Dragging & Dropping Files into Visual Studio Projects

Jose Rolando Guay Paz — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 01:50:02 GMT

I don’t know how many of you use this feature but for some time I’ve been having the problem of not being able to drag files into my Visual Studio projects.

It’s true that you need this feature, it’s true that it’s available, but why did this happened?

Well, it turns out that for some time now, I’ve been running my Visual Studio Team System 2008 in Windows Vista with elevated permissions (aka. Run as administrator).

For some security related issues related to UAC, Visual Studio can’t allow you to drag files into your projects when it is running as administrator. I just discovered that… It may be pretty obvious to some of you but it wasn’t to me for sure.

So, I’m now running my Visual Studio without elevated permissions and drag files into projects are enabled again. The drawback, you can’t access websites hosted in IIS, or at least I have that problem now.

Please feel free to comment. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this and probably we could all get all the features from Visual Studio up and running.

Cheers,

Recover HD Space in Windows Vista

Jose Rolando Guay Paz — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 20:25:00 GMT

Hi all.

Although this is not an ASP.NET related post you might be interested in claiming space from your hard disk that Windows Vista took.

The reason for the this lost space is "Shadow Copies". Shadow copies are backup information that keeps your hard disk "safe" (figuratively speaking). Anyway, the one thing you probably don't know is that you can instruct Vista to keep only a certain amount of this information. Keep in mind that by reducing the allowed amount of HD space for shadow copies you might loose information you will end up needing, but if you are sure you can dispose this info, fire up! Here is how to do it:

First, let's see how much storage space is currently allocated.

Click the start menu
Click on All Programs, and then Accessories
From the accessories menu, right click on Command Prompt and select "run as administrator"
Type "vssadmin list shadowstorage" into the command prompt
The results should tell you the amount of storage used and the maximum amount alloted

If you're not happy with those numbers, here's how to resize them. Keep in mind, you will lose some older system restore points when you do this.

Repeat steps 1-3 to get bring up the Command Prompt
Type "vssadmin Resize ShadowStorage /For=[your hard disk]: /On=[your hard disk]: /MaxSize=[how much space you want to allocate]"
For example: "vssadmin Resize ShadowStorage /For=C: /On=C: /MaxSize=2GB"
You should get a message saying Successfully resized the shadow copy storage association, and you should have more free space on your hard drive.

Remember the MaxSize of 2GB is just an example. I've setup my laptop to use only 5GB but was able to recover almost 30GB of lost space.

Additional information can be found in this excellent article by Brad Linder.

Enjoy!!

Jose R. Guay Paz : Vista

Dragging & Dropping Files into Visual Studio Projects

Recover HD Space in Windows Vista