Item Assistant - Startup Issue

Some people are experiencing problems starting version 0.9.2 (and possibly earlier version of the 0.9 branch). It shows up as a Windows error message telling you the application failed to start because the configuration is wrong. Well.. what configuration? AOIA doesn't have a configuration!!

So after a bit of googling and reading up on side-by-side assemblies, it turns out the solution is pretty simple. To run it you need the Visual Studio 9.0 CRT DLLs installed on your system. If you don't have Visual Studio you can just grab the redist package from Microsoft and install that.

Future snapshots of the application will probably have the missing DLLs bundled in the ZIP file as a "private" assembly, like in this CodeProject article about Visual Studio 2005.

Creating a Symbol Server for Your PDB Files

Create a shared directory on your server, and give read/write access to the people who are going to be using it. (Developers & build server)

To upload a set of .pdb files use the following as an example:

symstore add /r /f c:\bin\debug\*.pdb /s \\myserver\symbols /t "Boost" /v "1.37.0"

/f - Location of the files to upload
/s - Location of your symbol server directory
/t - Product
/v - Product version

Importing DLLs

Well, it was that time of the year again... to update the external dependencies for Item Assistant. Downloading and updaing SQLite always baffels me until I remember the hoops I went through (read: googling around for hours) last time I wanted to generate an import lib for use with the DLL.

So here is a link to the MS KB article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/131313
And a good article about more advanced DLL handling: http://qualapps.blogspot.com/2007/08/how-to-create-32-bit-import-libraries.html

Update:
This is the gist of it:

Open Visual Stuidio command prompt and run:
lib /DEF:sqlite3.def

This will genereate the appropriate .lib and .exp file.

Find in Files

More Visual Studio 2005 oddities.

Today my Find in Files command suddenly stopped working. For some unknown reason. A very helpful error message showed up in the results window:

No files were found to look in. Find was stopped in progress.

After a bit of searching on the internet I came over this blog that explained how to fix it: http://bloggingabout.net/blogs/edward/archive/2005/01/31/2136.aspx

Basically you have to press CTRL + Scoll Lock to fix it... why? I have no idea.

Disappearing GUI Elements in Visual Studio 2005

For some reason after updating to Visual Studio 2005, the Exception Window no longer had the "Break on Unhandled Exception" column (or whatever it's called).

Here is a link explaining how to get it back.