What does "RTMREL" mean in software versioning? - versioning

I just installed Visual Studio 2012 and noticed that the version as mentioned in the 'about' menu is:
Version 11.0.50727.1 RTMREL
I am familiar with RTM (Release To Manufacturing) but am curious what the REL component means.
Anyone have any insight?

RTMRel is the "release to manufacturing" release. A bit redundant, but rhymes with "SP1Rel" (the Service Pack 1 release).
Update: see Edward's comment below. There is a point to the "Rel" part. It means a "release" build (optimized and stripped of debugging information). MSDN members can also get "Chk" builds for debugging purposes.

According to this link https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/vstudio/en-US/b0db1059-6006-4e9a-8d82-6508adef31e0/is-it-the-rtm-or-final-version-of-visual-studio-2012-?forum=vssetup
RTM means Release to Manufacturing, i.e. the image that goes on DVD's in retail boxes

Related

"Enable the Visual Studio hosting" process compile option for Release configs

It appears to me as though the "Enable the Visual Studio hosting process" option on the Project Properties => debug tab is checked by default for both Debug and Release Configurations. If this item is checked, it seems that this results in the creation of a appname.VSHost.exe executable and associated configuration file that is used when running in the Visual Studio environment.
If this is the case, is there a reason why this option is set by default for Release Configurations since it seems this file would not be needed for a prod release? Is there any benefit to keeping it? I am tempted to remove it but the previous release included it and I hate to fix what ain't broken.
Also, I noticed that in both the Debug and Release folders that two new files that were not in the last release were created: AppName.application and appName.exe.Manifest. The previous release was compiled with VS2010 as was this and the .NET Framework is unchanged at 2.0. What might be responsible for these 2 fiels now appearing in both folders? Also, what differences would you normally expect to see between WinForms Release and Debug folders? I like having as much opportunity for debug info in errors messages as possible and I thought that dbg files were related to that. I assume that the compile optin "Generate Debug Info" is responsible for that at the expense of making your app clightly more transparent to hackers.
You can disable the hosting process (both in debug and release builds). It is only there to improve the debugging experience. Note that there are times when you do want/need to debug a release build, and the hosting process makes this potentially more functional.
For details on what it adds, see the Hosting Process page on MSDN.
That being said, you wouldn't deploy the *.vshost.exe files with your application. Having VS create them does not detract in any way, so it's typically harmless to leave these in place.

unknown build error "This implementation is not part of the Windows Platform FIPS validated cryptographic algorithms"

So I enabled this group policy and the first time I tried to compile my solution I get this error. The funny thing is that I only use cryptographic function in one place but what I am seeing this on is all my Silverlight ResourceDictionary files and WPF userControl files. Everything else seems to compile fine.
Why am I seeing the error on only xaml files where I do nothing with encryption? I know I can disable the FIPS group policy but I do want to support it. Any idea why specific XAML files are throwing this error during compile?
I know I'm a bit late to the game but I recently came across this problem and also figured out a solution. For the reasons stated by #mdutra above, this is why it doesn't work but interestingly, Visual Studio 2010 and 2012 have two different "fixes".
A Microsoft Connect post (that no longer exists) stated:
Visual Studio 2012 now builds C# projects in a separate process that runs msbuild. The entry you added to devenv.exe.config (that worked for VS 2010) won't be seen by this process. You should add <enforceFIPSPolicy enabled="false"/> directly above the </runtime> tag in the msbuild.exe.config file; typically found at C:\Windows\Microsoft.Net\Framework\v4.0.30319\msbuild.exe.config.
I also added it to the C:\Windows\Microsoft.Net\Framework64\v4.0.30319\msbuild.exe.config file as well since I didn't know which MSBuild I was using.
After some research I found this answer which makes sense:
WPF and FIPS
Here are the contents of the link just in case it is removed:
The following is the reply I got from the WPF XAML team:
We didn’t fix it because this issue was discovered days (June 2, 2008) before the release.
I still have the BBPack I didn’t checkin. Here is the comment from the code.
// The Federal Information Processing Standard mandates that
// MD5 is obsolete and not safe for cryptographic checksums.
// We are using it to coordinating source files for debugging
// not authenticating so MD5 use is OK here.
// But, on a OS with the FIPS compliant switch ON, the managed
// MD5CryptoServiceProvider Ctor will throw. So we can't use it.
//
// Currently we use a PInvoke wrapper to the Native layer;
// which still works, even on a FIPS compliant machine. A Better
// fix would be to move to the approved SHA checksums, but that
// will require co-ordination with VS and the Debugger groups etc.
The MSI builder and a few other tools also threw on a FIPS=1 machine.
So even we if we fixed our part (in 3.5sp1), the customer’s end-to-end solution was still broken.
General FIPS info:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/811833/en-us

Silverlight: How Assembly version affects ApplicationSettengs

I am looking for information how IsolatedStorage.ApplicationSettings are affected by Assembly Version. Is there a way to specify version to get same ApplicationSettings for any version of same app?
According to Microsoft, the ApplicationSettings are per xap path, not assembly version:
Their scope is determined by the full path of the application .xap file
Checkout this MSDN article for more info.
Sounds like support for multiple browsers is known to be flaky.
You will also find that running your app in the Visual Studio dev server will have unexpected results if/when the port changes.

Export and import resharper 6.0 settings

I've recently installed resharper 6.0. It took my long time to set up everything as I wanted. Now I want to export all this settings to another computer. I've tried this aproach without any success (might be because the computers use different versions of visual studio?). Then I found this in this answer. But RSM works for r# 5. I started reading to see if there is going to be RSM for r# 6.0 and there will not be because in r# 6.1 some settings management options are included. But I'm stick with r# 6.0.. Is there any way I can transfer my settings from one PC to another?
Now you may want to update to ReSharper 6.1 where the management of settings are improved including an export and import feature.
You didn't explain what you meant by "without any success".
Were you able to find the folders and copy the files?
Were there files already in the target directory? (If there weren't, you probably had the wrong directory.)
Did you diff the old and new files as a sanity check? (This would be especially important since you're apparently expecting this to work even when the two machines aren't running the same version of Visual Studio. There could easily be differences in the file format across VS versions.)
Did you make sure to close Visual Studio before copying the files?
Did you just copy files in ReSharperVersion\VisualStudioVersion, or did you also copy the files in the vAny directory?
At any rate, if you really can't copy the global settings files, and if you can't install 6.1 (why not? it's a free upgrade from 6.0), I think your only other option is to export and import your coding-style settings by going to ReSharper > Options > Languages > Common > Code Style Sharing. That won't get all the ReSharper settings, but it will get some of the most important ones.

Is it possible to degrade from Internet Explorer 7 to Internet Explorer 6 for debugging purposes?

I'm having Internet Explorer 6 problems on one of my sites, and I really wish I had it installed instead of Internet Explorer 7. Is there a quick way to do this?
Download Microsoft VirtualPC. Then download any of the files in Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Image. The second download contains four VHD (virtual hard drive) files which have:
XP SP2
IE 7
XP SP3
IE 6, IE 8 Beta 2
Vista SP1
IE 7
Multiple IE:
It is possible to run Internet Explorer in standalone mode without having to over-write previous versions thanks to Joe Maddalone who came up with a way of achieving that in November 2003. Basically, Internet Explorer is run by exploiting a known workaround to DLL hell - which was introduced in Windows 2000 and later versions - called DLL redirection.
Manfred Staudinger perfected the standalone versions by adding IE version numbers to the title bar of the standalone browser window. Moreover, by removing the "IE" key in the registry subkey [HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Version Vector] Internet Explore defaulted to respecting conditional comments based on the version number prebuilt in the program.
It is not difficult to follow the instructions and get any version of IE running in standalone along side other versions. Most of you probably know of evolt's archive of Internet Explorer which has them readily packaged in ZIP files. Now suppose you want to download them all. An installer that would conveniently automate the whole process would be great. Thanks to this comment for the idea.
So I made an installer which contains IE3 IE4.01 IE5 IE5.5 and IE6...
Download Virtual PC and set up a bunch of them for testing with various browsers/OS's. Once set up, this makes it trivial to test on IE6,7 and 8, various Firefox flavours, Konqueror, Opera, Safari, etc...
See Samuel's answer for a helpful VPC image in getting this started:
I recommend always testing your sites using BrowserShots. You can see how your site looks across multiple browsers, with multiple versions, on multiple operating systems. You can do something like 50 tests a day on their free service.
Also check out IETester, which gives you 5.5, 6, 7, 8b2 in one app.
Litmus is another BrowserShots-esque service.
This works fine for me: Multiple IE
Edit: looks like the minute it took me to find the URL was enough for 3 people to beat me to it..wow
IETester is pretty good, compare IE5.5/IE6/IE7/IE8 side by side.

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