With the Windows 8 Consumer Preview version out in the open and the Visual Studio 11 Beta also available, I’ve been putting some more effort into trying them both out. The first impression of the new Visual Studio 11 build was: Why doesn’t it work at all on Windows 8?!

The issues I encountered were odd to say the least. Visual Studio did install correctly, which was a good sign, but when I started it, I was greeted with a multitude of popups each telling me that some package could not be loaded. So I clicked away for quite some time to finally be greeted by the new default visual style of Visual Studio.

The next thing I wanted to do was start a new project so I pressed “New Project” and got the “Microsoft.VisualStudio.Dialogs.DialogInitializationException” exception. After some pondering and even submitting a bug report I found another already reported bug “http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/727578/vs-do-not-work-with-finnish-number-format-on-w8-64-bit”. It turns out that the dialog initialization failure has something to do with the packages no being loaded and following the presented workaround helped.

The trick is to change the negative number sign to “-“ (U+002D) from the additional settings of your regional settings. This issue appears to have a wider reach than just Visual Studio as I heard at TechDays Finland 2012 that the same fix has to be made when using Hyper-V.