Scott Hanselman

My two-hundred-and-fourteenth podcast is up. Gary Schmidt from runningwitht1.com runs marathons and triathlons. He also wears an insulin pump 24 hours a day, just like Scott. These two Type 1 diabetics chat about what's involved in being both diabetic and active.

I would also encourage you to watch my "I am Diabetic" video on YouTube, and consider donating to the ADA if this blog as ever helped you.

(Ya, I know, I'm late to post this.)

Subscribe:

Download: MP3 Full Show

Links from the Show

• Gary Schmidt on Twitter
• Running with Type 1 Diabetes

Do also remember the complete archives are always up and they have PDF Transcripts, a little known feature that show up a few weeks after each show.

I want to add a big thanks to Telerik. Without their support, there wouldn't be a Hanselminutes. I hope they, and you, know that. Someone's gotta pay the bandwidth. Thanks also to Carl Franklin for all his support over these last 4 years!

Telerik is our sponsor for this show.

Building quality software is never easy. It requires skills and imagination. We cannot promise to improve your skills, but when it comes to User Interface and developer tools, we can provide the building blocks to take your application a step closer to your imagination. Explore the leading UI suites for ASP.NET AJAX,MVC,Silverlight,Windows Formsand WPF. Enjoy developer tools like .NET reporting, ORM,Automated Testing Tools, TFS, and Content Management Solution. And now you can increase your productivity with JustCode, Telerik’s new productivity tool for code analysis and refactoring. Visit www.telerik.com.

As I've said before this show comes to you with the audio expertise and stewardship of Carl Franklin. The name comes fromTravis Illig, but the goal of the show is simple. Avoid wasting the listener's time. (and make the commute less boring)

Enjoy. Who knows what'll happen in the next show?

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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The help system changed in Visual Studio 2010. I totally had a "Who Moved My Cheese" moment, as did many folks.

• Where's my "as I type" Help Index?
• Where's my separate Help Viewer? I don't want help in my browsers, it clutters my tabs.

If you don't install the Help Documentation at the end of the Visual Studio 2010 setup, you help will be online and shown in your default browser. Personally, I like the idea of an external help viewer. I just saw on the Help Team's blog that they released the Help Viewer Power Tool today. It's an unsupported local content Help Viewer.

First, make sure your Help Content is installed locally, rather than served from the web.

1. Click Help | Manage Help Settings.
2. Click Choose Online or Local. Select Local, a path, then OK.
3. Click Install Content from Online (or from Disk)
4. Select your content by clicking Add on each topic you want, click OK.

When you've got local help content setup, go install the Help Viewer Power Tool. So what do you get?

The Help Viewer Power Tool supports two modes: in-browser and standalone.

1. The Power Tool defaults to an in-browser experience that adds two additional tabs – Index and Search – to the left pane using a Silverlight control. In addition, the left pane is now fully resizable.
2. The Power Tool can be configured to provide a standalone experience with three tabs for navigating content: Contents, Search Results, and Index. This mode provides some additional features over the in-browser experience:
• The help window has its own icon and is easily located in the task bar.· The help window can be pinned to the Win7 Taskbar.
• F1 queries overlay the previous help topic (eliminates tab proliferation).
• The standalone window is resizable and can be positioned independently without affecting browser settings.

Here's what your in-browser Help will look like. Notes the Contents, Search Results and Index on the left:

Here's the standalone Help Viewer. Once you've run it, you can also pin it to Explorer in Windows 7.

How do I switch to standalone mode?

1. From your system drive, run the following from an elevated command prompt
   (note you might be in \Program files (x86))
   cd \program files\microsoft help viewer\v1.0
   hlpvwpt.exe standaloneviewer=true
2. Shut down any instances of the Help Library Agent. Right-click on the Help Library Agent icon in the taskbar and select ‘Exit.

How do I switch back to in-browser mode?

1. From your system drive, run the following from an elevated command prompt:
   cd \program files\microsoft help viewer\v1.0
   hlpvwpt.exe standaloneviewer=false
2. Shut down any instances of the Help Library Agent. Right-click on the Help Library Agent icon in the taskbar and select ‘Exit.

If you're installing on a non-English system, make sure you read the Readme to make sure your localized help is shown. Also, if you only have IE6, you'll need IE8.

Another way to find the Help Viewer Power Tool

As an aside, you can also just go to the Tools | Extension Manager inside VS2010, and query something like "help viewer power" and you can get to the download page from inside VS.

Related Links

• How To: Updating multiple VS 2010 installations' Help content with a single download - This technique will show you how to share help between multiple developers via a Shared Drive. This is helpful in constrained bandwidth environments.
• A comment from my blog: "Also, while the updating feature is great, the downloads appear quite large and if you have a number of machines to update then this can be a slow and bandwidth consuming task, is there any way to download and share the help system updates between multiple installations?
• Community Created H3Viewer.exe - Alternative VS 2010 help viewer in the style of DExplore. Features a full TOC, full Index, Search and favorites.
• Keyword Index for Visual Studio 2010 Help Documentation - An unsupported inside-the-IDE Help Client with keyword index.
• Developer Documentation and Help Forum - Ryan, the developer of this tool, will be watching the forums for your feedback.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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A few days ago on Twitter @red7_liu tweeted:

微软的Web Camps大会要来中国了，大牛Scott Hanselman会来.

This part "大牛" as I understand, effectively means "Big Cow."

"Microsoft Web Camps Conference is coming to China, Big Cow Scott Hanselman will come."

If that's not a good enough reason to go to Microsoft WebCamps, then what is? ;)

This isn't a conference, it's a camp, like a classroom. Here's the schedule.

• Day 1: Learning: Web Platform from the ground up
• Day 2: Hack day, labs and building apps in teams

First day we learn, second day we code.

What are Web Camps?  Web Camps are free, two-day events that allow attendees to learn and build on the Microsoft Web Platform. At camp, they will hear from Microsoft experts on the latest components of the platform, including ASP.NET Web Forms, ASP.NET MVC, jQuery, Entity Framework, IIS, Visual Studio 2010 and much more. Web Camps also provide the opportunity to get hands on with labs and get creative by building apps in teams with prizes at the end of the day.  All this with Microsoft experts on hand to guide people through.

Locations

I'll be at the boldface events. They are free, sign up now!

• Toronto May 07-08 - with Jon Galloway and James Senior
• Moscow May 19-19 - with James Senior
• Beijing May 21-22 - with James Senior and Scott Hanselman
• Shanghai May 24-25 - with James Senior and Scott Hanselman
• Mountain View May 27-28 - with Jon Galloway and Rachel Appel
• Sydney May 28-29 - with James Senior and Scott Hanselman
• Singapore June 04-05 - with James Senior
• London June 04-05 - with Jon Galloway and Christian Wenz 
• Munich June 07-08 - with Jon Galloway and Christian Wenz 
• Chicago June 11-12 - with Jon Galloway and James Senior
• Redmond, WA June 18-19 - with ScottGu and James Senior
• New York June 25-26 - with Jon Galloway and Dan Wahlin

Here's the China one-sheet.

See you there. Become a Facebook fan.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

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My two-hundred-and-thirteenth podcast is up. Scott talks to AOP expert Philip Laureano about Aspect Oriented Programming. Is it the missing piece of the Object Orient Programming puzzle? It sounds scary but is it? Should I start using IL Rewriting and Dynamic Proxies on my next project, or is it too dangerous? All this and more as Scott and Philip learn about LinFu, an Open Source project that enables these scenarios and more!

(Ya, I know, I'm late to post this.)

Subscribe:

Download: MP3 Full Show

Links from the Show

• Philip Laureano on Twitter
• LinFu - A framework that adds mixins, inversion of control, DbC, and other language features to the Common Language Runtime.

Do also remember the complete archives are always up and they have PDF Transcripts, a little known feature that show up a few weeks after each show.

I want to add a big thanks to Telerik. Without their support, there wouldn't be a Hanselminutes. I hope they, and you, know that. Someone's gotta pay the bandwidth. Thanks also to Carl Franklin for all his support over these last 4 years!

Telerik is our sponsor for this show.

Building quality software is never easy. It requires skills and imagination. We cannot promise to improve your skills, but when it comes to User Interface and developer tools, we can provide the building blocks to take your application a step closer to your imagination. Explore the leading UI suites for ASP.NET AJAX,MVC,Silverlight,Windows Formsand WPF. Enjoy developer tools like .NET reporting, ORM,Automated Testing Tools, TFS, and Content Management Solution. And now you can increase your productivity with JustCode, Telerik’s new productivity tool for code analysis and refactoring. Visit www.telerik.com.

As I've said before this show comes to you with the audio expertise and stewardship of Carl Franklin. The name comes fromTravis Illig, but the goal of the show is simple. Avoid wasting the listener's time. (and make the commute less boring)

Enjoy. Who knows what'll happen in the next show?

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

Hosting By

I was setting up a new machine for presentations and I was getting ready to install Visual Studio 2010 Express and figured I'd go see if the Web Platform Installer (we call it "Web-P-I") had the new versions of VS2010 ready to go.

If you're not familiar, I've blogged about this before. WebPI is a 2meg download that basically sets up your machine for Web Development and downloads whatever you need automatically. It's a cafeteria plan for Microsoft Web Development. It's really matured in the last two years and it's THE fastest way to take a machine from fresh Windows install to "ready to dev".

If you've already got stuff installed, WebPI won't mess up your installation. It will instead give you a list of extensions you might want to add or turn on. For example, here I'm downloading the free version of VS2010, Visual Studio Web Developer 2010 Express and adding the URL Rewrite 2.0 module to IIS.

It sucks to say it, but the installer on SQL Server 2008 Express is insane. My brain just isn't wired to correctly install SQL Express and I always struggle with it. Additionally, I'm always trying to figure out how to add SQL Server 2008 Management Studio Express and I get lost. So, I've stopped trying and I use WebPI to do it; see the screenshot below.

However, it's more than setting up the dev  enviro, it also acts as an installer for Open Source apps from the Web App Gallery. If you're a Umbraco, Joomla, or Drupal person, it'll install the app and setup IIS for you.

WebPI inside uses the Web Deployment engine I talked about at Mix this year called Web Deployment Made Awesome: If You're Using XCopy, You're Doing It Wrong. It's easy to make your Open Source application installable via WebPI. I wrote about how I added support for a WebPI-based installation in DasBlog last year. It'll anything that can run on IIS, not just ASP.NET apps. If you've got an app, go submit it to the gallery!

Go check it out. Enjoy.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

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