In search of wisdom...

Following are the steps to troubleshoot Visual Studio 2008 setup problems: -

1. Download the FREE VSTS software from- http://bit.ly/OxdIK
2. Ensure that all of the pre-release (Beta or CTP versions) components on your machine have been removed:
3. Install the latest Windows updates from the Windows Update site: http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com
4. Check if there are any anti-virus or antispyware applications running. Make sure they are turned off during installation.
5. Make sure that the installation media is healthy. If the installation from disc drive is not working well, you can try copying the contents of the disc to the hard disk and installing from the hard disk.
6. Complete or dismiss Windows Update before installation. (and don't forget to turn it on later)
7. If the installation fails, you can collect the setup log file and analyze them.
Clean up the temporary folder (Open the menu “Start” “Run” and run “%TEMP%” without quotation marks) and reproduce installation failure. The log files will be generated in the temporary folder.
You can also utilize the collect tool from here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/heaths/attachment/8483493.ashx

Note - After running the tool, you can go to your %TEMP% folder to find the file vslogs.cab by clicking on the “Start” menu, choosing Run and running “%TEMP%” (without quotation marks). It may take some time for the tool to collect log files on your machine. Please be patient.
For more information, see: Visual Studio and .NET Log Collection Utility
http://blogs.msdn.com/heaths/archive/2008/05/09/visual-studio-and-net-log-collection-utility.aspx

8. Try using Process Monitor to track whether there is any file/registry access related issue.
Process Monitor:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/ProcessesAndThreads/processmonitor.mspx
The log can be large and you can make use of “Filter” feature to filter the result.
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Visual Studio Team System offers a nice Web- and Load-Testing Feature that allows you to easily create tests to verify your web application’s functionality as well as verifying how it performs under load. Web Applications that make use of AJAX Frameworks like jQuery execute additonal web requests to request information from the Web Server without causing the browser to reload the complete page. JSON is one of the formats that is used to exchange information between the Web Server and the AJAX Framework running in the browser.

Challenges with AJAX in Web- and Load-Testing

Asynchronous calls executed by AJAX frameworks can be very hard to deal with for web- and load testing tools? Why? Because those requests can most often not easily be correlated to a Page Request done by the browser and therefore its not easy to create a nice script that shows the sequential logic of all user interactions.
The next problem with AJAX requests is that its hard to verify if the simulated request produced the correct result and whether the result of one request needs to feed a subsequent request. An example for this would be a login call that returns a user id. This user id needs to be used for subsequent calls. If the testing tool doesn’t understand JSON and is not able to automatically detect the dependency between those calls its up to the test engineer to add parsing statements for the first call and use the parsed value in subsequent calls.

How to test JSON with Visual Studio?

I’ve downloaded the following ASP.NET MVC Sample App (KIGG) that uses jQuery and JSON. My task was to create a web script with Visual Studio that creates new user accounts. In order to do that a user needs to sign on to the page with username, password and email. The user account can then be activated by following an activation link that is sent via email.

Necessary steps for the Test Script

• Execute the request to sign up a new user by providing username, password and email
• Get the information about the activation link
• Execute the request to activate the user account

The default procedure for the activation uses an email that is sent out. As I didn’t want to bother with email during my web testing I extended the JSON message that is returned when signing up a new account to include the information about the activation link. Having that information as part of the response allows me to finish all the steps.

How to deal with JSON messages?

Here is the JSON message that is responded by the user signup request:

{"isSuccessful":true,"userId":"9JU51KDxp0-3Llw1BU2h7w","errorMessage":null}

The userId is the value that I am interested in. This is the value I need to use to call the Activate page. Another interesting value is the isSuccessful property. This allows me to add additional logic to my web script. I can verify if the sign-up request was successful. In order to do all this I need to extend Visual Studio Web Testing by writing my own Extraction and Validation Rule. Visual Studio offers an interface to provide custom implementations for value parsing and validation. Here is my implementation for the ExtractorRule using a helper class that parses the JSon string:

public override void Extract(object sender, Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.WebTesting.ExtractionEventArgs e) {

NameValueCollection jsonProperties = JSonHelper.ParseJSonString(e.Response.BodyString);

string propertyValue = jsonProperties.Get(JSonPropertyName);

if (propertyValue != null) {

e.WebTest.Context.Add(ContextParameterName, propertyValue);

e.Success = true;

} else

e.Success = false;

}

In a similar way I implemented the ValidationRule. Using it all in my web test allows me to specify the Extractor and Validation Rule in my web test.

Using JSON Validator and Extractor in Web Test

Conclusion

With Visual Studios extensibility mechanisms it’s easy to build support for those emerging technologies like jQuery and JSON. Let me know if you need the library that implements the two extension Rules.

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Visual Studio is the leading developer tool on the market, and I would like to share with you some tips and tricks that will make this great tool even more powerful. Getting familiar with a tool is crucial to getting the most out of the tool, and development tools and IDEs are no different.
Following is a list of tips and tricks which I have aggregated from my own knowledge and different online forums.
I hope they all be useful to us. For a free trial of the new Visual Studio Team System, Click here

Keyboard Shortcuts

F5:- Debug Start
F10:- Debug Step Over
F4:- View Properties
F7:- Toggles between design and code views.
F9:- Toggles breakpoint.
F12:- Go to definition of a variable, object, or function.
Ctrl+Shift+7Ctrl+Shift+8:- Quickly navigate forward and backwards in the go to definition stack.
Shift+F12:- Find all references of a function or a variable.
Ctrl+M, Ctrl+M: - Expand and collapse code outlining in the editor.
Ctrl+K, Ctrl+CCtrl+K, Ctrl+U: - Comment and uncomment line(s) of code, respectively.
Shift+Alt+Enter: - Toggles between full screen mode and normal mode.
Ctrl+I: - Incremental Search.
Ctrl+Shift+ - View AutoCloseTagOverride
Shift+F7 – View Designer
Ctrl+PgDn - ViewNextView
Ctrl+PgUp – WindowPreviousTab
CTRL + SHIFT + B - Build.BuildSolution
CTRL + F7 - Build.Compile
SHIFT + ALT + A - File.AddExistingItem
CTRL + SHIFT + A - File.AddNewItem
Ctrl+M,Ctrl+M - Will collapse the Code block, when you do the reverse (again pressing the same Key-pairs) then it will get expanded.
Ctrl+Shift+. - Auto close Tag override
Shift+F7 - View Designer
Ctrl+PgDn - Next View
Ctrl+PgUp - Previous Tab
End- Document End
Shift+End- Document EndExtend
Home- DocumentStart
Shift+Home- DocumentStartExtend

If you guys have some additional shortcuts, please feel free to add in the comments section. Thanks.

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