Oddly enough, you can't use the Add Reference... dialog box to reference an assembly from the GAC in either VS2005 or VS2008. It seems completely counter-intuitive, but it's true. Many developers actually think that the .NET tab of the Add Reference... dialog box is the GAC listing, which, again, is not true. So why do some GACed assemblies appear in the list while others don't? First of all, the assembly must not only exist in the GAC (e.g. c:\windows\assembly), it must also exist elsewhere on the system. Most often, these assemblies live in the Program Files\Vendor\... directory. Secondly, a...
Consultant's guide to legacy development. Being a consultant, once in a while I have to forgo the modern niceties of OOP, Reflection, Refactoring, etc... and jump into the client's old Visual Basic 6 code. But the experience doesn't have to be crappy - there are a lot of free add-ins that extend in VB in various ways and speed up development. This is the list of tools that I typically install to be productive. Microsoft Virtual PC 2007. You can't have all that COM junk funking up your consulting laptop. I have a Windows 2000 Professional...