Installfest Pittsburgh

December 11, 2-4 pm, or 5-7 pm (two sessions). 

Tuesday, December 11, 2007 (EST) – Visual Studio 2008 Community Launch
Party

location: Microsoft Offices

Join us for the Visual Studio 2008 community launch party at Microsoft!
We’re having 2 sessions: 2-4 pm and 5-7 pm, with lots of giveaways, including
125 full Visual Studio 2008 licenses!

Join the Pittsburgh .NET User’s Group on Tuesday, December 11th for

our Visual Studio 2008 Launch Event.  Danilo “Dani” Diaz, Microsoft

Developer Evangelist for Microsoft’s Mid-Atlantic Region will be our

featured speaker.  Dani will be demonstrating the new features of

Visual Studio 2008 along with the new features of the .NET Framework

3.5.  Bring your laptop as we’ll be providing trial editions of
VS2008
for you to install and try out new features as Dani discusses them.

We’ll also have a coding competition to see who can utilize the new

VS2008 features the best in creating a killer app; winners of the

local coding competition will be entered into a regional competition

where the stakes (and prizes) definitely increase!  All attendees (up

to a max of 125) will receive, via email, a free license to Visual

Studio 2008 Professional.
 
Due to the expected turnout for
the event, we will be having two
sessions for our launch event.  Both
will be held at Microsoft’s
offices on the North Shore.  The sessions
will be held from 2-4 PM and
from 5-7 PM on Tuesday, December 11th. 
We’ll also have lots of
give-aways at both events.  So come to the
December .NET User’s Group
on Tuesday, December 11th, and kick your
holidays off to a good start.

 
Full info and RSVP link at http://pghdotnet.org/Events/430.aspx.

There is no Unicode byte order mark. Cannot switch to Unicode.

You may receive this error if:

  1. you created a project in a pre-release Visual Studio 2008, and
  2. your project contains DBML files (created by database designer,
    like when using LINQ), and

  3. This is the first time you’re opening the project in VS2008 RTM.

Fortunately, the answer is simple.  In the code view of the DBML file,
you need to change the encoding from utf-16 to utf-8.

Thanks to Julie
Lerman for the solution
.  Some additional information at Converting
web site projects from Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 to Visual Studio 2008
RTM
.

VS 2008 Installation – So much smoother this time!

You need to get out waaaaayy more if I’m the one telling you Visual Studio
2008 has shipped for MSDN subscribers.  It’s available for download as of
yesterday from the MSDN Subscribers Download.

Kudos to the Visual Studio team this time–uninstillation of beta 2 and
installation of the RTM bits is so much smoother this time.  Not everything
you need to uninstall is removed when you remove beta 2, so you have to go
through the add/remove programs and get the stragglers.  Use the list at http://www.microsoft.com/express/support/uninstall/ for
guidance.  But, some of the names on the list vary slightly (Crystal
Reports 2007 was listed in my Add/Remove as Crystal Reports for Visual Studio
2008), but they’re easy to match up.  Also, some of the items on the list
(e.g., Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5) are removed by the beta 2 uninstaller, so
you may see them in Add/Remove, and get an error when you try to uninstall
them.  They clean up with the next reboot.  Expect 2-3 hours of
uninstallation, manual clean up and reinstallation.

All in all, though, so much better than with VS 2005.

New from the ACE Team: XSS Detect

The ACE Team (Application
Consulting and Engineering) has released a beta
version of their tool to scan managed code and detect potential vulnerabilities
to cross-site scripting
.  XSSDetect runs as a visual studio
plug-in.

From their blog:

One of the biggest, constant problems we’ve seen our enterprise
customers deal with and we here at Microsoft have to also contend with is that
of the XSS (Cross Site Scripting) bug.  It’s very common and
unfortunately, still an issue we have to deal with in many web
applications.  Internally, the ACE Team has been working on several
projects to help mitigate and fix these issues, as well as detect them in the
code bases that we review so that they can be fixed before going
live.

They also have a follow-up post which discusses using
XSSDetect to scan large applications
.  For very large applications, you
may run into an “out of memory” error.  Besides bigger and badder hardware,
the suggestion is to analyze binaries in smaller chunks.