Michael's Coding Den: Tools

Gliding in the project creating

Sun, 18 Jun 2006 08:14:16 GMT

Michael Lehman provides "ProjectGlide" tool as VS 2005 project extension.

"Project Glidepath is a MicroISV Evangelism program that delivers the workflow-based guidance, sample code, content and technology you need to create successful applications for Windows Vista"

ProjectGlide provides professional guidance in creating a bunch of apps that mISVs come across everyday. For example, if you want to create WPF application this tool helps you to install all required libraries, create template and sample of code or if you want to use blogging in you product tool shows you how to create and use blogging.

Other words, if you are mISV this tool heads you for the right direction.

PS: SQLExpress is required before installing ProjectGlide.

PPS: Standard SQLExpress doesn't install on Vista beta 2, you need SQLExpress SP1.

Work with assemblies directly

Sun, 28 May 2006 08:56:24 GMT

In last several months I have been working with C++/C# creating custom CLR hosts to work with them from unmanaged code and often direct access to the assembly manifest is required. For that time, Reflector API was the right library for this.

However, what if you want to analyze assembly without loading it into application domain? System.Reflector.Emit fails - it works with loaded assemblies.

For this reason there is a good library that came from Mono - "Cecil" (Thanks to MVP Greg Young for this note).

Cecil allows you to extract CIL bytecodes and work with assemblies without loading them.

DPack - free VS IDE code navigation tool

Thu, 22 Dec 2005 19:18:20 GMT

In our days there are a lot of various tools and add-ins for Visual Studio trying to make our process of writing code easier and more comfortable, but most of them either partly or don't at all realize required functionality.
Recently I've opened a new VS tool for code navigation for myself - DPack (thanks to Jon Skeet), and I'd like to tell a bit it about.
For the last 5 years I've scrutinized a lot of tools and finally for a long time Visual Assist and CodeRush got my nods (I will not describe their pros and cons for me, and why I don't like ReSharper).
DPack has several useful features I've never met before.
First is the "Solution Backup". I regularly work with large solutions, including thousand of classes, but often I need only several subsolutions to finish work at home. It was nightmare to browse a CVS folders to mark necessary folders that need to be zipped and send to home (moreover all debug files need to be removed). DPack do it automatically – zip open solution.
Second feature is ".NET Framework browser" - useful if you forgot how to type the function name (MSDN indexes words only for first letters) you can easily find it typing any part of function.
It’s my must-have tool.

code Snippet tools

Tue, 27 Sep 2005 13:43:04 GMT

A couple tools that can be used to manage your code snippets

Thanks Ollie Riches and Thomas Due for links

Agile Project Management & Bug Tracking Software

Tue, 23 Aug 2005 06:49:48 GMT

TargetProcess:Suite is a web-based integrated agile project management and bug tracking software. It is designed to solve distributed teams problems and support agile development processes like Extreme Programming. Integrated Bug Tracking makes project management more effective, improves overall project traceability and provides consistent snapshot of project state. In general, TargetProcess will help you keep project on track in an agile way.

Presentation: http://www.targetprocess.com/download/TargetProcessPresentation.ppt

Tutorial: http://www.targetprocess.com/download/planning.exe

Scott Hanselmans Developer Tool List

Wed, 13 Jul 2005 08:39:32 GMT

Over there is a nice developer tool list, most of these tools I use in my work.

Update: I'd like to add new tools I'm using wide

CompareIT: tool for diff/merge with syntax highlighting
NotePad++: Advanced notepad with syntax highlighting

And once more: http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/04/07/MustHaveTools/