I was playing around with some Windows Azure tutorials today and was following the Create Your First Windows Azure Local Application. The tutorial is pretty simple to follow but I ran into some little issues which were very annoying?

After installing the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio v1.2 I followed the tutorial's steps to try and get the Hello World app up and running. However, after starting the application without debugging as instructed in the tutorial I got the following error.

"Windows Azure Tools: Failed to initialize the Development Storage service. Unable to start Development Storage. Failed to start Development Storage: the SQL Server instance ?localhost\SQLExpress' could not be found. Please configure the SQL Server instance for Development Storage using the ?DSInit' utility in the Windows Azure SDK."

As you can see by default the storage install assumes that the instance name is SQLExpress and if you have the full SQL Server installed this wont work and therefore you are instructed to use the DSInit utility (which you can run from the Windows Azure command prompt under the SDK) to install the Development Storage.

I'm not sure what I misread along the way when trying to fix the error but I when running the DSInit command I ended up running it as per below.

and this resulted in me getting an error like the following

and when I started to try and investigate the problem I just went into too much unnecessary trouble until I saw this post.

To cut the story short. The issue was basically that I've specified the instance name as MSSQLSERVER instead of leaving it blank as this is the default instance (see the DSInit command link I wrote earlier in this post). And surely enough, once I removed the instance name from the command it all worked well!

So, if you run into this issue, ensure your instance name is correct before going too deep to try and figure out what the cause might be.

I've recently decided to get back into some study and maybe even do some more certification exams and though this is an opportunity to put up a post on the different exams/courses you could do that have coverage of the Visual Studio 2010 IDE.

One of the ways you can get some coverage of Visual Studio 2010 in certification is through the .NET Developer certification exams ? mostly anything covering .NET 4.0 ? as can be seen in the two snap shots below which I took from the Visual Studio 2010 Certification Roadmap PDF file.

And also some training courses & press books as per below.

In addition to the above you can also have a look at the Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server 2010 Administration exam 70-512. You can also find a nice break down of Visual Studio 2010 learning resources based on your role in your organisation such as Architect or Developer ..etc on the Microsoft Partner Network training and events page.

One of the things that used to really annoy me in previous releases of Visual Studio is that you cannot remove items from your Recent Projects list. This can sometimes lead to you having some unwanted items in your recent projects list and the only way to remove them is to change the location of the solution and then try to open it and when Visual Studio doesn't find it it will prompt you to remove it from the list. Annoying right?

Well in Visual Studio 2010 this is no longer a problem! From the Start Page you can right-click any project or solution from the Recent Projects list and then it's gone as per the screen shot below.

Simple enhancement but very handy! Whilst you don't get the same functionality out of the box in Visual Studio 2008 you can get a similar function by installing the PowerCommands For Visual Studio 2008 extension. Installing this extension will add a ?Clear Recent Project List' menu option for the Recent Projects menu, and the same for the Recent Files menu as shown below.

So I while I was enjoying working with the multi-monitor support in Visual Studio 2010 (Great feature!) I decided to have a play with the .NET multi-targeting features of Visual Studio 2010.

I created a Visual Studio 2010 solution in .NET framework 4.0 and then decided to switch the framework version of my projects from .NET 4.0 to .NET 3.5, when I attempted to do this on my test project I got the following error message.

It turns out that in Visual Studio 2010 all Test Projects must target .NET 4.0 and based on some reading I came across, this is in order to allow full utilisation of the new test enhancements in Visual Studio 2010. I also tried creating a .NET 3.5 Test project in Visual Studio 2008 and if you import that into Visual Studio 2010, once you run past the conversion wizard the test project will be upgraded to target .NET 4.0.

It probably doesn't make that much difference what framework a test project targets but it's worth being aware that this change takes effect in Visual Studio 2010.

You can find out more about Visual Studio 2010's Multi-targeting features from Scott Guthrie's: Visual Studio 2010 Multi-Targeting Support post, and also Jeremy Jameson's Test Projects in Visual Studio 2010 Must Target .NET Framework 4 post.

Also see this post from the Visual Web Developer Team Blog.

I've previously blogged about the different Visual Studio 2010 Product editions and thought it would probably be worthwhile also posting information on how you can get hold of the right version for you.

As mentioned in my previous post, Visual Studio 2010 comes in the following editions:

• Visual Studio 2010 Express
• Visual Studio 2010 Professional
• Visual Studio 2010 Premium
• Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate
• Visual Studio 2010 Test Professional

One thing that I noticed was different with Visual Studio 2010 is that some of the Visual Studio 2010 editions (mainly the top-end ones) can only be purchases with an MSDN Subscription.

Below is a list of how you can obtain each edition

• Visual Studio 2010 Express (This edition of Visual Studio 2010 is free but must be registered after 30 days of evaluation usage) - see the link for details on obtaining a registration key.
• Visual Studio 2010 Professional (As can be seen from this link, the Visual Studio 2010 Professional edition comes with an MSDN Professional Subscription or the new MSDN Essentials subscription) You can find out more about the subscriptions on the MSDN Subscriptions Comparison page.
  • The MSDN Essentials subscription contains basically as the name suggests the basic things you need to do development, the OSs and the IDE.
  • Visual Studio 2010 Professional can also be purchased by itself (no MSDN subscription) from the Microsoft Store here.
• To get any of the other Visual Studio Editions you basically need to purchase Visual Studio 2010 with an MSDN subscription. You can buy an MSDN subscription via Microsoft directly - see the comparison page link mentioned earlier, or you can by a subscription via a Microsoft reseller see the list below for options
  • MicroWay
  • City Software
  • Harris Technology
  • DELL
  • Insight
  • The Microsoft Business and Industry Page has more details on the purchase options.

Also, if you're looking to get MSDN/Visual Studio in New Zealand the best place to look is the GetVS website www.getvs.net.nz .