Fixing the Red-X on x64
A while ago Microsoft released a patch for the nasty red X that would appear over certain workflow activities (KB950210). Unfortunately this patch only worked on 32 bit editions of Windows. If you were running Vista x64 for example the patch would fail during installation.
After more effort than this cosmetic error deserved, I’ve been able to manually patch my Vista x64 machine. Using a great post by Heath Stewart (Extract Files from Patches, February 2006) I was able to construct the patched .DLL using the x86 edition of the patch.
First I performed an “Administrative Installation” of the x86 edition of Speech Server. This extracts the MSI into a temporary directory.
start /wait msiexec /a .\Data\mss32.msi TARGETDIR="%TMP%\mss32" /qn
I then patched the administrative installation.
start /wait msiexec /p SpeechServer2007-KB950210-x86-ENT.msp /a "%tmp%\mss32\mss32.msi"
The result of this patch is a new version of Microsoft.SpeechServer.Authoring.DialogDesigner.dll located in the %Tmp%\mss32\IDE\PrivateAssemblies directory.
To manually patch Visual Studio 2005 I simply copied the new .DLL into Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies directory under Visual Studio (C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies on my machine)
For those not wanting to go through the extraction process I’ve made the patched version I extracted available here. It should work just fine, but given the nature of MSI I cannot promise that it won’t in fact destroy your computer, burn down your home and eat all your candy. So be careful.