The root problem seems to be in the version of Newtonsoft.json – if you set it to version 11.0.1 all of the problems magically disappear
How to fix problems with conflicting version of Newtonsoft.Json in your visual studio projects
24
Aug 18
Written By Steve French
How to fix the entity framework problem with System.Data.Entity.Migrations.Utilities.DomainDispatcher not found.
After much searching and repair, I could not find a good way – the error does seem to be documented on Github – so at least there’s that.
My solution to the problem, after trying several other ways, was to downgrade Visual Studio as described here – note – you really do have to run all of the cleanup tools.
UPDATE ON 09/21/2018 – this fixes the problem – thank you Stack Overflow User.
Update on 05/02/2019 – this affects Visual Studio 2019 as well – one thing to note, this is the path to the new file
C:\Users\WarHorse\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\16.0_181cd91f
Copy and paste this
<dependentAssembly>
<assemblyIdentity name=”System.Management.Automation” publicKeyToken=”31bf3856ad364e35″ />
<bindingRedirect oldVersion=”0.0.0.0-3.0.0.0″ newVersion=”3.0.0.0″/>
<publisherPolicy apply=”no” />
</dependentAssembly>
24
Aug 18
Written By Steve French
A simple little linq values transformer
Somehow I’ve never actually used this keyword before, but as I gradually shift over to functional programming I came across the ForEach linq statement – for example
listOfObjects.ForEach(x => x.BodyText = x.BodyText.Replace(“,”,”, “));
And bam – all of the body text is replaced without having to loop through the enumerable. Rather nice. A simple little statement, but one that I’ve never really had the change to use before.
13
Aug 18
Written By Steve French
The simple way to force redirect to https in web config files
There are two things:
1. Just insert this code in the web.release.config
<system.webServer xdt:Transform=”Insert”>
<rewrite>
<rules>
<rule name=”Force HTTPS” enabled=”true”>
<match url=”(.*)” ignoreCase=”false” />
<conditions>
<add input=”{HTTPS}” pattern=”off” />
</conditions>
<action type=”Redirect” url=”https://{HTTP_HOST}/{R:1}” appendQueryString=”true” redirectType=”Permanent” />
</rule>
</rules>
</rewrite>
</system.webServer>
2. Then make sure that the Url Rewrite module is installed in IIS – if that module is not installed you will get perplexing, unhelpful error messages 
24
Jul 18
Written By Steve French
How to fix the problem of undeletable characters in json strings in Visual Studio
So – you’re cruising around in web services, pulling data from various sources and your want to deserialize a string into an object, however, you can’t seem to remove extra quotations and escape characters. In fact everything you see looks like this
“{\”DataThingObject\”:{\”DataThingOneID\”:89,\”Status\”:\”Active\”,\”UserId\”:89,
and the \ and ” don’t go away, no matter how much text manipulation you do.
There actually isn’t a problem, you’re just looking at the string in the debugger, which adds the escape charachters for some reason – if you save it to a text or json file you will see that your json files are perfectly formatted.
06
Jul 18
Written By Steve French
How to fix the directory name is invalid IIS problem
Just restart the app pool and the problem goes away.
22
May 18
Written By Steve French
How to fix the problems with the package manager console in Visual Studio 2017
So – you’re getting the following problem
The following error occurred while loading the extended type data file: Microsoft.PowerShell.Core, C:\Windows\SysWOW64\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\types.ps1xml(3763) : Error in type “System.Management.Automation.FormatViewDefinition”: Exception: The getter method should be public, non void, static, and have one parameter of type PSObject.
For some reason this just started happening after the last Visual Studio 2017 update
Update – 5/29/2018 – make sure to leave VS Code open while you open Visual Studio 2017 – the problem does recur after every restart for some reason.
First – locate devenv.exe.config in the C:\Users\WarHorse\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\15.0_YOURIDENTIFIER directory
Open that file in VS Code
paste the following in with the other dependent assemblies
<dependentAssembly>
<assemblyIdentity name=”System.Management.Automation” publicKeyToken=”31bf3856ad364e35″ />
<publisherPolicy apply=”no” />
</dependentAssembly>
<dependentAssembly>
<assemblyIdentity name=”Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.Utility” publicKeyToken=”31bf3856ad364e35″ />
<publisherPolicy apply=”no” />
</dependentAssembly>
<dependentAssembly>
<assemblyIdentity name=”Microsoft.PowerShell.ConsoleHost” publicKeyToken=”31bf3856ad364e35″ />
<publisherPolicy apply=”no” />
</dependentAssembly>
<dependentAssembly>
<assemblyIdentity name=”Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.Management” publicKeyToken=”31bf3856ad364e35″ />
<publisherPolicy apply=”no” />
</dependentAssembly>
<dependentAssembly>
<assemblyIdentity name=”Microsoft.PowerShell.Security” publicKeyToken=”31bf3856ad364e35″ />
<publisherPolicy apply=”no” />
</dependentAssembly>
<dependentAssembly>
<assemblyIdentity name=”Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.Diagnostics” publicKeyToken=”31bf3856ad364e35″ />
<publisherPolicy apply=”no” />
</dependentAssembly>
16
May 18
Written By Steve French
How to properly clone a project from Visual Studio.com
So – I recently had to clone a site off of Visual Studio.com lately – after some discovery, here are the proper steps
- Don’t try to do it from Visual Studio 2017 directly – instead just go to the project in VisualStudio.com, and click “Clone Is Visual Studio” – a dialogue window will pop up, and the combination f Visual Studio 2017 and Visual Studio.com will take care of everything for you
- Visual Studio will then be open to the FOLDER of the newly created project. Note the folder location, then close Visual Studio, and open the solution (.sln) file in that folder (why Visual Studio doesn’t open it immediately I don’t know)
- From there, you have to copy over the nuget packages – in the nuget package manager, just enter “Update-Package -reinstall” and they will all be reinstalled or installed (that solution found here – the packages are not copied into source control)
and you’re done!
22
Jan 18
Written By Steve French
SideeX browser automation is awesome
The SideeX browser automation Chrome plugin is the single best tool I’ve come across this year. It handles all the stuff that Selenium IDE would only do with great difficulty, and it did it on the first try. Highly recommended.
29
Dec 17
Written By Steve French
How to fix irritating problems with TFS and Visual Studio 2017
Update – I did some more Googleing and found this page
Whereupon it says to
In your Team Explorer panel, click on Home > Projects > New Team Project…
Actually you have to click on Home to do it
but that gives you
Create from there
Due to a variety of circumstances I’m creating new projects with Visual Studio 2017, but using Team Foundation Server 2015 to house the source code – here is the proper sequence (for me) that gets the source code in place properly
- Create Team Foundation Server Project using Visual Studio 2015 – note remote origin server
- Disconnect from VPN (and therefore TFS)
- Create Solution normally using Visual Studio 2017
- Do the normal “Add to Source Control” (from the File menu) (if you do this while connected to the VPN/TFS it will try to force you to save it to TFS (where you can’t create a new project, or see the project you just created) – it will then do all the Git setup normally
- Reconnect to the VPN
- In the Team Explorer settings, add the remote origin server location to the “Remotes” section in the Repository settings – don’t forget to use the name “origin” as the name
- Commit and Push – everything should be working fine.
I’m sure there is a much better way to do this, but this is what works for me.
01
Dec 17
Written By Steve French
