Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 - How to Stop Annoying Notifications - visual-studio-2013

Just installed Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 and now I see this annoying red notification telling me I need a developer licence for Windows Store and Windows Phone - which I do not need.
Once I click dismiss all, it comes back next time I load Visual Studio, the same notification I dismissed. In other words how many times will it tell me I need a licence? So my point is how do I stop displaying the red notification.
[edit]
Actually it's prompting me every so often not just every visual studio restart... as I think someone has mentioned in one of the comments.

LATEST UPDATE (Nov-21):
We have now released a patch for this bug. You can download it from here.
I'm leaving the rest of this answer as is but there should no longer be a need for any workaround once the patch linked to above has been applied.
ORIGINAL ANSWER:
I'll start by apologizing and confirming we've got at least one bug here (if not more). There are several of us actively investigating this on our side. We don't yet know the full extent of the problem though so it would be great to get some additional information from anyone who's currently running into this.
The intent was to show a notification to users working on Windows or Windows Phone Store apps. It was not something that should be coming up for users not doing Store development.
The most promising workaround so far is to:
Close the currently open solution (if there is one loaded)
Dismiss the notification
Close Visual Studio
You shouldn't see the notification again in subsequent VS sessions until you do something that causes the Store related functionality to load again (e.g., create or load a Store app project).
If this doesn't make it go away, please respond and we'll try to work with you to get more details on what could be causing it to continue to appear for you.
UPDATE:
If the above workaround doesn't work for you (e.g., ReSharper users), I've got another one that should at least provide a respite from the notifications for about a month at a time:
Make sure the critical notification is currently active (i.e., red notification).
Close all open instances of Visual Studio.
Open up File Explorer and navigate to the %LocalAppData%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0\Notifications directory.
Open the Notifications_Active.xml file found in in a text editor.
Find the notification element referring to the developer license.
Change the value of the Severity element to 0 instead of 2.
This should make the red alert no longer kick in for this notification as long as you leave the notification active (i.e., do not dismiss it).

Related

Google parental control Family link app doesn't ask for approval

I've setup google parental control on my children phone, they ask for approval to install a game and i approved it, later i changed my mind and uninstall it from there phone, but they went to play store a re-install it, but this time family link didn't ask for my approval, it's just installed it and showed me a notification that it's been installed. What i want is that whenever they install anything, no matter it was once approved or millions times, google play must ask them for my approval each time it's reinstall.
Most probably you approved the app as Always allowed app. To edit app activity:
Open the Family Link app Family Link and then Select your child.
On the "App activity" card, tap Set limits or More.
Next to your desired app, tap Always always allow.
From here you can select an option to:
Always allow always allow.
Set a time limit Set limit.
Set unlimited time Empty hourglass.
Block an app Block.
The Google Family Link app lacks the 'whitelist' feature to allow only a strict set of application to install. Unfortunately, the answer is you cannot prevent the installation of a previously installed application (as a previous answer suggested, you could block said apps).
I experimented and unfortunately disabling and re-enabling Family supervision will still allow previously installed apps to install. Also, the previously installed apps will be available if you get a new device for the child's account. Or at least, this is the functionality circa Fall 2022.
An extreme solution would be to create a new account, but obviously this is a frustrating answer if you are trying to do something like protect an older family member who has established accounts for billing.
This solution outlined below will not work, but I did read it as a proposed solution elsewhere online. I thought I would include it and mention it with this warning.
Open the Play Store app
Select the account icon in the upper right corner
Choose the Manage app & device from the popup menu
Select Manage
Click Installed
Select Not Installed
Select all applications you wish to remove in checkable list
Click the Trash Can icon in the upper right corner
This would disassociate the application from the account in an ideal world; however, it does not and the child account can still reinstall the offending applications. The parent is notified of this installation, but they cannot prevent it.
Had the same issue but rather than doing the "google play delete not installed apps list"-thing which doesnt solve the problem anyway, use this list to search and install the apps you dont want your child to have installed. After that you can manually block these unwanted apps from normal family link app and deinstall them after you've done that. (You can also leave them on the phone, i mean they are blocked anyways, but it should still take memory space so no reason to not deinstall them after)
Now you will see the following if your child tries to reinstall the app from the play store:
picture
it says "your parents blocked this app" (just in german :) )
This "feature" (if you even want to call it that way) is really stupid and this way might be the only one to solve this problem even if a bit time-intensive. Hope Google will work on Family Link. Big potential but soooo many problems.

After Windows 10 latest update VB6 hangs

Last night Microsoft Decided to Update Windows 10. I have been running VB6 on Windows 10 since Windows 10 was originally released. Now when I try to run VB6 the VB6 splash screen is displayed and then I get a window titled Windows Installer, a message that says Preparing to install, a button that says Cancel a window titled Windows Installer, a message that says Preparing to install, a button that says Cancel. This window is modal and does not allow me to get to VB6. If I click Cancel the process repeats. If I click on a .vbp the same thing happens. Please help
Thank you
Charlie
I don't know if I should apologize or demand an apology from Microsoft. I right clicked on VB6 and chose Compatibility Checker. After it ran, Microsoft decided to update office 2010 Single Image (whatever that is). Then I clicked on Test the Module and guess what? It worked. I so hate updates...I had this problem and now my computer reboots every night, thus trashing any open files and ruining my Free Cell game :-)
Hope this helps somebody else who is frustrated.
BTW shouldn't it be Windows' Installer. Doesn't the Installer belong to Windows?
Happy Computing
Charlie

How do the visual studio notifications work

Anyone who has used recent editions of visual studio will be aware of the little flag in the window chrome that alerts or 'notifies' them of possible upgrades to certain components that they may have installed in visual studio, or indeed to visual studio itself.
I have managed to add a notification icon to my window chrome and I can control its appearance from the window's underlying view model.
My next goal is to try and get it to actually respond to external notifications. Perhaps somewhat predictably my first port of call was a search on Google but almost everything returned referred to Push Notifications. I may well be wrong but somehow I don't get the impression that this is what is controlling the visual studio notifications. I am aware (from having used Advanced Installer and it's auto update facility that it is possible to conduct a search at a specific web address, see if I particular text file there contains new information and then trigger responses based on that.
Would anyone know if that is the sort of thing the visual studio itself does. I'm also intrigued as to how the notifications process keeps track of those items upon which you have acted, those upon which you haven't and whether or not you've actively dismissed all of them. I would love to know the principle of how these have been implemented so that I can look at a way to emulate them in my own application and would welcome any information that can be proffered.
I intend to work in wpf and vb.net but can read c# hence the variety of tags I have appended to the question.

Trying to install Visual Studio 2015 community edition but install window becomes invisible

This issue is driving me crazy. I'm on a corporately controlled network but have local administrator rights. This issue is happening with all versions of Visual Studio installer where you initiate the install, then you see the initial splash screen and then that vanishes and it looks like nothing is there. But if you click and drag that area you can see the window borders during the drag. Some portions of the invisible window even respond to mouse clicks. There's even a task bar indication that is blank when you hover over it. I can't even update the current 2013 installation to SP5 because even that window behaves the same way.
However, it just totally hangs the install and since I can't see the install options I don't know if there's a failure or it's just waiting on me to do something.
I've seen several posts about this outside of here but all of them lead to a dead-end.
I have installed Studio on this machine before - actually all versions since 2005 and never have seen this issue until it started about 2 months ago. I did updates galore and all that. Updated my video drivers, blah, blah, blah. I've even tried remoting into this this box and seeing if that would alter the display enough to see what is going on...all to no avail.
The box is beefy (i5, 16GB, 500GB SSD...triple display, etc...) so it more than meets the requirements.
When I try to install any version of Visual Studio, the install window briefly appears and then disappears. However, it is still there, just 100% transparent. Has anyone else seen this before?
I was able to finally find an answer to the invisible install dialog question, it is however not an adequate solution, but an answer. I have to run only one monitor then the install dialog is visible and things proceed normally.
My solution was to disable the graphics card I have on my computer and run on onboard graphics card. It seems that the issue is with the graphics, so forcing the system to use the "regular" graphics card did the trick.
I have to use /Full /Passive from the command line to install on a build server. I would prefer less flashy installer for a more robust one. I am sure its a combination of the graphics card etc. But other installers work.

How do I make WebDev clean up its tooltray "tracks"?

After I've shut down a VS 2008 web project, well, a lot of times, I see many instances of the WebDev icon in the "tooltray" / system notification area:
These are no longer active instances; they were shut down by VS.
When I mouse over any of these, Windows Vista "conveniently" collapses the tray for me. This makes life miserable if the app I want is in between any of them (e.g., Outlook in the image above), and even worse if I actually want to right click on the "active" WebDev.
Any idea how I can get VS, WebDev, or Windows to fix this behavior?
There is a utility on CodeProject that does this: TrayIconBuster
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/system/TrayIconBuster.aspx
It runs every x minutes and removes all phantom icons...
Not the perfect solution, because I think this should be built in to Windows...

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