Daily Archives: February 10, 2010

Installing Visual Studio 2010 RC from a Virtual DVD?

Tools

I got bit when installing the VS2010 RC and it cost me a few hours of aggravation. Here’s why.

I use Daemon Tools to mount ISOs to a virtual DVD. I have a Windows 7 machine and am using a new installation of Daemon. By default, Daemon’s auto-mount feature is turned off. I didn’t realize this.

During the installation, the installer needs to reboot. When it rebooted, it didn’t find the DVD and I scrambled to re-attach the ISO file while the installer was attempting to continue setup.

I thought I got it covered, but in the end I had the following error:

rcinstall

What a slap in the face. No Entity Framework tools out of everything in VS that could have been left out! LOL. Well, I do need those.

I tried repairing the installation two times but still the tools did not install.

I finally decided to just uninstall and reinstall but this time I would be smart and burn the darned DVD.

Wouldn’t you know, my brand new DVD writer wasn’t being recognized.

So as a last resort, I used WinRAR to unzipped the ISO file onto my hard drive and I was then able to install directly from the files.

The installation went perfectly. And because I had uninstalled VS2010 but not .NET 4, the reboot was unnecessary.

Since then I have heard from many people that they had no installation problems when using Virtual CloneDrive.

RIA Services in VS2010 Beta 2 and a Debug problem caused by Intellitrace

Data Access

I had a problem that stopped me in my tracks for two days.

A RIA Services/Silverlight solution which I had created from the Silverlight Business App solution template, was crashing.

Specifically…

In VS2010 Beta 2, using the web development server, I was able to run the app by right clicking on the host web page and choosing View in Browser.

But any time I tried to run it by debugging (F5), I got the old somethingorother not loaded error. That’s the error the domain context on the client side throws when it tries to load data from the service but no data comes back.

After lots of digging, I concluded that in debug mode the client app was unable to find the service.

I won’t go through the two days of hairpulling, but in the end it turned out that the cause of my problem was a known issue with VS2010’s Intellitrace.

It may have been known, but it was not documented anywhere discoverable.

Wilco Bauwer (another great community person who I seem to have forgotten was sucked up by Microsoft at some point – I’m doing this a lot lately…can’t keep track ) was dragged into the thread by Jeff Handley (another silverlight guru at MS,  who had been valiant in trying to help me). Wilco suggested turning off Intellitrace and voila, two days of misery disappeared.