So, I rebuilt a workstation because I am soon to lose my current wicked awesome hp laptop.  Like many people, reloading a workstation is both, a pleasure and a pain.  On one hand, you get to refresh your xp installation, so everything seems super fast again.  On the down side, none of your tools, plug-ins, extensions, settings, or any of that stuff is in place, so you have to redo all that work.

Anyway, I installed visual studio 2008 and Visio.  Then, like zillions of other people, I said "Hey!  Where did the generate menu go?".  Turns out, Visio Professional is just not quite professional enough to generate a script from a database diagram.  Good grief.  So, where is this Enterprise Architect version?  Sweet.  Its on msdn.  Pulled it down, and started to install, and soon, all would be well in the world....or so I thought.

Now, I came up against the dreaded "You must first install one of the qualified Visual Studio editions" or it's evil cousin "you must first install visual studio 2003 enterprise architect".  Blast!  Turns out, you can only install the good Visio if you have visual studio 2003 or 2005 enterprise architect installed.  You have got to be kidding me.  I have msdn.  I have access to both of those applications.  I do not want to re-install visual studio 2005 over my new, pristine 2008 installation, but I really need Visio, with the generate functionality.

Well, after lots of searching, and accepting the fact that I was probably violating some sort of licensing agreement, I came up with a hack workaround.  If you have an installation of visual studio 2008, and want Visio enterprise architect, but do not want to install visual studio 2005, this can work for you.  I gave filemon a try, but it didn't look like it was doing anything interesting.  Then, I gave regmon a try, filtered on msiexec, and found some interesting keys.  The last thing it did before bailing out on the installation was look in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0.  I did have that key in my registry, but it obviously didn't have exactly what the installer was looking for.  In the 9.0 folder was my visual studio 2008 installation.

I exported the 8.0 folder using regedit for a backup, exported the 9.0 folder, opened the exported .reg file, did a search/replace on "9.0" to "8.0", and saved it.  Then, I imported the modded 9.0->8.0 .reg file into the registry, basically pretending that my visual studio 2008 installation was actually a visual studio 2005 installation, at least as far as the registry was concerned.  Fired up the Visio installer, and, kachow, it worked.  After installing, I reverted back to my original 8.0 export, and everything is good to go.

It is a hack to get you going, but if you have the same problem, and are crazy like me, this can get you going.

Jesse Foster | jf26028

I know the link has been floating around for quite a while, but just to reiterate, LinqPad is really cool.  In the first 5 minutes of looking at it, I learned some really interesting stuff.  Most notably, "Outer Variables in a Loop", and what was really going on in "A Basic Query - Translation".  What's in those examples?  You'll have to download it to find out!

And, apparently, these examples were from the book C# in a Nutshell, which, as a corollary, seems to be a pretty good book, even though I have not actually seen it.

Looking forward to getting passed the Chapter 8 examples,

Jesse Foster | jf26028

I stumbled across DotNetPanel today from http://weblogs.asp.net/anandn/archive/2007/11/16/dotnetpanel-review.aspx, which is in my rss reader.  I haven't installed it yet, but it appears to be a really cool tool for managing your web servers.  If you have ever dealt with cpanel or plesk, then you know how helpful something like this can be.  Sure, you can manually do everything that this app does, but this sure makes it easier.  And, with the price for a local installation, you can't go wrong.  Can't wait to give it a try.

Jesse Foster | jf26028