So I ended up downloading both AutoCAD and MAYA for my education, but it turned out that I only needed MAYA for my classes and not AutoCAD. I never used my student license on AutoCAD, so I shouldn't have to worry about the licensing. However, for uninstalling, there are many different Autodesk programs inside my control panel Programs and Features area. I looked up how to uninstall AutoCAD, and it said I needed to remove the extra things first. My question is, how do I know which ones are for MAYA (because I need to keep those) and which ones are for AutoCAD? Thanks in advance!
Go to the start menu. Search for the "Uninstall Tool." Select which programs you want to remove. It will also remove any extra media involved with them.
Search for the Autodesk Folder in your Start Menu.
Click on the Uninstall Tool.
Select the program you want to uninstall and it will alone delete everything related to it with the rest remaining untouched.
Uninstall tool with its tree structure
Related
My "apps and features" (in Settings) has a couple of 'NoUiEntryPoints' "apps". And the start screen - many more.
Is it safe to delete them? I know there is a question about how to remove them. I'm asking if it really is safe to do that without checking first what they are. (How can that even be done?)
Yes, it is safe to remove them. At one point these "apps" were generated whenever you used the Visual Studio Designer which used this approach to display the preview. This has been fixed since, but the "apps" will remain installed in your PC unless you uninstall them manually.
Visual Studio 11 Beta version is released recently. I'm to download and replace my VS2010, while i'm in the middle of some risky projects. How do you find it?
There are many aspects that I wish I can ride of them by putting VS2010 away:
Single Edmx diagram: It's very important to create separated (splitted) edmx files for large data models.
Weak garbage collection and memory management: Installing some or many extensions ends to memory problems and exceptions.
Weak modeling tools: one unanswered problem of mine is an example. Also, I couldn't check my layers references using layer diagram or other kind of available diagrams.
There are many other points, that you and me faced with them.
How's the VS 11 Beta? How did you find it? What are benefits and risks?
I wouldn't replace it. In fact, the user interface is a disaster and was the first thing to make me revolt and uninstall it after ten minutes of use. Now, a user interface doesn't stop me from doing work, sure, but this was so far from an improvement that I won't be touching it until Microsoft brings back some colour into the icons. Even then, the idea that mono-colour glyphs are easier for humans to perceive amongst a sea of other same-coloured glyphs on a background of the same colour is unfounded and unresearched. It seems more that were simply trying to "make it like the other stuff" without even doing any UX testing.
Humans fundamentally evolved colour eyesight because it aids in perceiving our environment. Grass is green, fire is orange, sky is blue, scary monsters are gray and scaly. When users have ten or more years of visual 'muscle' memory behind them, removing colour, let alone shape and form (in the form of object based icons) is disorienting and plain stupid.
No one ever complained that Visual Studio 2010 was too colourful and distracted them from their code, at least not in the way that the developers are complaining about the beta. If anything, it reinforces the structure of the IDE panel and toolbar layout by providing colour, shape and line cues in our peripheral vision.
I could go on, but given the almost universally negative feedback on this issue, I'm not alone in my frustration.
All the features in the world couldn't get me to use a UI like that, especially when I have a user interface as nice as Visual Studio 2010's. I had trouble separating the IDE into panels and objects. Which gray rectangle with gray shapes is the solution explorer. Which gray rectangle with gray shapes is the toolbox?
Well, visually, it is quite different. Really heavily inspired by WP7, and the expression blend suite.
I find it quite appealing visually speaking. It also seems more user friendly while installed out of the box (you can however import settings from your current VS installation, which I chose not to do)
You get some pack of additionnal tools, and seem easier to access (at lest IMO).
Concerning extensions, we will have to wait and see, but most of the extensions I use are quite good, and dont crash inexpectedly, so I believe the extension developper is more at fault than Visual Studio itself :).
You should simply try it out to see, because you can install side by side with your current VS install, it should not interfer
You can find Visual Studio 11 Beta here.
I haven't used it to be honest, although your question implies you're going to replace VS2010 with the new Beta version - that's not a good idea! You should be able to download and install it alongside Visual Studio 11 until it's released properly.
I have a serious issue, my harddisk crashed yesterday , and i had tons of projects on it .I lost most of them but the ones i recovered are all the debug folders i sent to clients (most of them are desktop applications). I am unable to recover the code for most of the work , but i do have debug folders , my question is is there any way that i can recover my code from them.
I am sure some one you would have gone through it in the past, please help if you have any information regarding this.
Files in the debug folder:Example i make application apple
apple.exe type=application
apple.pdb type=PDBFIle
apple.vshost type=Application
apple.vshost.exe.mainfest type=MANIFEST File
ADDITIONAL INFO:
My laptop hardisk crashed so i am currently using it as a usb drive with another laptop . I had 3 partitions but now i see 4 i,j,k,l . One of them which used to be my D: drive working fine, i see it shows 72 GB free out of 150 GB. Rest of them they are just there no info, when i click them nothing for minutes then it says format drive etc... If you know how to fix that that would be wonderful.
Thank you
You really lucked out with having access to the Debug folders containing your compiled binaries. The fact that you're working in a managed language (C#) means that you can use one of the many .NET decompilers to display the source code that they contain in a readable format. It may not be exactly the same as what you initially typed into Visual Studio, but it will be pretty darn close—way better than can normally be expected in the event of a system crash.
I used to recommend Redgate's .NET Reflector for this task, but they recently decided to eliminate the free version of their decompiler utility and adopted some business practices that I personally disagreed with. Then again, their tools are probably still the best around, so you might consider downloading their 30-day trial to attempt to get your code back. Who knows, you might like it so much that you buy!
If you're a cheapskate like me, or a devotee to truly free software, you can try one of the free alternatives that cropped up after Reflector became not free, like ILSpy, developed by the same people who develop SharpDevelop. Even more alternatives are listed here.
Whichever decompiler utility you choose, download a copy and open its executable. Then from the "File" menu, choose "Open", and navigate to the first compiled .exe from which you want to recover source. The utility will display the name of your application and some metadata about your assembly. From here, you can make sure that you opened the correct file.
In both ILSpy and .NET Reflector, you can click the [+] toggle next to your application's name to expand its listing. You'll see a bunch more expandable items, like References (the DLLs that your application uses), Resources (the resource files compiled into your application), and the namespaces defined in your code. Expanding an individual namespace will show you all of the types defined in that namespace, and expanding a type will show you all of the types, methods, members, etc. defined in that type, and so on down the hierarchy. Clicking on individual items in the source tree to the left will display the decompiled code in the output pane to the right; both ILSpy and .NET Reflector support displaying the code as C#, which should look very readable to you.
For example, using ILSpy to open the ILSpy.exe application itself produces the following output:
You really can't break anything in here, so navigate around, exploring and seeing what all can be recovered, amazed at how well this works. Everything works just as well with DLLs as it does with EXEs.
Then get started copying and pasting...
The next order of business is getting your system stable again. If you had a hard disk crash, you definitely don't want to trust that drive ever again! Run out and buy a new one immediately, wipe it, and reload Windows.
Once you finish with that, you definitely want to get on setting up a source/version/revision control system to use in the future to store your code. All smart developers use this for so many reasons. Find more information with a Google search. There are lots of different options. Which one you pick is not important; the important thing is that you pick one!
Last year, in 2009 GSoC, I participated with an organization called Winlibre. The basic idea is having a project similar to Aptitude (or Apt-get) and a GUI like Synaptic but for Windows and just to hold (initially), only open source software. The project was just ok, we finished what we considered was a good starting point but unfortunately, due to different occupations of the developers, the project has been idle almost since GSoC finished. Now, I have some energy, time and interest to try to continue this development. The project was divided in 3 parts: A repository server (which i worked on, and which was going to store and serve packages and files), a package creator for developers, and the main app, which is apt-get and its GUI.
I have been thinking about the project, and the first question that came to my mind is.. actually is this project useful for developers and Windows users? Keep in mind that the idea is to solve dependencies problems, and install packages "cleanly". I'm not a Windows developer and just a casual user, so i really don't have a lot of experience on how things are handled there, but as far as I have seen, all installers handle those dependencies. Will windows developers be willing to switch from installers to a packages way of handling installations of Open source Software? Or it's just ok to create packages for already existing installers?
The packages concept is basically the same as .deb or .rpm files.
I still have some other questions, but basically i would like to make sure that it's useful in someway to users and Windows developers, and if developers would find this project interesting. If you have any questions, feedback, suggestions or criticisms, please don't hesitate posting them.
Thanks!!
be sure to research previous efforts on this. Google turns up several similar/relevant efforts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Package_management_system#Microsoft_Windows
http://windows-get.sourceforge.net
http://pina.plasmite.com
IIRC there was an rpm for windows at some point
Also I think there was some guy (who used to work at MS) in the news recently that basically is starting up a very similar project. I can't find a link to this now.
But anyway, yeah, it would be awesome if there was such a standard tool and repository.
I can only speak for myself, but obviously I could definitely make use of such a tool as I found your post through googling! ;)
My two use cases for this tool would the following ones:
1. I generally avoid to re-install my system as long as possible (in fact I manage to do so only for switching to a reasonable (not each an every) new version of Windows every few years or to setup new computers). But still I'd like my software to be up-to-date. Neither do I want to have to go to all the web pages and check manually if there are compatibility issues with the new version of Doxygen, Graphviz and the latest version of MikTeX for example, nor do I want to have to navigate to the download pages and run the setups all by myself. I just want to schedule ONE SINGLE (!) tool, which checks whether there are new updates or not and updates those applications which are not in conflict with any other application version.
If it unavoidably happens to me that I have to re-install my system, I don't want to get the new setups neither (and check compatibility). I even don't want to wait for one setup to finish in order to start the next one, I just want to check the tools I need, or even better, I want to simply load my "WinApt XML" batch installation file, which gets the installers and handles the setups sequentially all by itself.
I don't know enough about the architecture of .deb or .rpm but IMHO the most reasonable would be to maintain a DB with only the names, versions, dependencies and the location of the different versions' download locations. I mean, most of the tools available for Windows provide .msi packages anyways, which (I guess) is the application itself and some custom installation properties (really not sure how scripting is handled, but I know that creating a MSI in Visual Studio has very limited abilities to create custom installation steps and I can only imagine this is due to limitations of MSI protocol).
I guess a GUI will be mandatory for Windows users ;) but I personally would prefer the additional ability to handle the setups with the console.
Well, I like the idea and would love to hear from that (or such a) tool in the future.
Cheers
Check out NSIS. It's an open source MSI creator. You might be able to use it as part of your package creation software.
http://nsis.sourceforge.net/Main_Page
For the ALT-.Net tool/lib stack there have been some affords in this direction: Horn Get
However, the usability in a real world project has been subject in this SO question.
Personally I hate auto-created desktop shortcut icons, but some folks seem to think that unless your installer clutters up your desktop, it hasn't worked correctly!
Are there definite guidelines for this (for Windows?)
(Having a "Leave clutter on my desktop?" checkbox in the installer is one option, but to my mind, that's just put MORE clutter into the installer...)
From here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/uxguide/winenv-desktop
If your users are very likely to use your program frequently, provide an option during setup to put a program shortcut on the desktop. Most programs won't be used frequently enough to warrant offering this option.
Present the option unselected by default. Requiring users to select the option is important because once undesired icons are on the desktop, many users are reluctant to remove them. This can lead to unnecessary desktop clutter.
If users select the option, provide only a single program shortcut. If your product consists of multiple programs, provide a shortcut only to the main program.
Put only program shortcuts on the desktop. Don't put the actual program or other types of files.
My take is this: the installer must ask me if I want a desktop icon - to which I can reply yes or no.
Any app that just blindly and without asking installs its icon on my desktop is a bad installation in my opinion.
Ask for permission - if I deem your app important enough to me personally, I might say yes (but most likely I won't). Give your users a choice - don't just assume since it's your app, it's so darn important to everyone that everyone will want to clutter up their desktop with your program icon.
The same goes for the installation directory - unless you have a very good technical reason why you can't install anywhere, allow me to change the program's installation target directory. Not everyone is a big fan of the "c:\program files" folder hierarchy (I'm not, for one - I like to keep my apps in C:\bin for instance).
So in general: any decent installer should ASK the user installing for these things and present sensible defaults - but always give me the option to change the settings to my liking (to my standards).
I don't know of any meaningful guidelines, other than your conscience. As a programmer, I sympathize: I don't want icons on my desktop, either :-) However, having watched non-technical family members struggle with installing software and then trying to run it, I think it's worth noting that
1) There are more non-techies than techies
2) Techies can cope with checkboxes on installers
Based on that, I usually go for having a checkbox on the installer for creating icons, which defaults to on. I don't mind anything other than the "always create icons" approach. (I'm looking at you, Adobe.)
I think that depends on what you see your client doing with the app, the level of the client's expertise with computers and how frequently you see him using it.
If the client is not very well versed with computers he would prefer to have the icon on the desktop where he can access it. If you target market is experienced users you don't need to bother because he can make the icon himself if he wants it.
If the application is for daily frequent use like a web browser the client would want it on his desktop for quick access.
Finally the decision rests on you. If you're being obnoxious you can create 4 icons on the desktop (I've seen apps that do that).
I don't think asking for permission is a bad idea. After all the installation needs to be done only once and it's just one checkbox to tick.
I've no particular love for desktop (or quick launch) shortcut icons either, but I think that you should still give your users the option in the installer to install neither, one or both of these shortcuts.
Depending on how computer literate your users are (if it's possible to determine this) you can default the two options to either enabled or disabled accordingly.