Visual Studio

.NET Assemblies Lessons Learned

Devin A. Rychetnik — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 22:58:46 GMT

A few things I learned today while instrumenting some binaries in preparation for performance profiling:

Resigning a .NET assembly is as simple as opening a VS command prompt and entering:

sn –R MyAssembly.dll MyApplicationKey.snk

Browsing the GAC through Windows Explorer -- open a command prompt and enter:

SUBST L: C:\winnt\assembly

Now you can browser the assembly folder using your L drive. This also makes it easier to reference a DLL in GAC inside a VS project.

(tips taken from: http://aspalliance.com/1251_Miscellaneous_Concepts_of_NET__Part_2 & http://www.thejoyofcode.com/Accessing_dlls_in_the_GAC.aspx)

.NET Tool Must-Haves & Essential Visual Studio Add-ins

Devin A. Rychetnik — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 07:11:00 GMT

These aren't new, but better late than never...

Ten Must-Have Tools Every Developer Should Download Now: http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/04/07/MustHaveTools/

NUnit to write unit tests

NDoc to create code documentation

NAnt to build your solutions

CodeSmith to generate code

FxCop to police your code

Snippet Compiler to compile small bits of code

Two different switcher tools, the ASP.NET Version Switcher and the Visual Studio .NET Project Converter

Regulator to build regular expressions

.NET Reflector to examine assemblies

Visual Studio Add-Ins Every Developer Should Download Now: http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/05/12/VisualStudioAddins/

TestDriven.NET
GhostDoc
Smart Paster
CodeKeep
PInvoke.NET
VSWindowManager PowerToy
WSContractFirst
VSMouseBindings
CopySourceAsHTML
Cache Visualizer
Wrapping It Up

Create a Setup Package for a Windows Service

Devin Rychetnik — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 19:21:00 GMT

I used this article once before and today I had to find it again: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/vbcon/html/vbwlkwalkthroughcreatingwindowsserviceapplication.asp. (There was just one step that I was forgetting to do.)

.NET Code Profiling Tools

Devin Rychetnik — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 02:51:00 GMT

This is an excellent list of performance profiling and debugging tools for monitoring, testing, and optimizing your .NET code:

http://sharptoolbox.com/Category09009393-4a62-4eb4-97e1-4a2928e43dd1.aspx.

From the little taste of ANTS Profiler from Red-Gate that I got, I think it rocks!

SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005 & BizTalk Server 2006 Launch

Devin Rychetnik — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 04:35:00 GMT

The long-awaited launch happened yesterday and I enjoyed what I was able to see. Unfortunately, I only stayed through the morning session since our team was scheduled to release that day (imagine that). In any case, the organizers were understanding and forgiving enough to give me the free copies of VS.NET 2005 and SQL Server 2005 before I left anyway. Let me give a quick synopsis of some of the things I noted during the talks.

The keynote speech cited a few statistics that showed the market adoption of .NET in comparison to J2EE and SQL Server in comparison to Oracle and DB2 over the past few years. Some of these numbers were quite impressive although I wasn't able to catch the source quickly enough so I'm not sure how reliable/accurate they were. Nonetheless, a couple things sure hit home; the fact that .NET has been adopted by a lot of large companies and it is here to stay for a while. Two of the companies that the presentation specifically talked about were HMV and Barnes & Noble. The presentations focused on how HMV is utilizing VS.NET 2005 to develop its online media center and how Barnes & Noble is using SQL Server 2005 to integrate, analyze and support billions of data records. The argument that SQL Server cannot scale has to be seriously reconsidered after seeing what they are doing with it.

Ok, so moving on to the session about Visual Studio Team System. The Team System is targeted at integrating several different software team roles: the infrastructure architect, the solution architect, the developer, the tester, and the project manager. The Team System comes in three editions (software architect, developer, or tester) or you can get the whole team suite. The idea is to let everyone on the team work smoothly together via a common toolset. In this case, the infrastructure architect can create a logical model of the available web servers, database servers, firewalls etc. and the solution architect can apply the functional model with the web service packages, web interfaces, smart clients etc. on top of that. Then the deployment can be validated and checked in for the developer who will work on the specific projects and solutions and so forth. Later on the tester comes in and start writing stress tests, unit test and other things and the project manager can check-up and run reports seeing all the progress that has been made because everything relates back to the same repository. What makes all this possible is that Team System uses the concept of work items. So you can, for example, only allow a developer to check-in code that has been related to a specific work item, which could be a feature or a bug fix or whatever. The Team System has version control so history of all changes is kept. It also has automated build, unit test integration, and code performance and analysis checking capabilities with things such as NUnit and FxCop. Another plus is that the software comes with the documentation for two MSF methodologies including the agile one. It has templates, samples, and learning material to teach you the formalized approach as well as help you complete each deliverable. So as you can probably tell I was pretty impressed with the tool and would love to start using it myself. [I just realized that there is a 180 free trial version of it available at MS.com: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/products/trial/. Now all you have to do is find a company that is willing to pay for it and employ you to use it.]

I missed the afternoon sessions on 1) Design and Development Tools for Building Mission Critical Applications, 2) Web Application Development, and 3) Smart Client Application Development and Deployment, but I would love to hear from anyone else who was able to attend them.