I love this tool and I do recommend getting it, but be aware that this tool will ask you to update it for absolutely no reason quite often. This is annoying with my slow internet connection, as it takes 30 minutes out of my day every time I have to open the extension manager, wait for Visual Studio to check for all the updates, update, restart VS, and then wait for my solution to reload.
I believe they're doing this to increase their search ranking. Which is lame IMHO.
I'd give 5 stars if they remove the required re-download after X days. What if my internet was down? Does that mean I have to stop working for the day because I can't boost WoVS's web presence?
Others are annoyed by this as well, but usually only remove 1 star because of it. I STRONGLY suggest other users to remove more stars. I can just imagine Clarius weighing the options... "We *could* remove the message, but the one star we loose is worth the extra 80,000 extra downloads we get because of the message."
I half wonder if the time I waste updating this tool would be better spent writing my own copy of this tool. All it does is update some registry keys.
Maybe you want to blame, besides us, your ISP provider? Your VS solution with a million projects?
The bits are in beta and we want to keep only a single build out there to help us get better testing coverage, less support work, etc. That's why we ask you to update the bits, which doesn't happen more often than 1 (one) time every month or month and a half.
So if spending the few seconds (literally, 3 or 4 seconds which takes to download the tool) every 60-90 days to help us test the latest beta bits is sooooo (oh my letter 'o' got stuck!) much to ask to you, please look for an alternative tool that better suits your requirements bar.
UPDATE: seems like you keep editing your original post, so I'll address here what you have added recently.
>>>All it does is update some registry keys.
You are wrong, again. The tool does more than that.
But again, please don't waste any more of your time, I'll love to check out your tool that "all it does is update some registry keys" when you have it ready for testing (later today?) -- just let me know!
That sounds weird -- we haven't seen any other report of slowing down VS. If you can provide any more precise data please send it to our support email and we can work from there. Thanks.
Have installed this with VS2010 ultimate. on XP SP3. Have unistalled and re-installed several times and it will only allow I.E. I also have firefox installed (latest Version) and it will not allow me to select this as an option. This product is pants.
It's nice and very usefull add-on but PLEASE do something about that update dialog!!! SO many people telling you about that, telling they DON'T like it but you are still trying to break the wall with your heads again and again. I already have the option of changing default browser and it WORKS FINE. Why it's so crucial to get updates? At least you could warn people but LET THE ADD-ON WORK ANYWAY. Sorry for CAPS.
This is one of the best, most useful extensions for Visual Studio, particularly when working on MVC applications, since VS doesn't make it easy to switch the debugging browser in those projects.
But it is also one of the most annoying, with frequent "these bits are expired" messages every time there is a minor update. What is different with this extension that it doesn't just upgrade, and keep working if I decide not to upgrade immediately?
Highly recommended, except that it is highly annoying.
This product works great, and is an incredibly useful plugin! I've never experienced any bugs with it; it's always been fantastic to use. Great job on making a really great, easy-to-use product that really hits the spot for web development.
It's a flawless product - works great with no problems. I would give it a 5-star rating and HIGHLY recommend it, but it gives "these bits are expired" messages every few weeks.
After installing the add-on, when I click one of the browsers icon I get the message: "Access to path C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\browsers.xml is denied". I am running as administrator and I open the access of this file to everyone.
The browsers.xml file has this content:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<BrowserInfo><Browser><Name>Opera Internet Browser</Name><Path>"C:\Program Files (x86)\Opera\Opera.exe"</Path><Resolution>0</Resolution><IsDefault>True</IsDefault></Browser></BrowserInfo>.
Can you help me?
Thanks
I don't know the reason... but its not working on my formated PC (I used to use this before the clean up). I use Win7 64bits and VS2010 (not SP1 yet)... The buttons are all grey, and the context menu option does not appears... =/ Do you know something about it?!
DBS has a known issue where it won't work on new installs of VS until you use the built-in "View in Browser" feature at least once. Please use VS "View in Browser" first and then it should work. Thanks.
I have 0.8.3 with VS2010 SP1 running on Win7 SP1 64-bit. WoVS Default Browser Switcher doesn't seem to know that I have Firefox v6 installed. My only choice of browser using the tool is IE (IE8). How do I configure WoVS Default Browser Switcher to let it know that I have other browsers installed?
Hi guys, unfortunately DBS browser detection is not currently driven by a configuration file or registry setting that you could tweak. It happens in code and it looks like Firefox v6 may not be properly detected in all cases for AtlantaProgrammer. For timmi-de and Jimi2Cool, which browser (if any in particular) is failing DBS to detect for you? Thanks!
After toying around with things a bit I realized the paths are coming from the registry under the key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths
each subkey is the name of an application (firefox.exe for example) with the value set to the full path to the app. The BrowserSwitcher checks the list of apps against some internal list of supported browser exe names and determines which are installed and where they live that way.
For whatever reason none of my other browsers were listed. There's another key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths
that contains 32-bit exe listings on 64-bit systems but mine were not listed here either.
So I decided to try and manually add these values and it worked!
I added the key
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths\firefox.exe
with a value [My firefox install location]\firefox.exe and PRESTO! it's now available in the switcher's toolbar.
I'm not a huge fan of manually changing the registry but adding these doesn't seem to hurt anything (so far).
Suggestion: Can you provide a mechanism (through a config file perhaps) for users to enter in override values for these paths? Auto-detection is great but override capability would really tie the room togather
hope this helps
I have IE 6.. (I know its ancient) and its not detecting I need to specify the path somewhere.A config file would have helped a lot.Hope you can add this feature in a future release.
Why can't you gracefully request an update of the plugin like everyone else - instead of shutting down blackmailing us to install the update !???
Its pretty anoying, especially because theres rarely a reason to update !
I have FF selected as the browser to open my web app in, however when I run it for the first time it automatically switches the selected browser to Chrome (which is the default browser for my OS) and opens it in that. I have to manually re-select FF as the browser and then every time thereafter it does open in FF. It's just the first time after opening VS that it auto-switches from FF to Chrome. It's annoying me so I had to come here and write this :(
Same here. I just upgraded to 0.8.6 and it still sets the default back to the OS-default browser. At first glance it doesn't appear to: the selected browser is still shown in the toolbar as Firefox, but on launch of the site Chrome (currently my default) start up and the selected default browser switches.
This also happened when IE was my OS-default browser: on (re-)install of *any* extension the VS-default browser was still shown as the previously selected one, but the OS-default browser came up.
This has been an annoying issue for quite some time and I seem to remember reporting it a long time ago.
I have the same problem. I have Google Chrome installed but it isn't a default for anything. FF8 is my default browser. If I tell Browser Switcher to show in browser or to specifically show in FF it always runs Chrome instead. OTOH it will show in IE if I tell it to. I'm running Win7x64 with VS2010 Pro.
I'm currently running Firefox as my default browser and use your extension for setting VS to IE, but there seem to be an issue when other extensions update...it defaults back to Firefox every time...is that some sort of limitation in VS that you can't get to or is it some wicked hook you got that resets it...it's a small issue but really annoys me every time I run into it.
I'm getting a message stating that the "beta bits have expired". The version I am using is 0.8.5 and uninstalling, downloading (same version??) and re-installing has not helped. Message comes up when clicking on the tool bar and was working fine yesterday.
Any suggestions?
Hi andymerritt, sorry about that. We've now just uploaded a newer beta version with some bug fixes and an extended experitation date, version 0.8.6. Please update to it and it should work ok. Thanks!
So I tried installing Firefox Aurora on my machine to check it out, and afterwards I could not select Firefox on the default browser switcher toolbar. I tested to make sure I could select all of the other browsers, which I could, then tried FF again and it threw an error message at me. (Unfortunately I don't remember what this message was) Now all the browsers are greyed out and the Default browser switcher item in the context menu is gone as well.
I uninstalled Aurora, and reinstalled Default Browser Switcher but no luck. Any ideas? I love this extension and want to keep using it. Help!
Actually, it looks like after a reboot and another reinstall of the extension everything is back to normal. Thanks anyway, and thanks for the awesome extension!
Hi RickH3, we haven't really tested this extension against Aurora bits so it may fail to detect it. Glad to hear you got the extension back to work. And I'll send this to the team so they can consider testing Aurora in a future version. Thanks
Hello,
I have firefox 7.0.1 and I can't select the firefox option in the default browser switcher.
All other browsers work fine, but FF never gets highlighted.
Any news on this?
Many thanks...
Hi,
i tried to install and received this error: "The specified path, file name, or both as too long. The fully qualified file name must be less than 260 characters, and the directory name must be less than 248 characters."
I´m usung VS2010 SP1. WINDOW XP SP3 x32
help please.
Hi PrmCosta, this looks like it may be a long path issue of Windows but not really related to the DBS extension itself. Given that you are using WinXP you should have the usual "Documents and Settings" folder and deep inside that the Visual Studio extensions folder. Can you take a look at how long that ended up being?
I have the same issue here. If i rename the original *.vsix installer file to a shorter name the installer comes up but won`t work. Other extensions have not such a problem. I also have WinXP 32Bit with SP3, VS2010 Ultimate SP1. My %LocalAppData%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\Extensions path has a length of 118 characters.
Hi, this only happens in some installations on WinXP and it is due to the long folder names used by that OS that were then changes by the shorter ones later on, e.g. "Documents and Settings" -> "Users". Renaming the .vsix installer file won't help here. What you may want to try is to: 1) unzip contents of the .vsix file (it is just a .zip file), 2) manually edit the .extension.vsixmanifest file and change the <Name> and <Author> elements, currently set to "WoVS Default Browser Switcher" and "Clarius Consulting" respectively to something shorter like "DBS" and "CC". This should result in a shorter installation path and hopefully fix the issue you're seeing. Let me know if it worked!
Just FYI, I had this problem while using Windows Server 2003 Enterprise (XP) and the solution you proposed worked. I just changed the extension to .zip, opened the extenisions.vsixmanifest file, changed Name to DBS and Author to CC, saved it, changed the extension back to .vsix and it installed without issue and works great. Thanks
