Getting SQL Server 2008 Management Studio Express installed on Windows 7

by Matt Milner 1. March 2010 07:19

This morning I found myself in need of the SQL Server management studio on a new box I built a few months ago. So far, I’ve only installed Visual Studio 2010 RC and the SQL Server 2008 Express that came with it.  I was first directed to use the Web Platform Installer which, while it is a great tool, didn’t provide any details with the installation ultimately failed.  After trying to run the installer as an administrator directly (outside the Web PI) I was warned that I needed to re-apply SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 1. No biggie, I hit run anyway.  Then the real problem.  The installer kept failing saying that it required .NET 3.5 with Service Pack 1.  Windows 7, as you may know, comes with .NET 3.5 SP 1 installed by default. Well, sort of. 

While Windows 7 basically has 3.5 SP 1 on it, it really has a comparable version of the .NET framework installed.  Most machines (pre-win7) with 3.5 SP 1 have a framework version of something like 3.5.30729.1 .  On Windows 7, the framework version is: 3.5.30729.4926.  If you look in the registry, under HKLM\Software\Microsoft\NET Framework Setup\NDP\v3.5\   you will find this version number, but also a key named SP.  On Windows 7 that value is zero (0). 

Solution, change the registry entry for the SP key from 0 to 1 (one) and then run the installer. Voila, installs with no problem.  Now I just need to reapply SP1 (well, after actually walking through the less-than-intuitive installer to apply the management studio) and I’m good to go. 

Hope this saves someone else some time. 

[Update 3/3/10: fixed registry key path]

Tags:

General Musings

Hotfix for some BizTalk 2009 issues in Visual Studio

by Matt Milner 26. January 2010 09:21

For some time now, I’ve been working with BizTalk Server 2009.  One of the major frustrations has been with the VS 2008 integration.  Project references between BizTalk projects wreaked havoc if you were working on a single developer machine with BTS installed.  Fortunately, Microsoft has released a hotfix for many of these issues [1].  If you are having issues within Visual Studio, you may want to try this hotfix.  Look for the link near the top of the document to request the hotfix.  I got an email with the link within minutes when I tried. 


Thanks to Bryan Corazza of Avanade for pointing out this support document. 

 

[1] http://support.microsoft.com/kb/977428/en-us

Tags:

BizTalk Server

Twin Cities Cloud Computing User Group presentation

by Matt Milner 25. January 2010 05:02

I had a great time presenting at the TC Cloud Computing User group about a week ago.  The group is still kind of small, but growing rapidly and pulling together good content as well as hands-on opportunities for people to get going on cloud technologies.  This particular presentation was on the Azure platform AppFabric (ServiceBus and Access Control).  For those of you who attended, the demos I used are in the attachments as I mentioned

Tags:

Windows Communication Foundation

Amazon releases .NET SDK for their Amazon Web Services stack

by Matt Milner 13. November 2009 03:24

Not that I’m surprised by this move; I mean, who would expect Amazon to sit on their laurels and let Microsoft claim the masses of .NET developers. One of my main complaints with AWS has been the lack of tooling for consuming the services.  Having a REST API provides great reach and flexibility, but if you truly want to get people building on your platform, often you have to lower the bar to entry.  This SDK is aimed squarely at Azure and comes just one week before PDC – smart marketing Amazon.  It appears, at a quick glance, that the SDK provides simple .NET wrappers around the web APIs for AWS and source code of course gives you ultimate flexibility to modify.  What it doesn’t have is something to compare to the developer fabric for building and testing your Azure applications locally. give the services they provide, this makes sense, but I wonder if people will really see this as comparable to the Azure development tools. 

Read about this SdK and other news from Amazon on their website.

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“Oslo” becomes SQL Server Modeling

by Matt Milner 10. November 2009 07:39

I’m not surprised at all about this announcement from Doug Purdy about the changes coming to the “Oslo” tools.  Ever since the Connected Systems group was “merged” with the data group, it seemed a foregone conclusion that the modeling work would begin to heavily focus on the Microsoft data stack. I’ll wait to see how the tools evolve before making an opinion about their usefulness.  I’m actually optimistic that in the end, more Microsoft developers will be better off as the tools will be more likely to help them in their everyday development.  As it was, the M language and associated tools seemed to be targeting a niche market of language developers.  Looking forward to PDC and hearing all about how these new tools are going to help me model my application data and hopefully help build up a good deal of the infrastructure for my data access layer. 

Tags:

General Musings

My presentations at HDC 09

by Matt Milner 29. October 2009 04:21

A little late on this post, but my excuse is that I’ve been traveling pretty much since I left HDC.  I had a great time at the show this year as Pluralsight was able to have a significant presence with our marketing team (Meagon) and three speakers (myself, Kent, and Aaron).  I wish I was the one leaving with that ZuneHD, but I’m pretty sure the lucky winner is enjoying it.  Hopefully folks who attended have checked out there free week of Pluralsight On-Demand so they can see what we are doing with our online training – customers are telling me they really love being able to go online anytime and watch a knowledgeable instructor walk them through some content. 

The show was well organized and had a lot of cool social and networking opportunities.  I’m really glad we have a show like this in the midwest, and hope we can build on the HDC model to have more in the years to come. 

Here are the materials from my two talks at HDC. I’ve included a Beta 2 update for the WF4 sample code since Beta 2 shipped just days after the conference.  Hopefully that will make the transition easier for those of you who attended.

 

Tags:

Windows Workflow Foundation | Presentations

BizTalk Project Creation Fails – or, Why did BizTalk in VS 2008 break?

by Matt Milner 22. September 2009 04:37

I found this post on the BizTalk Customer Response team blog about the problems people are having with the BizTalk project system integrated into Visual Studio 2008.  Apparently, the team built very closely on the C# project type, but that integration is causing some problems as any patches to VS can cause values to be overwritten, removing the relationship of the btproj to the csproj projects.  I have run into this on several machines and always had to repair the BizTalk installation in order to fix it.  That takes more time than I think it should to fix this type of problem, so I was glad to see the solution is a simple registry edit. 

 

You should be able to create a reg file the following contents to fix this on an x86 box:

 

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\Projects\{FAE04EC0-301F-11d3-BF4B-00C04F79EFBC}]
"PossibleProjectExtensions"="csproj;btproj"

 

For a 64-bit installation, you can use a similar file, but with a slightly different path for the key. So the reg file would look like this:

 

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\Projects\{FAE04EC0-301F-11d3-BF4B-00C04F79EFBC}]
"PossibleProjectExtensions"="csproj;btproj"

 

I plan on having these registry files around on my machines with BizTalk developer tools on it so that I can quickly apply this fix anytime I patch (or Windows Update patches for me) my Visual Studio installation. 

Tags:

BizTalk Server

New podcast on .NET Service Bus with Jeff Brand

by Matt Milner 4. September 2009 17:18

A couple of weeks ago, I sat down with Jeff Brand to do a podcast on the .NET Service Bus and Cloud Computing in general.  We had a fun conversation about the cloud and why it is such a big deal, then dove into more detailed conversation about the .NET Service Bus. Get the link for the audio from Jeff’s post

I’m really getting excited for the release of Windows Azure and seeing the kinds of applications people build on this new platform.

Tags:

General Musings | Windows Communication Foundation

Beta version of “Dublin” course published to Plurasight On Demand!

by Matt Milner 12. August 2009 07:17

We’ve recently added a short course on “Dublin” to our subscription-based on demand library.  This is very much an early adopter course using very early bits released last year at the PDC.  The intention is not to provide detailed information on specifics around the technology as those will most definitely change, rather I wanted to provide enough information and detail so developers can figure out “What is Dublin?”. 

The modules provide an overview as well as showing the tools provided by, or built upon by, “Dublin” to deploy and manage your services. 

Hopefully, these early look modules are helpful to you as a developer as you prepare for the next wave of connected systems technologies from Microsoft.  As “Dublin” reaches further milestones such as Beta  and Release Candidate status, I will be updating the course, and adding more content to round it out with deeper detail. 

Enjoy!

Tags:

Windows Workflow Foundation | Windows Communication Foundation

New WF 4 whitepaper has been published

by Matt Milner 4. August 2009 05:15

I’m happy to announce that the WF 4 whitepaper I wrote this spring has been published on MSDN and is ready for viewing.  This was a fun paper to write digging into the new bits for WF coming in the framework.  I’m very excited about the new models for activities and workflows and being able to do totally declarative workflow programming.  The new designer model is awesome and I can’t believe how easy it is to rehost the designer. 

A Developer’s Introduction to Windows Workflow Foundation (WF4) in .NET 4 Beta 1

The paper is based on Beta 1, which means you can download the bits and play along. 

At the same time, Aaron’s paper on WCF in .NET 4 has been published and contains a lot of the workflow service content as well as all the new features coming in WCF 4. 

Tags:

Windows Workflow Foundation