VS 2008 SP1 Tidbits – 1 of X

Sometimes it’s the little things that excite me the most :-)  For instance, in the recently released Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (VS 2008 SP1), there are a few nice enhancements to the Team Explorer and Source Control Explorer that I find extremely helpful.  These enhancements include:

• The ability to right-click on a build type within Team Explorer and select “View Configuration Folder”.  This will open the Source Control Explorer pane and take you directly to the folder containing the selected build type.  This is a great time saver – especially now that TFS 2008 supports storing your build types in any folder you choose.
  
   
  
• Having non-solution files automatically checked out when you start modifying them.  This is especially useful in build type (TFSBuild.proj) files.  How many times have you forgotten to check out a build type file prior to editing it?  This is no longer an issue with SP1.  Nice!
  
• The ability to drag-n-drop files directly into the Source Control Explorer pane.  This is a really nice feature and yet another great time saver.
  
• One other feature that I really like is the (minor) modification to the Source Location and Local Path within the Source Control Explorer.  The Source Location can now be copied to the clipboard (nice for documentation, e-mail messages, etc.) and the Local Path is now a hyperlink control which will open the mapped folder in Windows Explorer when clicked.
  

I realize that these enhancements are small in comparison to some of the other enhancements in SP1 but I still find them very useful.  It’s nice to see some of these time savers make it into a service pack release instead of having to wait for the next major release of Visual Studio.

VS/TFS 2008 SP1 – Installation Tips

Well, Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (VS 2008 SP1) has been out (RTM’d) for about three days now and several tips have materialized across the Visual Studio community that may help save you some time.  These tips are broken out into Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio.

Updating Team Foundation Server 2008

• When upgrading a Team Foundation Server, Installation order is important (read the installation guide).  As per the guide, “In deployments where the application tier and a client tier component are installed on the same computer, you must install SP1 for Visual Studio 2008 before you install SP1 for Team Foundation Server. Otherwise, you will not be able to install SP1 for Team Foundation Server.”
• If you upgrade from SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2008 but do not install SP1 after the upgrade, Team Foundation Server will no longer function.
• If you have Visual Studio 2008 installed on your application-tier server and you want to install SP1 for Visual Studio 2008 you must also install TFS 2008 SP1.  If you install only one service pack, you will create an unsupported configuration.
• If you have a standby application-tier server, you must install SP1 on the standby application-tier server if you install it on the primary server.
• In order to update client components such as Team Explorer, you must install SP1 for Visual Studio 2008 – SP1 for Team Foundation Server 2008 includes only server updates and does not update Team Explorer.

Updating Visual Studio 2008

• If you are upgrading from SP1 Beta, be sure to run the Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack Preparation Tool before you install the RTM version of SP1.  This utility cleans up several items, including:
  • Microsoft Silverlight Tools Beta 1
  • Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 – KB949325
  • Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 – KB944899 (v1)
  • Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 – KB945140 (SP1 Beta)

Miscellaneous

• If you’re having issues downloading VS 2008 SP1 on a network that uses Microsoft ISA Server, take a look at this post.
• As per this post:
  • If you get a Windows Update prompt to reboot during the installation of SP1, ignore it.  Wait until the SP1 installation is complete and then reboot.
  • If you have a pre-release of the Team System for Database Development GDR (that supports SQL Server 2008) installed, you will need to uninstall and reinstall after upgrading to SP1.
  • You can’t create the admin mode/slipstream TFS installer when running on a 64-bit OS.  TFS will be supported on 64-bit operating systems with the “Rosario” release.

VS 2008 & .NET 3.5 SP1 Released

Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 have been released.  You can read the details of what’s included as well as download the service pack here.

You can also read this post and this post from Brian Harry that covers some of the features in detail.

VS 2008 & .NET 3.5 SP1 Almost Here

A while back I posted about Visual Studio 2008 & .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1 (Beta).  This was on May 14th.  Based on the download text for SQL Server 2008 RTM, Service Pack 1 is a required dependency and will be available after August, 11th.

Also, the .NET Rocks PodCast #365 announces that SP1 is already available so the show must have been released a few days earlier than expected :-)  The description on the web site for this PodCast states that SP1 will ship around August 11th as well.

At any rate, it appears that SP1 will be available within the next week.