Add Google Calendar to Lightning in Thunderbird

One day, I opened up Thunderbird app after an auto upgrade and surprisingly found Google Calendar was not linked anymore in Lightning interface. It happens from time to time while I supposed Mozilla should have fixed it but it doesn't seem to be the case this time.

Searching around the forum, I come across several solutions but none of them is working. Whether it can be problems in the add-on itself or Google has changed API again, I found myself hard to remember what exactly to resolve this over time. This time I need to take a note to keep myself aware of what needs to be done in case the same thing happens again for the ongoing upgrade.

Just a reminder as for what has happened back in September 16th 2013:

Google is changing the Location URL of their CalDAV Calendars

Google has decided to change the authentication mechanism for their CalDAV calendars to OAuth 2.0, which required some changes in Lightning to accommodate.

Due to these changes, the URL to access the calendar has also changed. The old endpoint will stop working after September 16th (today!). This affects only Google calendars using CalDAV protocol.

According to the Mozilla's blog, iCal users with read-only access are not affected.

For iCal way in Lightning, you may receive error message like MODIFICATION_FAILED when adding new gCal event within Lightning Calendar interface, i.e., it becomes write-protected.

What if we really want to view and EDIT our Google Calendar in Lightning? Let's try another protocol like CalDAV. CalDAV provides read and write access to Calendar instance.

You may want to choose this way especially if you cannot make it work for specific option for Google Calendar under Provider for Google Calendar add-on. I found this option is not quite reliable as CalDAV and might not be working from time to time.

Steps as follows:

• Download Thunderbird and install Lightning add-on
• Open the new calendar dialog (File → New → Calendar)
• Add a new remote calendar (On the Network → CalDAV)
• As a location enter the following:

https://apidata.googleusercontent.com/caldav/v2/*calendar-id/events

*calendar-id is supposed to be your email address or any other id you have set to your Google Calendar

To enable this, you need to enter Google account login details (supposedly once), along with two way authentication 6 digits password if necessary (depending on whether you have enabled two authentication or not on Google account).

This will enable two way (read, write) communication with your Google Calendar instantly.

For Apple iCal users, they might need to use the following URL:

https://apidata.googleusercontent.com/caldav/v2/*calendar-id/user

For details, please see https://developers.google.com/google-apps/calendar/caldav/v2/guide

Completely UNINSTALL corrupted instance of Visual Studio 2010

Visual Studio 2010 is a comprehensive programming suite for app development on Windows platform. It can be good or evil when it comes to such an elephant build with additional packages and tools to be installed all at one time. It takes lot of space and requires attention while doing uninstallation. Any error generated during the uninstallation process could actually break the whole thing. You can repair it via the installation wizard before you can actually uninstall it.

When you land on this article, you might actually have left the installation in a broken state and you might have desparately searched through the Internet to find a resolution for all these. The thing is you just cannot uninstall VS2010 in a normal way. Indeed, Microsoft provide a better way for uninstallation in VS2012 or newer while we're still sticking to the 6 years old VS build.

Microsoft has released a tool to fix all kinds of registry errors or blocking issue during uninstallation of any program, i.e., any program which appears in the uninstall list.

URL:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/help/17588/fix-problems-that-block-programs-from-being-installed-or-removed

It's a troubleshooting tool which guides you through to the right option which actually fixes those strange errors for you and uninstalls the program as specified from there. I have tried this tool and ultimately removed my broken VS build on Windows 2008 server. It claims to support Windows version from 7 to 10.

You may need to try a further cleanup by uninstalling those depending components of Visual Studio via Control Panel | Programs and Features.

Finally, it frees up huge amount of diskspace on the server.