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Saving a file from Silverlight using the SaveFileDialog, added in Silverlight 3, is easy. If you’re used to desktop development however, you might find yourself getting a SecurityException with the message ‘File operation not permitted. Access to path ‘xxx’ is denied.’. Here’s why: In desktop development, you’re used to getting a filename from a SaveFileDialog. Next, you start doing whatever you need to be doing to the file, based on the filename.

Here’s a quick Visual Studio tip for you… I frequently search for a specific text in my solution because I need to do something in all places where that text occurs. Today I found out how you can open all the files that are mentioned in the Find Results window. Search for the text you’re looking for. In my case this is ITest*. Open up the Search Results window and select all the records where the text was found.

For a project I’ll probably dedicate a post on this blog to in the future, I needed a ZIP library for Silverlight. After asking around on twitter (@rickvdbosch) I was pointed towards the SharpZipLib port on Codeplex, found on https://slsharpziplib.codeplex.com. Basically what I wanted to do was replace a file inside the ZIP file with my version of that file. The file was located in a specific folder inside the ZIP and could be found by either iterating through the ZipEntries in the ZIP, or by getting it based on its name.

The past couple of days I’ve been experiencing some issues with the context menu for my Solution Explorer in Visual Studio 2010. It contained scrollbars even when there was sufficient space on the screen to show the menu without scrolling. Searching for that issue I immediately found this blog post on The Visual Studio Blog. Taken from that post: We’re pleased to announce that there are patches available for Visual Studio and Windows Presentation Foundation that fix this problem.

The above scenario gave me the well-known could not load file or assembly error message. The assembly that couldn’t be found was log4net, Version=1.2.10.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=692fbea5521e1304. Or one of its dependencies of course… The situation in which I was getting this error message: using the CrystalReportViewer in an ASP.NET application having the ASP.NET application hosted in IIS (the error did not occur on the ASP.NET Development Server) running on a 64 bit machine Log4net was available in the GAC, with the exact version and PublicKeyToken stated in the error message.

Just a small post to start the new year… and let it be a good one! When opening a XAML document in Visual Studio, it opens in split view by default. This might become annoying when you have a large XAML document, because all the content needs to be rendered before you can get some work done. Here’s how you can have Visual Studio open XAML documents in code view:

As of December first I’ll be joining the ranks of Valid (www.valid.nl – Dutch website). I’m very excited to start over there and I am convinced we will be able to do great stuff together 🙂 I would also like to take this opportunity to thank BDO (www.bdo.nl) for the past period and wish them all the best with the plans for the future of ‘our’ system. Update 14 Jan 2011

Although the feature has been around since ASP.NET 2.0, I still meet people that don’t know and/or use app_offline.htm. Do you know (and use) the feature…? When working on an ASP.NET web application, you should notify your visitors in a decent way that your application is down. There’s a nice default feature available for these purposes since ASP.NET 2.0. Somehow, however, this feature is not very well known and rarely used.

Because we were still using an old Visual Studio 2005 solution which included a Web Site project, it was time to upgrade. We upgraded our Visual Studio 2005 solution to Visual Studio 2010 (and .NET 4.0), converted the Web Site Project to a Web Application Project and then, of course, the AjaxControlToolkit had to follow. I downloaded the latest build from their Codeplex site and updated the references in the different projects.

Yesterday I remembered two Visual Studio options Sara Ford told about in a presentation of her I attended a while back. Changing them made me happy… 🙂 Zero-impact projects When I have to test something real quick, I tend to create a new project in Visual Studio and scribble some code to test whatever I want to test at that point. This causes my project directory to be filled with projects named WindowsFormsApplication14 or something like that.

Sometimes it’s the little things that make you love a new product just a bit more. I tend to close stuff I don’t use anymore fairly quickly. Sometimes I even close an Explorer window or an application right after I used it, only to find I need it again in a few moments… We all have our quirks, right 😉 While developing I regularly close all the documents I have open in Visual Studio, especially when I am done with a specific task.

While working with Visual Studio 2010, a new feature caught my eye that isn’t communicated (strongly) in the “What’s new” lists you can find online. As part of the Visual Studio 2010 supports multiple web.config files! Now we can create a separate web.config file for each configuration we have for our application. If you add a configuration through the configuration manager, you have the possibility to add a web.config file for the new configuration, too.