, you'll find a ton of emails because you get to test a lot of code at work. HOWEVER, what if you know it was in the past couple of days? Try this then:

kind:mail test date:>5/1/2006

That will get all emails with test somewhere in it that came after May 1, 2006. Of course, you can narrow the search more by specifying test in the subject or body or whatever.

See my other tips and tricks here.

Thanks to Scott Hanselman for the heads up.

I've been using Consolas for a few months now and it is easily one of the best programming fonts I've ever used... and I've tried an awful lot of them... (see here and here for others).

Once it is loaded, start pimping your IDE.

I wanted to share an experience I had last week while working with my development team. I think I've mentioned this before, but we're the first group in my company to move to .NET 2.0. As a result, we're also the first to get to really use Visual Studio 2005. We had been working on mockups and UI designs with our users for quite a while on this project.

Finally, we were getting ready to start work on the internals. The three of us met in a conference room with a projector and I pulled up the Class Designer in Visual Studio. I've done team-coding a few times before, where one person is typing while everyone else is yelling out bugs or typos. While the process can be annoying, it also tends to produce less-buggy code. Doing the same thing with the Class Designer worked out really well. It helped us visualize how everything would tie together. We were drawing out our code, but behind the scenes, the Class Designer was also spitting out workable code!

I don't think I could use the Class Designer in all cases, but it really does force you to think about design issues and it makes for a good team development product. It also helps ease developers who aren't as comfortable with OO concepts see how inheritance is working. Give it a try and let me know how it works for you.

I've really become a fan of MSN Desktop Search at work. I don't really use the toolbar at all, because I've got tabbed browsing in both Firefox and the IE7 beta, but the search features are great. I also like it better than Google's offering because the results don't pull up in a webpage. Even with all the buzz over AJAX lately, there is still a lot more interaction that can happen with a true client application.

Anyway, on to Desktop Search. It makes finding emails SO MUCH easier. The ability to use special search keywords makes it even better. For example, let's say I wanted to find all emails from me. Here's what I could do:

kind:mail from:David Mohundro

Voila! I now have all emails from me. The kind keyword lets you specify things like mail, pictures, documents, etc. If you want to get even more detailed, you can use things like the ext keyword and specify file extensions. Here's a search to find all icon files that have 'mail' in the name.

ext:ico mail

I haven't seen an all-encompassing list of all of the different keywords that you can use with Desktop Search, but there are quite a few if you'll look in the Desktop Search Help under Advanced Users.

And don't forget to use CTRL+ALT+M to get focus to your search box!

NOTE: If you're running into performance problems with it, check out this KB download. It really helped speed Desktop Search up on my PC. I couldn't work without it now.

Never heard of PowerShell you say?

I hadn't either, at least until today. That's because it used to be called Monad. Microsoft released the RC1 of PowerShell today and it is pretty sweet. Basically, it offers scripting and CLI access to the .NET Framework. Instead of using cmd.exe, you'll be using PowerShell.exe. I haven't used it much yet, but it is really cool. Just as a quick example, try this out in PowerShell:

$var = "This is a sweet"

Now, type $var. and then hit tab.

OH WOW! Tab completion for System.String from the command line!

Check it out!

Continuing in the tradition of posts on Visual Studio WSoD's, I ran into another one today that gave me this error: "Object does not match target type."

Okay... super.

Luckily, I got some warnings with line numbers. They pointed me to a line in my designer code that looked like this:

CType(Me.MyUserControlInstance, System.ComponentModel.ISupportInitialize).BeginInit()

The other error was the same line except it was the matching EndInit call.

Similar to before, I was working with code that was in the process of being updated to the .NET 2.0 Framework. I had been working with a control that was inheriting from a .NET 1.1 control. The ISupportInitialize code had been in there for the 1.1 parent. The designer didn't mind at all until I moved the parent control over to 2.0. The solution was easy enough... just take the ISupportInitialize code out. I'm not sure if this is the recommended solution or not (I didn't Google it for too long), but it works.

Ever seen this error in Visual Studio 2005?

I've seen it all too often and it is really annoying.

However, I did find a possible fix today. I was working in a project that had multiple assembly references. One of the references was using a 1.1 assembly, so it came along for the ride. By simply removing that reference, I was able to view my form without any problems. If I tried to add the reference back, I would get the designer error again. I reworked the assembly being referenced to not use any 1.1 components and... lo and behold... the designer errors stopped.

Is this just a really random bug or is this a subtle way to push people to migrate to .NET 2.0?

I had some code that I was porting from .NET 1.1 to .NET 2.0 today. The code I had was checking the version of comctl32.dll to see if it was version 6 or greater to determine if the application supported visual styles or not. As I didn't write that code, I'm not sure if that is a valid way to check for visual style support in .NET 1.1.

I DO know that in .NET 2.0, that check doesn't necessarily work correctly; however, there is a new way to check that is much easier and more reliable -- Application.RenderWithVisualStyles. If you call Application.EnableVisualStyles in your Sub Main method, this boolean will be set to true. That's all you need to check!

See MSDN documentation here.

Check out this article on ABC News. Or this press release from Winternals.

Apparently, a few members of Geek Squad have been using pirated versions of software from Winternals. In case you're unfamiliar with Winternals, they're the enterprise side of Sysinternals, which provides the excellent Process Explorer as well as a few other invaluable tools. Mark Russinovich, who discovered the original Sony DRM rootkit, is one of the people who established the company.

Way to go Best Buy.

Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.2 was released today. At first glance, it seems to be a lot more stable than 1.5.0.1. I had all sorts of issues with the last version randomly crashing on me. In their defense, it seemed to be a combination of some of the extensions I was using and the corporate proxy. I never had any problems at home using the same extensions.

Check it out.

(via Neowin.net Software)

I stumbled across this post by Mike Woodring today. Apparently, the UserState property from the BackgroundWorker isn't accessible from the RunWorkerCompleted event. What in the world???

Anyway, I wasn't actually looking for information on the UserState property -- I was trying to find some information on the Error property off of RunWorkerCompletedEventArgs. It gets populated when an exception is thrown in your background thread. The weird thing is, I couldn't get my code to fall in there. The debugger kept popping up on the line where I was actually throwing the exception. Believe it or not, but that is actually the intended behavior... IF you're running in the debugger. Check out this post on the MSDN forums. If you're running standalone, then the Error property will be set as expected and you can check it. I wonder if you can continue on the exception and get to the RunWorkerCompleted event. I'll have to try that.

One last potential gotcha involving using the Error property: make sure it is the FIRST thing you check in your RunWorkerCompleted event handler. See this post on the MSDN forums for details there. According to Mike Woodring's post referenced above, if you access the Result property off of the RunWorkerCompletedEventArgs parameter and the Error property is populated or the Cancelled property is true, you'll get an invalid operation exception.

So now you know... and knowing is half the battle!