Connect(); // 2015 Summary

Microsoft have just held their second Connect(); virtual event with quite a few product announcements. If you didn’t get up in the middle of the night to watch it live, you can see all the videos from the event on Channel 9. Here’s my personal highlights:

Visual Studio Code open sourced and extensible

VS Code has now reached ‘beta’, which includes support for extensions. VS Code is now being developed in a public repo on GitHub.

ASP.NET 5 RC1

The rewrite of ASP.NET build to run on .NET Core is getting closer to final release. Some nice new tooling additions (Bower support), and early support for “.NET Platform Standard” as a way of indicating binary compatibility between packages.

Entity Framework 7 RC1

The rewrite of Entity Framework that runs on .NET Core (as well as full .NET Framework etc). Consider using it only if you don’t need features that it doesn’t have (kind of obvious advice really!)

Glimpse v2 Beta1

The re-architected version of the ASP.NET diagnostics dashboard that (for the moment) runs only on ASP.NET 5. If you’re (like most people) still using earlier versions of ASP.NET then stick with Glimpse v1 for now.

Visual Studio Dev Essentials

A one-stop shop to get free access to training, tooling and access to services.

Visual Studio 2015 Update 1

Due out on November 30th (so no link yet)

Windows Server 2016

Pretty sure this wasn’t a Connect() announcement but is just as interesting. Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 4 is now available, which includes support for Hyper-V Containers (a more isolated container technology than the lighter-weight Windows Server Containers that were introduced in preview 3).

North America Trip–SEA to ADL

Friday was another chance to do some final sight-seeing back in down-town Seattle. I went on the Seattle Underground Tour, which was fantastic. A hilarious and entertaining tour guide made for a very enjoyable and educational history tour of the beginnings of the town of Seattle.

I also managed to get back for another look at the Pike Place Markets, which I’d briefly seen the previous Sunday, though Friday’s weather was an improvement. It was nice to look around and having something yummy for lunch whilst the sun poked through the clouds.

On the recommendation of Scott Hanselman I saw (but tried to avoid smelling!) the ‘great wall of gum’. Good timing, as a week later they started cleaning it all off for the first time in 20 years.

Then off to the airport for my flight down to San Francisco. The train from downtown Seattle to the airport only cost $US3 – what a bargain!

I was a bit concerned about the relatively short time to make my connecting flight to Sydney, but I need not have worried. San Francisco airport is relatively small (possibly similar size to Adelaide), so it was literally a 5 minute walk from gate to gate. What a relief – and much less stressful than going through Los Angeles again.

The flight back to Sydney went well (there’s something about flying overnight that makes it easier to go to sleep, or maybe I was just exhausted after a full on fortnight!)

Landing in Sydney early Sunday morning I managed to get on an earlier flight back to Adelaide than I’d originally booked. It was so great to get home and see my family again 😀.

Web Essentials 2015 extension keeps being disabled

I noticed recently that Visual Studio 2015 wasn’t loading the Web Essentials extension. Checking in the Extensions and Updates dialog revealed the problem – it was disabled.

But I hadn’t disabled it! So I re-enabled it, restarted Visual Studio and got on with my life…. Until I next started Visual Studio and it was disabled again. Grrr.

Next stop, “Captain Google” – which brought me to a closed issue on GitHub. So it isn’t just me, but no reliable solutions to the problem (yet).

What about running Visual Studio with logging? I did this, re-enabled the extension and chose Restart. Looking at the second log file revealed the following interesting lines:

Checking the folders above maps to the following extensions:

1. Visual Studio Extensibility Templates
2. Team Foundation Team Explorer Extensions
3. Cloud Explorer for Visual Studio 2015
4. Web Essentials 2015

The first two are interesting in that they’re both under C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\Common7\IDE. A closer look here reveals that in both cases, the second folder is actually a shortcut that points back to the first folder, so there isn’t really a conflict here – just Visual Studio having to process the same exact folder twice.

The 3rd item is interesting in that I hadn’t notice a problem with Cloud Explorer, but that’s probably because I hardly ever use it. But sure enough, checking back in Extensions and Updates showed that it too was disabled.

Ok. So I selected both Cloud Explorer and Web Essentials, chose Uninstall and restarted Visual Studio. And they were still there! (Zombie Extensions?!!). But I can see how this would be. The duplicates did get removed, but this left the other extensions still there.

Righto.. Once more with feeling! Select each extension, choose Uninstall and restart Visual Studio.

Check Extensions and Updates again. Hooray – they’re really gone now.

Now re-install both extensions and really get on with life 😀