Visual Studio 2010 - How It Should Have Looked
A few years ago (before Twitter, StackOverflow, DotNetKicks), one of my great sources of info was CodeProject.com. I remember some of the great articles from that time. When Visual Studio 2010 came out, it reminded me of something I saw over 4 years ago on that site a concept of the Visual Studio 2010 IDE.
If you have installed Visual Studio 2010, you can note it has a new look and feel. It has a new skin/theme. It resembles an Expression Blend feel. The shell of the IDE is using WPF technology. It pretty much looks like the screen shot below:
As mentioned above, a while ago I came across an article on CodeProject that really had a great set of ideas. I really hoped that Microsoft would adopt some of these concepts. Take a look at some of the screens below:
Visual stack trace idea is really neat and the concept UI looks a lot "cleaner" and softer on they eyes than Microsoft's version
Concept IDE that shows error trapping
You can check out the full article with all of the author's ideas on CodeProject here (http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/concept_ide.aspx). It is a shame that Microsoft's version hasn't really changed all that much since Visual Studio 2003. Obviously, a lot of these concepts are provided in different ways and with other add-ins. In fact, I think with the new WPF shell we might even see these new concepts come to life. However, you can see that over 4 years ago the concept IDE was pretty advanced and even holds up by today's standards of modern UIs.
Installing Visual Studio 2008 - Error 1330
This week I had to re-install all of my software again on my laptop that runs Vista. That is never fun. However, with all the SDKs and software I use, the computer tends to slow down and this becomes a necessary evil. In installing all of my software again, I ran into a problem with installing Visual Studio 2008. I haven't run into a problem with installing Visual Studio 2008 since it was in beta (I have probably done over a dozen installations of VS 2008, various editions).
I downloaded the ISO from MSDN Subscriptions and fired up the Visual Studio 2008 installation and then, bam! "Error 1330. A file that is required cannot be installed because the cabinet file c:\download\vs2008\cab5.cab has an invalid digital signature. This may indicate that the cabinet file is corrupt." I tried different install options, re-mounting the ISO and eventually re-downloaded the ISO. I never saw this before and figured this had to be a fluke thing. After it downloaded overnight, I tried again the next day and the same thing happened: "Error 1330. A file that is required cannot be installed..."
Then I started looking around on the web for any solution and noticed that many other people were having the same error (Error 1330); however, they were getting different cabinet files as the culprit. Heath Stewart's blog article on this is referenced in a lot of forums and is the first hit on Google when searching for Error 1330. His suggestion was to not install from a DVD and copy the files to the HD. I was already doing that. A further search on forums didn't really help with having success by disabling Microsoft Live Care (which I do not use).
What ended up being the problem was that I installed SQL Server 2008 first and had SQL Browser enabled (I tried a bunch of different stuff prior to this). I turned that off and also disabled search indexing on the HD. As soon as I disabled those two services, the installation worked. Just to double check that was the solution, I tried the installation again and it worked! I don't understand why either of these essentially change the signature of the cabinet file; however, it does make sense it was a service as users were reporting different cabinet files in the 1330 Error.
I wasted probably over seven hours trying to get around the Error 1330, so I decided to do a quick post to help anyone else out there that is facing the same error (as the solutions provided online didn't seem to help).