I recently installed Windows Vista Business edition on my computer at work, and discovered it's a small hassle to get Microsoft's Visual Studio 2005 tools to run properly on it.

Thought I'd consolidate the links to the updates necessary to do Windows Vista development here, for your convenience.

Visual Studio 2005 SP1

Assuming you already have Visual Studio 2005 installed on your computer, you'll first need Service Pack 1.

• For Visual Studio 2005 (Standard, Professional, or Team Editions) - Download VS80sp1-KB926601-X86-ENU.exe
• For Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions - Download the update(s) here

The updates for the express editions are each less than 50 megabytes, however the update for Standard, Profession or Team Edition is a whopping 431 megabytes, which may take a while.

Once you have that, go ahead and install it.

Visual Studio 2005 SP1 Update for Windows Vista

Next you'll need the SP1 Update for Windows Vista. If you're previously installed a Beta version of this update, be sure to uninstall it first.

To get SP1 Update for Windows Vista, download VS80sp1-KB932232-X86-ENU.exe

Once you've done that, you should be all set to go, and no longer receive warning messages when you start Visual Studio 2005.

NOTE: Be sure to start Visual Studio 2005 as an Administrator, otherwise you won't have access to some of it's features (right-click it in the start menu, and select "Run as Administrator" -- even if you're using an account with administrative privileges...)

I just finished setting up domain based authentication on our new SVN server here at work, so I thought I'd post my notes on the process and links to what you'll need - since I found that the information was pretty disparate.

First a list of what I used, and you'll need:

• Subversion - obviously. I used version 1.2.3
• Apache Web Server - I used version 2.0.55
• mod_auth_sspi 1.0.3 - This has always been hard to come by and there's always been various patches of it floating around. This place is a unified attempt to bring all the patches together, and it works very well. Grab the one for the appropriate version of Apache2

I will assume that you've already installed both Apache 2.0.55 and SVN 1.2.3. If you haven't, please do so and then come back -- the installation for both of them is very simple and will only take you a few minutes to complete.

Step 1: mod_dav and mod_dav_svn

The first step to accessing SVN via Apache is to set up WebDAV. To do this, copy

C:\Program Files\Subversion\bin\mod_dav_svn.so

to:

C:\Program Files\Apache Group\Apache2\modules

Next edit your httpd.conf file, and add the following content:

LoadModule dav_module         	modules/mod_dav.so
LoadModule dav_svn_module 	modules/mod_dav_svn.so

<Location /svn>
	DAV svn
	SVNParentPath "/path/to/repositories"		
</Location>

This example uses SVNParentPath to point to the parent folder of multiple SVN repositories. If you set it to C:\repositories, then any directory you create under it, such as C:\repositories\ProjectA, is accessible under the /svn URL, like so: http://localhost/svn/ProjectA. If you only have 1 repository, or do not plan to use multiple repositories, you could use the SVNPath directive instead, and point it directly to your SVN repository. This approach is more flexible though, and allows for expansion without changing your configuration files.

mod_auth_sspi and mod_authz_svn

The next step is to enable domain based authentication and access control to your SVN repositories. Copy:

C:\Program Files\Subversion\bin\mod_authz_svn.so

to

C:\Program Files\Apache Group\Apache2\modules

And edit your http.conf file again to look like this:

LoadModule dav_module 		modules/mod_dav.so
LoadModule dav_svn_module 	modules/mod_dav_svn.so
LoadModule authz_svn_module 	modules/mod_authz_svn.so 
LoadModule sspi_auth_module 	modules/mod_auth_sspi.so

>Location /svn<
	DAV svn
	SVNParentPath "D:/Engineering/svn/repos"	

	AuthName "My SVN Server"
	
	AuthType SSPI
	SSPIAuth On
	SSPIOmitDomain On
	SSPIAuthoritative On
	SSPIDomain DOMAINNAME

	Require valid-user
	AuthzSVNAccessFile "C:/repositories/svnaccess.txt"	
</Location>

You can see that we've added two modules, and several lines to our Location /svn element. Set the SSPIDomain appropriately for the domain you want to authenticate against. SSPIOmitDomain On allows you to authenticate against the domain without specifying it as an explicit prefix, you can turn that off as you like, but it's simpler to just leave it on.

We also specify an AuthzSVNAccessFile directive that specifies the file we store our authroization information in, which leads us to:

AuthzSVNAccessFile

The AuthzSVNAccessFile specifies a plain text file that identifies which repositories users have access to. It's simple to set up, here's an example:

[groups]
developers=Tom,Dick,Harry,Sally,Sue
managers=Bill,Jean,Marry,Bob,Dave

[repositoryname:path]
@developers = rw
@managers = r
Bill = rw

Replace repositoryname with the name of your repository, which is a subdirectory under the path you specified in the SVNParentPath directive, and path with the path you're modifying, such as / for the whole repository, or /branches/Bill for a specific branch. In this example, we've given the group developers read write access, the managers group read access, and explicitly given Bill read write access (he's a manager).

Conclusion

You should now have web-based access to your SVN repository using domain based authentication! It's a good idea at this point to further protect the repository using an SSL configuration, which I won't cover here. I have some notes on it for an Apple platform that may be useful here and here - I'll cover it explicitly for a Windows installation in another post though, hopefully sometime soon.

That make me hate Microsoft so bad

The worst part is that a catastrophic failure doesn't even crash the app. For those of you who are curious to know, I got this while attempting to change my Source Control preferences in a VS.NET 2003 project. If you experience awkward errors, such as the one above, or ones that simply say "Unspecified error" while trying to perform source control operations in Visual Studio .NET, here's how to fix it.

So I tested my client tools for the first time on a Windows XP platform the other day. The system was a clean install running JDK 1.4.2_03 -- and to my horror, my JTabbedPane looked horrendous; here's how it went down... I have a class that extends JFrame, called MainFrame, and MainFrame's constructor looks something like this:

public class MainFrame {
   public MainFrame() {
      JPanel panel = new JTabbedPane( ... );
      // ...

      this.setContentPane( panel );
   }
}

Now, on the Mac and Linux platforms, there is absolutely no issue with this. Everything works great. However, on the windows platform, everytime the panel had to be redrawn, the tabs would be shifted, skewed, missing, duplicated, and other strange sorts of things. It was very strange indeed.

Simple fix:

public class MainFrame {
   public MainFrame() {
      JPanel tabPanel = new JTabbedPane( ... );
      // ...

      JPanel panel = new JPanel( new BorderLayout(), true );
      panel.add( tabPanel );
      this.setContentPane( panel );
   }
}

So it seems that the JDK1.4.2_03 on Windows isn't double buffering their JTabbedPane. Hopefully this will be resolved soon. Do any of you know where I could submit a bug report to sun? :).