Programming | Luke Browning

Visual Studio Community 2015 Crashing on Startup

Since yesterday I have been having a very strange error in Visual Studio Community 2015 where as soon as I open a solution VS crashes with no error. Now the only thing that has changed since yesterday was that I installed a large number of Windows updates that had been waiting for probably several months! I checked my installed updates but found nothing directly related to VS. I did find an update that made changes to .net but was unsure if this was related. The error I received was as follows;

Migrating Multi-Device Hybrid App (CTP3/3.1) to Visual Studio 2015 Apache Cordova App

After upgrading to Visual Studio 2015, Multi-Device Hybrid Apps (Cordova based apps) have a new project structure and are incompatible with VS. Microsoft have released a how-to guide here for upgrading your projects but due to it not being visible on search engines, being a little bit lacking in depth and taking me about half an hour to find the instructions – I have decided to replicate it here (with some extra details missing from the original). So, in order to update your previous project to the new structure, follow these steps;

NUnit HTML Report Generator

After doing some work with Selenium to perform some automated testing of a number of web applications and websites, myself and the team at Jatech came to the conclusion that the reports were not attractive enough to present to clients and thus embarked on creating a more attractive and responsive report.

Microsoft.ApplicationServer.Caching.Client.dll Missing from AppFabric 1.1 Installation

I came across and issue today after doing a clean install of Windows and reinstalling AppFabric where the Microsoft.ApplicationServer.Caching.Client.dll was missing from the installed files. The dll is used to interact with the distributed AppFabric Cache in .net so it was important I got it working.

Event Viewer Logging in C#

I spent the morning writing a Transport Agent for Exchange 2010 (another story!) to log some emails to disk. As it was on a remote server and remote debugging wasn’t possible, I decided to log some details to the event log. Now this must be the first time I’ve had to write the logging mechanism myself because I’ve never come across this before. When you try to use the EventLog.WriteEntry method you need to pass the source of the message (i.e the application name). So when I did this I get the following exception:

The source was not found, but some or all event logs could not be searched. To create the source, you need permission to read all event logs to make sure that the new source name is unique. Inaccessible logs: Security.

CoffeePot (HTCPCP)

CoffeePot is based on the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (although slightly modified) and is used to order coffee remotely. The project is written in Java and is based on a client-server architecture. The server emulates a coffee machine, taking orders from anything that connects to it, be it the client or telnet, then reporting back to the client once the order has been completed.

phpHighlighter

phpHighlighter is a nice little script to output another php file with all of the syntax highlighted and show its line numbers.

encryptMe

encryptMe is a couple php scripts designed to help developers and website administrators protect and add security to their data. Using the built in functions, you can encrypt and decrypt data using the encryption and decryption algorithms as well as hash your data with over 40 different hashing algorithms!

LostMyMobile

LostMyMobile provides a listing of lost mobile phones and gives a way for users to get in contact with anyone that finds them. Written in PHP using MySQL for my Data, Schemas and Applications module at University. Users must register an account to upload details of their lost phone. Once users have added their phone, all they have to do is wait to see if anyone contacts them.

Feedz RSS Reader

Feedz RSS Reader fetches RSS feeds from as many sites as you want and display them on one page.