This morning I ran into a ASP.NET bug in Visual Studio. Dragging a custom server control on an aspx file was not possible since I had ‘an invalid FORMATETC structure’ (what the …. is that?!). The message box alerting me something is really really wrong is this one:

Trying to solve the bug, I found the following attribute to be the problem: [ToolboxItem(true)]. Just delete the attribute, rebuild the application and the problem/bug disappears!
Good luck! Happy coding!
It has been a while since I posted anything on my blog. Sorry for keeping you on hold
! I think the blog will be filled with some information shortly, since I am still overthinking all the great stuff I saw on Tech-Ed North America a couple of weeks ago (first I had to overcome the jetlag, then the weather in The Netherlands, etc. etc.
). Enough nonsense for now!
While attending a session by Scott Hanselman on everything new in .NET 4.0 he showed a wonderful small tip, not only useful for the few of us already working on Visual Studio 2010: when working in the VS.NET Command Prompt, there is a small but useful command called ‘CLRVER’. It shows all .NET versions installed on your computer. Also, as an addition to this command, you can show active runtime processes using the -all switch. Nice piece of code! Enjoy!
A week ago I started to use a new TFS server (TFS 2008). The old TFS server got phased out yesterday after moving all sources to the new TFS server. Doesn’t sound like a problem, does it? However, I forgot to remember my laptop: my old workspace was still in there, but to delete a workspace the normal way the TFS server should be available. At itself, this is still not much of a problem, however: when you would like to map your new source control folders to the old ones on disk, this is not possible since the old workspace is still mapped to that location. Arghhh!!!
Luckily, there is a tf.exe command tool switch (discussed a few minutes ago in my previous blog post) to cope with this problem: use ‘tf workspaces /remove:*’ and all cached workspaces will be gone! Problem solved!
Windows Explorer is one of my favorites, especially when coding (in Visual Studio). I often navigate to the file, folder, or project I’m currently working on. Clicking “Windows Explorer” in the Tools menu would be helpful if we could manage to get it there… and ‘yes we can!’.
How?
Go to Tools -> External Tools… -> Add.
In the screen you are presented with, enter:
Title: Windows Explorer
Command: explorer.exe
Arguments: /select,”$(ItemPath)”
Leave Initial directoy blank
Click OK. When you click Tools -> Windows Explorer, the explorer will open with the selection on the current file you are editing in Visual Studio.