Monday, March 31, 2008

"Location is not available" on Vista

Ok, this is not exactly a .NET issue but I still thought it is worth mentioning it here since I assume there is a sufficient number of people currently using Vista for development who may have encountered this issue. You may have experienced one or more of the following:
  • "Preparing your desktop..." for an extended period of time
  • "Location is not available" after you log in
  • Desktop looks more like XP and has lost the Aero look-and-feel

I don't know what the reason for this was. Maybe it was relating to my Vodem to not being able to survive stand-by and/or hibernate. Maybe it was because Vista decided to run some lengthy checks, like CHKDSK. The event logs don't give a clue.

Resolution: Reboot another time.

Monday, March 24, 2008

csUnit 2.3 available

Just in case you are a regular reader of this blog: csUnit 2.3 has just been made available. With this release we have focused on improving the quality by fixing a few defects. On behalf of the csUnit team: Happy testing!

unresolved external symbol ?.cctor@@$$FYMXXZ

This error is usually related to upgrading Managed C++ project from Visual Studio 2003 to Visual Studio 2005. It is easy to resolve by removing a few options from both the compiler and linker, then recompiling the project. For the compiler remove the /ZI flag (don't confuse with /Zi). In the project properties pages choose "Configuration Properties", then "C/C++", then "Command Line". In the bottom part of the page you'll see "Additional Options". Remove /ZI from there if you have it at all. Next, go to "Linker", then "Command Line". Remove /NOENTRY and /NODEFAULTLIB from there if you have it at all. In all cases make sure you do this for all configurations not just the debug or the release configuration. More details about the context and background are available here.

Monday, March 17, 2008

csUnit, Visual Studio 2008, Vista, .NET 3.x

Maybe you have wondered about whether csUnit is supported on Vista and/or Visual Studio 2008. So in this post I'd like to give a few details for csUnit 2.2. Microsoft Windows Vista is not an issue. csUnit installs and runs just fine. This is also true for Visual Studio 2005 on Vista. The add-in registers properly and the context menus work, too. Visual Studio 2008 is a different story. The add-ins don't install and neither do the context menus. This is an item that we'll address in one of the next csUnit releases. If you are building for .NET 2.0 in VS 2008 you can still use csUnitRunner as a stand-alone application and run all tests. This mode works on both XP and Vista. If you are building an application for .NET 3.0 or .NET 3.5 that's fine, too. Simply include the reference to the csUnit 2.2 runtime assemblies as before and run your tests within csUnitRunner (or the add-in in VS 2005 if you managed to modify VS2005 to use .NET 3.x). If you encounter an issue with any of the above combinations, or if you find a combination that doesn't work, we would be very interested to hear about it. Please log a bug report at csUnit's but tracker at SourceForge and include as many details about your specific configuration as possible. Happy testing! (Note: All of the tests mentioned above were conducted using the English language version of the mentioned software components, all of them on the latest patch level as of the date of publication.)

Thursday, March 13, 2008

csUnit Sources About To Be Moved to Subversion

Since the beginning csUnit has used Sourceforge's CVS repository. In the meantime Subversion has become very stable and provides a number of benefits over CVS. As a consequence we will stop using the CVS repository. All committed source code that was available in CVS will continue to be available via CVS. Access is also possible via the internet and ViewVC. As of the conversion date all new commits will go into the Subversion repository. We have no plans to migrate old commits to the new repository. Details for accessing the new repository are available here.

Visual Studio: "Unable to find manifest signing certificate in the certificate store"

I just moved a Visual Studio project from one computer to a different one. When I then tried to rebuild the solution I received the following error:
"Unable to find manifest signing certificate in the certificate store"
As I was sure that I wasn't using any certificate to sign the assembly I couldn't understand the reason for this error message and the integrated help system for Visual Studio wasn't a big help either. It turned out that I had to manually go into the *.csproj file and remove the following three lines that were apparently left over from some past experiments with signing using a certificate:
<manifestcertificatethumbprint>...</manifestcertificatethumbprint> <manifestkeyfile>...</manifestkeyfile> <generatemanifests>...</generatemanifests> <signmanifests>...</signmanifests>
After I had removed those lines I reloaded the project and the solution rebuilt just fine. There is more information on this subject at a Microsoft Forum.