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Microsoft’s Brad Abrams and Somasegar both posted about a set of standard Microsoft icons that ship with Visual Studio 2005. They can be found in a zip file in the Visual Studio 2005 installation directory (usually C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\VS2005ImageLibrary\VS2005ImageLibrary.zip). There are over 600 icons in total with a mixture of Windows, Office and Visual Studio icons, and are licenced for reuse in your own applications.

The latest trend for even the simplest of tools is to provide the executables as an MSI file, requiring an installation to run the application. Lots of applications simply do not require an installation and will work if the .exe contained in the MSI file is run.

Scott Willeke has made a nice little tool called Less MSIerables (aka lessmsi) that can extract the contents of an MSI file directly to disk with no installation. Extracting the contents and running the .exe has worked successfully on every simple application I’ve tried so far.

After trying to modify unique index names on tables in a database using the INFORMATION_SCHEMA views and getting nowhere fast, I delved into the system tables to see if they would shed any light on how to do it. This was even more confusing as it’s not obvious how these tables fit together. If only there was a map of the relationships between the system tables. Well, there is - Microsoft helpfully supply one on their SQL Server website. Very useful.

I’ve recently been doing some work in Visual Studio 2005 which consisted of several projects in a single solution that I’d converted from Visual Studio 2003 format. Since the AssemblyKeyFile attribute has been deprecated, I began to add the shared strong name key to each project using the project properties view. The problem with this is that it copies the strong name key file to each project directory, making a shared key a bit pointless. This behaviour doesn’t happen (as explained in more detail by Shawnfa) if the strong name key file is added to the project as a linked item before setting it in the project properties view. This leaves a single strong name key file on disk, but still includes it in each project as with Visual Studio 2003’s AssemblyKeyFile attribute.

Using Visual Studio 2005 today, I received a “407 Proxy Authentication Required” message when trying to search the online help integrated into the IDE. KB910804 from Microsoft held the answer.

In order to allow VS2005 through an authenticating proxy, you have to edit the Visual Studio configuration file located at C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Help 8\dexplore.exe.config. To add support for the proxy, make sure the proxy element is present:

<configuration>
    ...
    <system.net>
        ...
        <defaultProxy enabled="true" useDefaultCredentials="true">
            <proxy bypassOnLocal="True"
                   proxyAddress="http://yourproxy:port"/>
        </defaultProxy>
    </system.net>
</configuration>

where the correct proxy server is configured in the proxyaddress element.

If you use the integrated help viewer, you must also add this xml to the configuration file located at C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe.config.