Installing and using nuget

In Visual Studio, go to Tools / Extension manager. Select the Online Gallery, and type in ‘nuget’ in the search box:

Click the Download button, and install Nuget Package Manager:

You need to restart VIsual Studio now. After that, if you click on a solution, you can enable Nuget Package Restore:

You will get the following message:

If you click the Yes button, the Nuget Package Restore will make sure that if you build your application, it will automatically download all required packages needed by the solution:

Afterwards, a new solution folder ‘.nuget’ is created:

To add a nuget package, for example the Specflow nuget, right click the solution and select ‘Manage NuGet Packages for Solution…’:

Select ‘Online’, type in the nuget name and click on the Install button next to the nuget you want to install:

If you then look in the references of your project, you will see that the assembly has been added:

Now everyone will be kept up to date with the correct nugets and versions with every build of the solution.

Sharepoint integration with IE 9

A while ago I set up a Sharepoint Services 3.0 site, which was working fine. However, lately two annoying problems appeared. It I tried to edit text using the rich text editor, I got exception:

Trying to edit a document from a document library resulted in:

I searched for days to find the reason for this, and to my surprise there was actually nothing wrong with Sharepoint or Office, but with the fact that I used Internet Explorer 64 bit. All editions of IE 64 bit have only limited support, which caused all of these issues! If I use the 32 bit version of IE, there were no problems.

Switching from VMWare to VirtualBox

I have been using VMWare for a couple of weeks now. Unfortunately it was not a very good experience. Once in a while it crashed during startup or shutdown of the virtual machine, after which I manually had to remove the lock file in order to be able to use it again:

But the most annoying issue was that in NAT mode the internet connection worked but I experienced several network related problems, and in bridged mode I simply had no internet connection. Trying to fix it with several solutions I found with google resulted in no solution.

Then I tried to quickly create a virtual machine with VirtualBox. After a few minutes I noticed that everything just worked out of the box, in NAT and bridged mode. So the decision was taken to move to VirtualBox.

I found that this does not mean that all of my virtual machines should be recreated, because VirtualBox also supports the VMWare hard disk format (vmdk)! It requires only some small manipulations to get this working.

First, power up the original virtual machine with VMWare, uninstall the VMware tools and shut down the machine:

Start VirtualBox, create a new machine.

Click next.

Now copy all of the original VMWare hard disk files into the created folder:

Click next to continue the creation of the virtual machine, and select the main vmdk file:

Click create. Do not start the virtual machine yet!

Select the virtual machine and click settings:

In storage, remove the SATA controller:

In IDE controller, uncheck ‘Use host I/O cache’ and click the ‘add hard disk’ icon:

Choose the existing hard disk file:

That’s it! Start the virtual machine. Windows will now update its drivers accordingly, and a couple of restarts may be needed. Eventually, your virtual machine will be up and running in VirtualBox. Then, select ‘Install guest additions’ in the Devices menu, so that you unlock the full power of VirtualBox:

After an hour of work, my four virtual machines were converted successfully: