Monthly Archive for November, 2009

Line Length Guides in Visual Studio

Published on November 9, 2009 in Code. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Here’s yet another tip for Visual Studio 2005/2008 users. If your company enforces any sort of line limit, and you want to make yourself visually aware of when you may be approaching or dealing with that limit, add this key to your registry:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\Text Editor]
(New String Value) "Guides"="RGB(192,192,192) 110"

110 Being your line limit, and 9.0 being the version of your VS. (2005 users should find 8.0)

Restart VS and you’re good to go.

Fixing Visual Studio 2008

Published on November 3, 2009 in Code. 0 Comments Tags: .

I recently took the time to upgrade from Visual Studio 2005 to 2008 at work, and in doing so, came across an issue immediately after starting the program for the first time. (Hopefully not a bad omen! :) )

A dialog popped up, saying:

Package Load Failure

Package ‘Microsoft.VisualStudio.Xaml’ has failed to load properly ( GUID = {E58C2A8B-BCC4-4559-AD59-D62EB6D58A22} ). Please contact package vendor for assistance. Application restart is recommended, due to possible environment corruption. Would you like to disable loading this package in the future? You may use ‘devenv /resetskippkgs’ to re-enable package loading.

It turns out that this seems to be a common issue for users who had Visual Studio 2008 Express installed on their system, and then they installed Visual Studio 2008 afterwards.

Thankfully, the fix is easy. Just reinstall the VS 2008 SP1.