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Visual InterDev™ Readme includes updated information for the documentation provided with Microsoft® Visual Studio™ -- Development System for Windows® and the Internet. The information in this document is more up-to-date than the information in the Help system. Many of the issues outlined in this document will be corrected in upcoming releases.
For general installation issues on the Visual Studio 6.0 suite of products, including side by side product installation for installing more than one Visual Studio product on the same computer, see the Installation Notes readme (install.htm).
For issues that are specific to the Microsoft® Visual Database Tools which are installed with Visual InterDev, see the Microsoft Visual Database Tools Readme. For issues on the Help system, see the MSDN™, the Microsoft Developer Network Readme.
Contents - Click any of the items below
Note Be sure all headings in the table of contents are expanded when you search this Readme for a topic. In this way, you will know when the search finds the topic among the TOC headings.
Installation
Uninstalling pre-release versions of Visual InterDev
Upgrading Web applications created with a pre-release version
Remote Machine Debugging server component must be installed with Windows NT Option Pack
Installation problems with the Visual InterDev RAD Remote Deployment Support server component
Product Related
Source control does not support file names containing semi-colons
Ignore events in the Script Outline view for FRAME, IFRAME, FRAMESET, OPTION
Class names containing underscores are not supported
The editor does not support "<script>" or "</script>" within JavaScript or VBScript comments
Visual InterDev does not support the ActiveMovie control
Visual InterDev does not support hierarchical recordsets
Changes to Client Script Debugging in ASP Pages
Browsing "User Notification" sample using Netscape
Issue concerning window_onload event not firing
"[FrontPage vinavbar component]" appears when browsing a page
Difference in CSS implementation between Netscape and Internet Explorer
Use server-level default document properties only
Visual Component Manager
"Related Files Tab (Component Properties Dialog Box)" topic incorrect
You can install Visual InterDev on a client and on a server. The steps below are required for installing both the client and server portions of Visual InterDev. Note that you will need to install some server components with a client installation.
If you are using the computer as a client only, you will still need to install certain server components in order to take full advantage of all the product's functionality.
If you're installing on Windows NT
The following components are required for the PageNavbar design-time control, remote debugging, and previewing active server pages on your local machine. You may choose not to select these components if you do not want to take advantage of these features.
If you're installing on Windows 9x
The following components are required for the PageNavbar design-time control, remote debugging, and previewing active server pages on your local machine. You may choose not to select these components if you do not want to take advantage of these features.
You can install the server components on the same computer as the client, or you can install them on a different computer. Follow the steps for Windows NT or Windows 9x below.
Perform the following steps if you're installing the server on Windows NT.
When the Installation Wizard arrives at the Server Setups screen, you will be prompted to make a selection from the Server Components list. Install each of the components as instructed below.
Note In order to assure that your server is set up correctly, you must install the server components in the order that they are listed on the Server Setups screen.
To ensure that your Web application will run properly on a production server installed with Windows NT, you must install some of the Visual Studio server components on that computer.
Note Windows 95 and Windows 98 are not recommended as production server platforms for running Visual InterDev 6.0 applications.
The components needed on a production server are:
Furthermore, if you intend to deploy an application to the production server, you may want to install the FrontPage Server Extensions or the Visual Studio Posting Acceptor.
Perform the following steps to install the server components on a Windows NT production server.
If you have the Visual Studio Enterprise Edition, you can set up your computer for versioning and debugging stored procedures. When versioning or debugging stored procedures, the SQL Server will be logging into Visual SourceSafe to perform the necessary operations on the Visual SourceSafe database. Therefore, the SQL Server will require appropriate permissions to perform these actions. To reduce security issues, it is recommended that you set the SQL Server service to run as a logged on user.
To set the SQL Server service to run as a logged on user
If your SQL server is on a different server than your Web server, you need to install the SQL Server Debugging and Visual InterDev Server components on the SQL server. You can install these server components from the BackOffice Installation Wizard.
To install the SQL Server Debugging and Visual InterDev Server components
In order to run the Sample Gallery application, follow these steps.
To install the Visual InterDev Gallery sample application
To run the Visual InterDev Gallery sample
Note If you have trouble viewing the data pages, display the Property Pages dialog box for the data connection you created, which appears under the Global.asa file in the Project Explorer. On the Authentication tab, select Save Design time authentication, and make sure that the User name option contains "admin".
The installation compact discs include a setup of Microsoft® FrontPage® 98. It is not necessary to run the FrontPage setup to use Visual InterDev. However, it has been included for your use if you so desire.
To install FrontPage 98
To find out about the features that are new to this version of Visual InterDev, see the "What's New" topic in the Visual InterDev documentation in the MSDN Library Visual Studio 6.0 documentation. To see the documentation, choose Contents from the Help menu.
For late-breaking news and product updates, be sure to visit the Visual InterDev Web site at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vinterdev.
The following issues are known in this version of Visual InterDev.
Warning If you have installed a pre-release version of Visual InterDev 6.0, you must fully remove it before installing this final release version. Some of the older file versions are not compatible with the versions in this release.
It is recommended that you remove previous pre-release versions of Visual InterDev 6.0 by reinstalling the entire operating system on a newly formatted hard drive or on a separate hard drive partition. This will ensure that Visual InterDev and all the components that it depends on are installed properly. The setup program that is used by this final version is new. Therefore, the only way to ensure proper installation of this final version is to install it on a "clean" system.
If installing on a "clean" system is not possible, follow the steps below.
To uninstall a pre-release version of Visual InterDev
If you used a pre-release version of Visual InterDev to create a Web application, you will need to upgrade the application in order for the script library and the data environment to function correctly.
On the server
On the workstation
<!--METADATA TYPE="EditorGenerated" startspan <COMMENT>Delete these lines from the bottom of the ASP page:
Visual InterDev Scripting Object Model - Page Header
Do not modify between these meta data tags
</COMMENT> -->
<!--#include file="_ScriptLibrary/pm.asp"-->
<% if StartPageProcessing() Then Response.End() %>
<FORM name=thisForm METHOD=post>
<!--METADATA TYPE="EditorGenerated" endspan-->
<!--METADATA TYPE="EditorGenerated" startspan <COMMENT>
Visual InterDev Scripting Object Model - Page Footer
Do not modify between these meta data tags
</COMMENT> -->
<% EndPageProcessing() %>
</FORM>
<!--METADATA TYPE="EditorGenerated" endspan-->
In order to ensure that debugging functions correctly, the Remote Machine Debugging component must be installed when the Windows NT Option Pack is installed. If the Windows NT Option Pack is reinstalled, the Remote Machine Debugging component must also be reinstalled.
Both the Windows NT Option Pack and the Remote Machine Debugging component can be installed by the BackOffice Installation Wizard which is accessed from the Visual InterDev and Visual Studio setup programs.
If the Visual InterDev RAD Remote Deployment Support server component was not installed successfully on the server, you will receive the following message when attempting to register a component on the server:
If you receive this message, follow these steps to install the server component in order to avoid the problem when creating new projects:
Note If you use the BackOffice Installation Wizard to see which components are installed, the wizard will not display the correct status of the Visual InterDev RAD Remote Deployment Support component. You must view its installation status with Add/Remove Programs on the Control Panel.
If you attempt to enable source control on a Web project that contains a file with a semi-colon (;) in its file name, the product will fail. Avoid using file names containing semi-colons.
When you add a FRAME, IFRAME, FRAMESET, or OPTION element to a page, the element's ID will appear in the Script Outline view. If you expand the element in the Script Outline, you will see a list of events. However, these elements do not fire events. Therefore, ignore the events that appear under these elements in Script Outline.
Class names that contain underscores (e.g., "my_Class") are not supported by Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0. Therefore, when creating classes in the CSS editor, it is a good idea to create classes without underscores (e.g., "myClass").
Do not include "<script>" or "</script>" inside JavaScript or VBScript comments. The editor treats the commented <script> tags as if they were uncommented HTML. This results in incorrect color coding and causes event handlers generated by the Script Outline to be inserted in the wrong place.
If you manually add the ActiveMovie control to the Toolbox, and then add an ActiveMovie control to a page, Visual InterDev will fail.
You can add an image file to a page by choosing Image on the HTML menu. If you do this when working offline and in Design view, Visual InterDev will create an absolute URL, beginning with "file://", that is local to the machine. To work around this, choose one of the following:
When you display the properties dialog box for a data command, three tabs appear on the dialog box, General, Parameters, and Advanced. In the Visual Studio help topics for the Command Properties dialog box, there are six tabs listed. Three of these tabs (Relation, Grouping, Aggregates) do not appear in the dialog box when called from Visual InterDev because Visual InterDev does not support hierarchical recordsets.
When Internet Information Server (IIS) processes an ASP page, the resulting page sent to the browser can be considerably different than what you see when you edit the ASP page in the editor. Server script can generate new client content dynamically, or conversely, a large quantity of server script can result in only a few lines of client HTML output. This situation introduces problems when you set breakpoints in client script inside an ASP page because the line on which you set the breakpoint can move dramatically within the file by the time the page reaches the browser.
The solution is to enable client-side debugging in ASP pages. Doing so specifies that IIS tracks the location of client script breakpoints in an ASP page, and passes the location of those breakpoints to Internet Explorer, so that Internet Explorer can stop at the correct locations.
The process of enabling client-side debugging for ASP pages is described in the Visual InterDev help topic "Debugging Client Script." However, the process has changed slightly. In the topic, under "Enabling Client Script Debugging for ASP Pages," change Step 3 of the procedure to read:
3. Under Server script, make sure that the Automatically enable ASP server-side script debugging on launch option is checked.
Later in the topic, under "Debugging Client Script Within a Solution," Step 5 has changed. The text should now read:
5. If debugging for client script in ASP pages has not been enabled as described above, Visual InterDev displays a message prompting you to enable debugging for ASP pages. Your options are:
- Choose Yes if you are working with an ASP page and want Visual InterDev to automatically enable debugging.
- Choose No if you if you are working with an HTM page and will not be navigating to an ASP page during your debugger session.
The Gallery sample includes a "User Notification" page. In order for this sample to work properly when browsed in Netscape Navigator, you need to enable Basic Authentication for the UserNote directory on the Web server.
To enable Basic Authentication
When browsing the "User Notification" page using Netscape you will be prompted for a user name and password. To be compatible with Microsoft Internet Explorer, enter the domain name and user name (e.g., "YourDomain\UserName") in the User text box.
When you output HTML in server events (for example, by including response.write() statements in the thisPage_onenter event), the browser will create an implied <BODY> tag that overrides the attributes that you may have set on the
tag, and the window_onload event is not fired. Therefore, attributes that you may have set on the <BODY> tag will not be used, and the window_onload event is not fired. To avoid this problem, defer all HTML output until the content portion of the page. Use script only to set up state that is used to compose the page. If you need to output HTML prior to the content portion of the page, then you should set the <BODY> tag attributes programmatically using client-side code (for example, window.onload = "return window_onload()")."[FrontPage vinavbar component]" is displayed by the browser when the navbar bot is not installed properly on the server. To fix the problem, verify that the vinavbar directory exists on the server. It is typically located at "\Program Files\Microsoft FrontPage\version3.0\bots\vinavbar".
Netscape Navigator and Communicator versions 4.0 through 4.03 implement cascading style sheets (CSS) differently than Internet Explorer. Navigator interprets relative URLs as relative to the document rather than to the linked CSS file. To work around this difference:
If you are running an IIS 4.0 Web server, you may encounter a problem with the ability to set a default document (welcome page) for each directory on your Web server. When using Site Designer, the default document information is taken from the Web server's server-level (root-level) properties and not from the directory-level properties. To work around this, set the default document at the Web server's server-level properties page.
Note After you re-set the properties, the change only affects new projects.
Visual Component Manager User Interface Reference: The topic "Related Files Tab (Component Properties Dialog Box)" incorrectly states that the tab is used to display and enter files that are related to the selected component. In fact, none of the information displayed on this tab can be modified. You can add related files to a component only when publishing or re-publishing the component. For more information, search online, with Search titles only selected, for "Publishing Components" in the MSDN Library Visual Studio 6.0 documentation.
If you installed VCM 5.0 (previously available for Web download) you will have the following Windows Registry keys setup. They were necessary for VCM 5.0 and the 1.0 version of the Repository. If you find the following Registry entries then it is safe to remove them and may, in fact, improve VCM 6.0 performance.
If you try to open an existing .mdb file from within VCM that is not a repository database (i.e., it does not contain the repository structure/tables), you will be asked if you want the repository tables added to the database. You should not do this for normal use; the repository should generally be in a separate database. This will work, but it can take as long as 10 minutes to create the repository structure in an existing .mdb file.
To create a brand new .mdb file containing the repository structure, right-click in the folder outline, click Repository, click New, and then enter the name of the file you want to create.