Installing a Visual Studio 2005 Add-in for all users

For posterity, here is a nugget of information that required quite a bit of digging to uncover.

If you want to install a Visual Studio 2005 Add-in for all users, drop the .AddIn and .DLL files (along with any subdirectory containing satellite DLL(s)) in the following directory:

C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\MSEnvShared\AddIns

If %ALLUSERSPROFILE% is not C:\Documents and Settings\All Users on your machine, adjust accordingly.

Microsoft's documentation on installing a Visual Studio 2005 add-in is fairly confusing, although I do see now that they mention this directory in a comment below the main article.

This issue came up as part of deploying a Visual Studio Add-in for Marmoset which a YCP student and I wrote this summer. Marmoset is a nifty project submission and testing server for programming courses. I expect the Add-in will be a part of the forthcoming open source release of Marmoset, which should happen sometime this Fall.

Ubuntu Studio

One of my projects for this summer is to get my guitar (1995 Fender Standard Telecaster) and amplifier (1976 Fender Vibrolux Reverb) fixed and to do some home recording. I did a few recordings about 6 years ago on a Tascam 4 track tape recorder (you can find them on my UMD web page if you're interested, but bear in mind that I suck). However, audio production on Linux has progressed significantly in recent years---e.g., Ardour---so I figured I'd give it a whirl.

I despise compiling and configuring software by hand, so I was thrilled to discover the existence of Ubuntu Studio. The current release, 7.04, is essentially Feisty Fawn with a low-latency kernel and prebuilt binaries for all of the major audio/video/graphics applications, plus some cool new desktop themes. Through the magic of apt-get, it was a matter of three shell commands to upgrade my home machine to Ubuntu Studio. (Plus 400 MB of downloads through my DSL connection, of course.) The only hitch was breaking X because I didn't get the restricted binary kernel modules for the new kernel (nvidia drivers, alas). Once that was fixed I was in business. People talk about whether or not Linux is ready for the desktop. I think Ubuntu has not only answered this question with a resounding yes, but proven that it is a better desktop system than Windows many times over.

I haven't tried out Ardour yet, since I'm still waiting for my guitar and amp to come back from the shop, and also for the soundcard (M-Audio Delta 1010LT) I won on ebay to arrive. Thanks to Ubuntu and Ubuntu Studio, I'll be ready when they all arrive.

Visual Studio 2005 works in VMWare Player

Since I had no luck getting WinXP/Visual Studio working in VirtualBox, I decided to try VMWare Player. Long story short, it works! I followed the instructions an a VMWare Player HOWTO at ubuntuforums, and a couple hours later I have a full WinXP VM in which Visual Studio is (apparently) running quite happily. Got TortoiseSVN installed as well. Whee! Networking works just dandy through the NAT'ed virtual ethernet device.

My initial impressions is that VMWare Player gets extremely bogged down by disk I/O. Double clicking a program icon can send it off into space for minutes. It kinda seems to be a one-time hit, though. Maybe I just need more RAM.

Other than the disk I/O problem, responsiveness seems acceptable.

Now I can engage in some Windows development without leaving the cozy womb of Linuxdom.

Can't run Visual Studio 2005 within VirtualBox?

I tried today to get VirtualBox set up on my Linux (Ubuntu 7.04) box at work. WinXP installed without a hitch, but it refuses to install Visual Studio 2005, which is the only reason I wanted to run WinXP in the first place!

Here's a screenshot of the error


Aiiighhh!

A google search on the text of the error message returned no hits. The Properties menu says I have 14.6 GB of space left on my (virtual) hard drive, and Linux has plenty of real disk space left, so I don't think that's the problem.

VirtualBox seems like an excellent product, and responsiveness within the guest OS seems quite snappy, so my current state of affairs is disappointing.

Eclipse CDT

I've been hearing good things about Eclipse CDT (the C/C++ development tools for Eclipse), and I finally sat down and tried it out today. [Back in the day I was a vi/make/bash die hard, but I was won over by the huge (huge!) productivity gains I experienced using the Eclipse JDT (Java development tools) when doing Java, and now I really want something similar for C.]

So far, I'm very impressed. I was able to get the source code to a new version of GeekOS I'm working in imported and (almost) compiling, without writing a makefile. Based on the project settings, CDT generates makefiles automatically. The settings seem pretty flexible---for example, I was able to redefine the command for assembly files with very little effort. (I use gcc to convert assembly files into object files so that they can include C header files.)

Code completion seems relatively functional; not always totally up to date, but in general pretty good. I was actually able to do an automatic renaming of a variable, which is something I now take for granted in JDT and pains me greatly to have to do by hand using grep and vi. Of course, GeekOS is straight C code, so the underlying problem of extracting symbol information from the source code is not as complicated as for C++, but I don't care about C++.

I still have to customize the linking command and add a post-build step to get the kernel into some bootable form, but that should (in theory) be pretty easy. Eventually I would like to be able to support other hardware targets out of the same source base, which would require a mechanism in the build system to select a subset of source directories based on the current configuration (target).

Summer!

Summer's here! (Or, at least, the academic year is over and the high temperature yesterday was close to 90 degrees F.)

My earlier post about a frustrating experience installing Subclipse was somewhat inaccurate. As it turns out, when you install subclipse via the update site, you can uncheck the box that installs the Mylar integration. The base subclipse feature works just dandy with Eclipse 3.2.2.

I installed Ubuntu 7.04. I normally don't upgrade on a whim, but after seeing an Ubuntu forums post about a GUI configuration for nvidia twinview I just had to. I despise editing xorg.conf, but I love working with dual monitors. Anyway, I now have both my 19" Acer and 15" Dell LCD panels connected and running quite well. The basics are

1. System->Administration->Restricted Devices Manager (enable closed-source nvidia driver)
2. sudo nvidia-settings (run the GUI config tool)
3. log out, control-alt-backspace to restart the X server (just to make sure things really work)
   

All is not perfect. New firefox windows do weird things if they are sized too large to display fully on the small monitor. However, the annoyances are pretty minor.

Now back to work. I'm doing some refactoring of FindBugs in preparation for the upcoming tutorial at PLDI. Assuming everything works out, it should become a lot easier to implement new analyses in a FindBugs plugin.

Subclipse frustrations

I use Eclipse for Java development. Great IDE, love it, etc. But, it doesn't do subversion out of the box. You need Subclipse for that, and it must be installed separately.

OK, go to subclipse website. Find update site. Go through the whole Help->Software Updates->Find and Install... business in Eclipse. It says that I can't install the latest version of Subclipse because I don't have "Mylar" installed. Let's think about this for a moment:

Isn't the whole point of f***ing update sites to automate the process of software installation?

So, now I need "Mylar". Google takes me to the Mylar website. My heart sinks: there's no convenient link labeled "Install Mylar". I can't even really tell what the hell Mylar is. I'm sure it's nice and all, but I just want Subclipse to work!

Eventually I decide to click the "Mylar 2.0M2" link in the "Releases" box. It's the only release listed, so I guess it's the one I should use, right? I see an update site, so I go back into Eclipse and let it party on both the Subclipse and Mylar update sites. Now I'm allowed to install both features. After a few minutes of downloading, installing, and restarting Eclipse, everything is ready.

Long story short, this version of Mylar doesn't work correctly, at least with my Eclipse (3.2.1) under Linux. Errors out the wazzoo. Fortunately, I'm able to disable Mylar and the Subclipse Mylar Integration (thank you, Eclipse, for providing Help->Software Updates->Manage Configuration), leaving just good old Subclipse, which now seems to work.

Hey, Subclipse developers:

1. I expect your update site to correctly install all of the software I need to run subclipse
2. I don't want to be forced to install broken experimental software in order to use basic version control
3. The Mylar integration should be optional

Hey, Eclipse developers:

Please, please, integrate subclipse into the mainline so I never have to go through this again.