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;

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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.

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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.

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XML Beautify

This is a small application I’ve built to transform unreadable, ugly XML into nice, clean, pretty, human readable XML. It is written in C# on top of the .NET framework (3.5). The software can handle multiple documents at a time (I managed to get it up to 180+ documents before giving up) and each file is syntax highlighted. All the software does is try to reformat your XML to indent your code and warn you of any structural issues with the document.

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Deploy .Net 3.5 Using Group Policy

Something that’s cost me a lot of time recently is trying to install  the .net 3.5 Framework to multiple computers in a domain using Group Policy. You would think, being a Microsoft product that the installer would be provided as an MSI as well as an EXE to ease deployment through domains. This however, is not the case.

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