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Connecting my Canon EOS 350D to Windows 7 (32-bit)

Last week, the week after our marriage, we went a few days to Limburg (Belgium) to relax a bit and have a first small honeymoon trip… Because we had our bikes with us, we decided to make some great tours. During these tours, i love to take pictures with my Canon EOS 350D camera from the lovely landscapes, the nice buildings and even our driving vehicles aren’t safe for my camera.

When I was planning the trip, I decided to take my portable with me, so I could connect my camera to my portable to view quickly the result of the pictures I made. Connecting my Canon EOS 350D DSLR camera to my Windows 7 Ultimate 32-bit installation wasn’t that easy as I thought it would be.

Unknown device

I connected my camera with the USB cable to my portable. Unless my camera is almost more than 5 years old, my Windows 7 installation did not want to recognize the hardware. Weird because all other hardware, some less than a year old are always immediate recognized by Windows 7…

Installing the device driver

So I needed to find the Windows 7 driver for my Canon EOS 350D camera. After googling a bit, and sniffling the Official Canon Drivers and Software website, I found that there wasn’t released a new Windows 7 32-bit driver. I had no other option than installing the Canon Camera USB WIA Driver for Windows Vista 32-bit (download here). Unless this wasn’t the Windows 7 driver, this installed perfectly!

Connect camera to my pc

Next step would be a piece of cake… NOT… I connected the camera to my OS and the device was recognized as “EOS Kiss_N REBEL_XT 350D”. I found this a weird name for my camera, but continued because I had no choice. Another thing is, you cannot change the name of your hardware devices in a Windows operating system. When I tried to reach my camera, It was visible in several imaging software like Photoshop, Picasa, … and also in the device manager but I could not download or copy any picture to my computer. Also in the ‘My computer’ window, the camera wasn’t present.

Modify settings on the camera

Again I went googling a bit and now I found that there is one Canon DSLR camera which has problems connecting to Windows 7… Indeed EOS 350D (see here under *4).

To solve this problem, switch the communication setting from the Canon 350D camera from ‘PC connection’ to ‘Print/PTP’.

After modifying this settings (which sounds the wrong way), everything works fine. The camera is recognized as “Canon EOS 350D DIGITAL” and is visible in the “My Computer” window.

Problem Solved!

From now I can copy any image I want from the camera to the Windows 7 computer.

VPC Images with Visual Studio 2010 RC and TFS 2010 RC available

Microsoft has released some new Virtual PC images (.VHD), pre-configured with Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Release Candidate and Team Foundation Server 2010 Release Candidate. These are designed to provide an easy way to evaluate, test and learn the upcoming Visual Studio 2010 product family without having it to install on your own machine.

New features included in the Release Candidate version of Team Foundation Server 2010 are:

A set of hands-on-labs and demo scripts are also available to provide a guided experience through many of the new application lifecycle management capabilities of Visual Studio 2010. The operating system and programs installed were patched with all updates as of March 18, 2010. This virtual machine will stop working on June 30, 2010, when the Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate expires.

Download the Virtual PC image with Visual Studio 2010 RC and TFS 2010 RC. Virtual PC 2007 SP1 can be downloaded here.

Click here for more info on the Visual Studio 2010 family.

Microsoft Visual Studio Team Explorer 2010 codename "Eaglestone"

On 3 march 2010 the beta release of Microsoft Visual Studio Team Explorer 2010 codename "Eaglestone" was published. This is the changed version of Eclipse plug-in and cross-platform command-line client for Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server that were acquired from Teamprise back in November 2009.

Previous version of Teamprise:

Changes in the current release:

1. All of the architectural changes in TFS 2010 has been reacted, which primarily shows up in our support for Team Project Collections but it also means that the Eclipse plug-in supports all the configurations for project portal and reporting services that are possible (including not having any configured at all)
2. Added the enhanced work item linking and hierarchy capabilities.  You can now define typed links, query for work items based on links, and work with work item hierarchies.
3. 
4. Added support for the new WF-based team build
5. Have reacted to a lot of underlying changes in the source control version model with respect to how branching, merging, and renames happen. History now follows branches and merges. Branches are proper first class citizens in the source control explorer.

A detailed blog post with more screenshots can be found at the blog of BHarry (Microsoft Visual Studio Team Explorer 2010 codename “Eaglestone”). The binaries can be downloaded here.

Quickly find files in your Visual Studio solution

When developing large scale projects, one of the most annoying problems of the day by day development is searching the correct file to edit. Because of the large number of folders, projects and files it might take some time to find the right file. Scrolling from top to bottom and back to the top without finding what you’re looking for is no shame. Most of the time you even know the complete filename you’re searching for. There is a hidden feature in Visual Studio which solves this problem and helps you to quickly find files in your Visual Studio solution.

This feature is hidden in the default “Find” control in the toolbar by typing the command “>of (space) (BeginOfFileName)”. After you type a letter of the filename, an auto complete list will show up with directories/files that match these characters. After selecting one result and pressing ENTER, the correct file will show up in your Visual Studio.

I’ve tested this hidden feature and it works fine in the releases of Visual Studio 2005, 2008 and 2010.

Quickly find instances in Visual Studio 2010

In the same context I can highlight one of the new features in the Visual Studio 2010 IDE, Using the new “”Navigate To” window (shortcut: CONTROL + COMMA) Visual Studio 2010 allows you to quickly find all types, files, variables and members within your solution matching the search text. Here you don’t need to know the beginning of the filename. All solution objects that contains the search terms will be showed in the results. You can also use multiple search items or Pascal Casing (ex. the search term DGV will show DataGridView as a result). When clicking on a result, you can easily navigate to the correct file.

I’ve achieved my MCTS for TFS !

Since this week you may call me Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist for Microsoft Team Foundation Server, Configuration and Development.

I had been planning this exam a while ago, and this week i finished the course 70-510 with success.
From now on I can handle all your TFS requirements!