My colleague Johan started a blog about his experiences with .NET.

You can find it here:

 

A great example for any developer.

It's been a while since I posted something on a blog.  No excuses, I plead guilty.  I cannot promise it's going to be better in the future, but at least I do have one handy trick I want to share with the world.

 

This week I spent a few of my working hours trying to get my development PC ready to do some development in the .net Compact Framework (version 1.1). 

I already have Visual Studio 2003 installed on my PC since I got it (some 1,5 years ago) and I also have Visual Studio 2005 installed.

 

Since I already had the CompactFrameworkSDK installed, I needn't install a lot more to get started (or so I thought):

- ActveSync updated to version 4.1.0 (build 4841)

- installed the Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC SDK (although I currently don't use VS2005, I thought it wouldn't do anything wrong to have the latest goodies).

 

All installations went flawless, and I thought I would be ready to get started in no time (I hardly could believe it).

 

Next I thought it would be wise to verify my installation by doing a little test: let's make a "hello world" application!

Evidently I start by creating a new project (originally called 'SmartDeviceApplication1') and get started.

Result: the form in the project doesn't design and the build fails !

 

What happened?  All installations had gone flawless and still I can't even create a new project!

After some investigation, it appeared that all references in the project were missing.  Strange....

A doublecheck with a project of a colleague showed the same effects.  Something was wrong with my installation...

 

Next step: repairing Visual Studio: I thought perhaps all installations I had done in the past  1,5 years had messed up my installation.  Result: no success.

 

After quite a bit of googling, I ran into a post that gave me a clue to the solution:

The 4 xsl files in the directory [Documents and Settings]\[your user]\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\VisualStudio\devices\7.1 seemed to be the problem.

I renamed the 4 files and restarted VS.  Guess what, it worked!

Even better, once I started using VS the 4 files were automatically recreated.  This gives me the impression that the problem was correctly fixed and nothing else was broken by renaming the old files.

A comparison of the old and new files indeed shows that there are differences in the conman_ds_platform.xsl file.

 

I guess a full de-install and install of VS would also solve this problem, but if you can fix it by deleting 4 files I'd say that's the faster solution of the two!