The check-in policy for TFS is revved to v2.1 and it comes with the "Included Paths" and "Excluded Namespaces" features announced earlier on my blog. The release announcement has more details; also, take a look at the screenshot tour of configuring CCCP.

Today, I finally released v2.0 of the code comment checking policy for Team Foundation Server (TFS) / Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) 2005. Two major new features: firstly, you can extend the policy to do more restricitive checks (i.e. verify that the comments are actually in line with the number of parameters). Secondly, you now get an MSBuild task to compute "code comment coverage" during an automated build - independent of VSTS / TFS!

As for future versions, it is already in source control - take the following team project for example:

Currently, you can turn on / off CCCP only for the entire team project. However, checking a unit test project or a Windows Forms smart client is rather pointless (in my opinion at least):

It is much more helpful for library projects that are to be used by different in-house or external customers, where with the help of eg Sandcastle you can create a nice help file. Therefore, vNext will sport a "Paths to check" feature:

I decided to go with include instead of exclude because it is much more explicit with regards what is being checked and what not. Currently, this is only available via source download.

I have been patiently waiting for this one, quote from the download page: “Acropolis” builds on the rich capabilities of Microsoft Windows and the .NET Framework, including Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), by providing tools and pre-built components that help developers quickly assemble applications from loosely-coupled parts and services.

Download

Today, I uploaded a preview of version 2.0 to CodePlex. There are two big ticket new items in comparison to version 1.3:

• Plugin support The TFS checkin policy only tests for existence of code comments. For many applications, this is just fine. However, sometimes you also want to test for completeness of comments (i.e. a refactoring "broke" the documented parameter list). In this case you can use the new extensibility API, which comes with two sample plugins in the cccplibcontrib project. The API allows you to select which checking you want to override or complement, and you get full access to the parsed source file just like the stock implementation ("abuse" for non-code commment checking purposes obviously possible too). If you come up with a cool plugin, be sure to contact me for inclusion into the contrib project!
• MSBuild task This build task lives in cccplib, which is entirely independent of TFS or VSTS (it was written by Matt Ward). Therefore, you can use it eg with CruiseControl.NET or simply as part of the local .*proj files. What's the purpose of this build task anyways? Simple: as part of the build, you get information on "code comment coverage", just like you do with let's say code coverage and unit tests. Currently, you only get an XML file with the report - if you are XSLT-savvy and want to contribute a HTML report transform, let me know!

To get an overview what v2 looks like, how to configure it, etc you might be interested in this demo screen recording.

I have been doing some sprucing up of SharpDevelop's Web offerings today - namely the code converter. Up until today, you only could convert syntactically valid classes. Recently, Daniel implemented the SnippetParser class, which is now in use for the snippet converter (C# to VB.NET, VB.NET to C#). Note: the Web service for code conversion does support both class and snippet conversion, a Windows client sample is available for the former.

Also new (just completed a few minutes ago) is the code formatter: it uses the highlighting engine from SharpDevelop's text editor to HTML-ize a bunch of formats: ASP/XHTML, BAT, Boo, Coco, C++.NET, C#, HTML, Java, JavaScript, Patch, PHP, TeX, VBNET, XML. Again, there is a Web service available, as well as a sample using the service. This offering is built upon the HtmlSyntaxColorizer sample that can be found in SharpDevelop revisions > 2522 (currently only on the build server)

I am sure that both the snippet converter as well as the code formatter are welcome additions. Spread the word! After all, it's free.

Via the article WiDS Checker: Combating Bugs in Distributed Systems I found out about WiDS: An Integrated Tool Kit for Distributed-System Development which has been available for quite some time now. That would be a great feature for a future version of Team System!

Buck Hodges has a blog entry on this acquisition. To quote the most interesting part for everyone: "Effective today, TeamPlain is available, at no additional charge, to users who own a Team Foundation Server". If you need a Web interface for TFS, go get it!

World and dog has been reporting about the Orcas March CTP, so I'll stick with reporting news on released technology: the Visual Studio 2005 SDK Version 4.0 is here. Why is this important? It has all the cool stuff in it for extending VS, VSTS and TFS SP1.

Fiddler is a HTTP debugging proxy. Although it is easy to use (a very good thing!), it is also very powerful. Point in case and why I am writing about it today is that I stumbled across a drive-by-download site (stumble is the wrong word, the URL came with what seemed like a phishing mail and that piqued my interest):

That site is actually quite clever though: when you go there the second time, it detects that it tried to infect you before and tells you that your IP is blocked. And it doesn't send a peep to a browser other than IE. Plus - and that takes the biscuit - it also verifies the referer.

But I still wanted the code, so I reset my router and started Fiddler:

Although Fiddler has tons more features, this did the trick for me in this case (if you want to learn what Fiddler can do, look here).

So what's the obfuscated script about? The short version: it is a variant of the ASUS download server drive-by download incident. The actual code can be found in a discussion on our German .NET community site here.

Usually, this wouldn't be down my alley, but thanks to VSTS I am a WSS user: all new WSS templates in one download. There are quite a few templates to choose from:

• Absence Request and Vacation Schedule Management
• Help Desk
• Budgeting and Tracking Multiple Projects
• Inventory Tracking
• Bug Database
• IT Team Workspace
• Call Center
• Job Requisition and Interview Management
• Change Request Management
• Knowledge Base
• Compliance Process Support Site
• Lending Library
• Contacts Management
• Physical Asset Tracking and Management
• Document Library and Review
• Project Tracking Workspace
• Event Planning
• Room and Equipment Reservations
• Expense Reimbursement and Approval Site
• Sales Lead Pipeline

I highlighted a few that might be interesting to developers.

Get it from the revamped VPC homepage. What's new? Hardware virtualization is supported, x64 as host operating system, Vista as host and guest plus a couple other enhancements.

Nikhil has updated his controls for ASP.NET AJAX 1.0. Download here

Quote from his blog (so you know why you should go and download them):

• UpdateHistoryThis is a non-visual control that allows you to add history entries to the browser's navigation stack selectively for some post-backs, and not for some others. This helps fix the back button to make it work, and allows you to implement Ajax patterns such as "logical navigation" and unique URLs.
• StyledUpdatePanel A simple derived UpdatePanel that adds CSS class semantics. A simple addition, but a useful feature, nevertheless, that didn't make the feature cut.
• AnimatedUpdatePanel Another derived UpdatePanel that displays new content using a variety of animations or effects: slides, wipes, cross-fades as well as a visual highlight. This allows you to implement the "visual notification" Ajax patterns such as the one second spotlight and one second mutation.

Download here

I just gave StatSVN a try, which compiles statistics for Subversion repositories. For my trial, I used the 2.1 branch of SharpDevelop - which, because only created a month ago - should create a small and manageable statistic to start out with.

What do you need to get up and running with StatSVN (except, of course, StatSVN itself)? Well, the Subversion command line client (get it here), as well as Java. Working with StatSVN is really easy - simply follow the steps outlined in the readme and you can't go wrong - it even works nicely on Windows Vista.

If you don't want to install StatSVN on your box just to see how a report might look like for a real-world project, I have packaged the report generated for our SharpDevelop 2.1 branch:

DemoReport.zip (1.27 MB)

Before looking at the report, check out the LOC and churn rate I have posted below:

This branch was created from /trunk to only contain bug fixes from Beta 2 to release candidates and RTW. That's why there are spikes of activity, with no activity at other days. Also, not all developers are working on the branch, many are concentrating on developing features for the new version which lives in /trunk.

Matt followed through with his promise (see CCCP 1.2 Available With Setup) to write a tutorial on how to create a WiX-based installer with SharpDevelop: Creating an Installer with SharpDevelop

Updates

• TFSCCPolicy and CCCP Merge

As promised, the latest version of CCCP now sports a setup program. Setup is based on WiX, and has been created using SharpDevelop's WiX support. A special thanks flies out to Matt Ward, who provided me with the initial skeleton of this setup project. Please note, however, that you must use the bits from our build server because Beta 3 of SharpDevelop 2.1 doesn't work correctly with this setup project (\Source\Setup\Cccp.Setup.sln).

To give you an idea of the WiX project editing experience inside SharpDevelop I have included two screenshots for you (Matt promised a tutorial for his blog):

Above you can see the project tree plus the main WiX file, below the editing experience for the files included in the setup project:

There are four assemblies included in this setup project, with three being installed to the GAC - only cccppol.dll is copied to the target directory, and it has a registry key associated that enables the policy within VSTS. This is a change to previous versions of the policy that used ILMerge to pack those four assemblies into one.

The only other main change over previous versions is configuration:

The new options make hard-coded values from previous versions accessible to the administrator. Please note that this will force you to remove & then add the policy back to your team project if you used previous versions of CCCP (serialization changed).

I also put together a short screen recording on getting up and running with CCCP (sorry for the low audio quality, but I didn't manage to get Vista & my headset to cooperate nicely):

CCCP12InAction.wmv (1.58 MB)

Finally, here are the downloads:

CCCP12.msi (626.5 KB) [Windows Installer as demonstrated in the video]

CCCP12_Source.zip (1.06 MB) [Source code, BSD-licensed]

With this release I declare the CCCP feature-complete, at least when it comes to the features that I need. If you have further ideas for improvement, let me know by adding a comment to this post. If you find bugs, please let me know too. Oh, and if you like it, let others know!

Post Scriptum: yes, the MSBuild task hasn't been implemented yet. But the policy is done.

I wrote about SVK in Mirror, mirror on the wall and Going local with SVK. Now the release of version 2 has been announced. Note: WIN32 binaries are not yet available.

What is SVK? A quote from the homepage: svk is a decentralized version control system built with the robust Subversion filesystem. It supports repository mirroring, disconnected operation, history-sensitive merging, and integrates with other version control systems, as well as popular visual merge tools.

Work progressed much faster than I thought, so I can present you today with the next iteration of CCCP, the Code Comment Checking Policy for VSTS / TFS. What is new and improved over yesterday's release:

• VB.NET code comment verification enabled
• Code comment statistics tracking implemented, off by default
• Reference.* excluded (Web Services auto-generated files)
• Visibility special-casing of class type removed, CodeCommentCheckingVisibility honored
• Refactoring of CheckCodeComments, CreateInstance added for cleaner construction
• Unit testing automated and initial tests added
• Use String.Compare instead of == where potentially case sensitive or culture dependent

This equates to: the policy itself is feature-complete! It now sports the following functionality:

• Code comment verification for C# and VB.NET using a real parser engine
• Options to enable verification based on elements (methods, ...) and visibility (public, ...) - note that C# and VB.NET is auto-detected, no need to enable or configure this

Not included is "double-clicking policy violation automatically positions cursor on offending element" (I'd need to take a dependency on VS, and quite frankly have no idea how to implement this using VS' object model). Remaining on the todo list is the MSBuild task for calculating code comment coverage, but this will take a while because firstly I am not really that firm with writing MSBuild tasks, and secondly I will have to spend more quality time with IIS7 in the near future.

Without further ado, here are the goods:

• CCCP11_20061228_SetupOnly.zip (238 KB): Contains cccppol.dll, a .reg file and ReadMe.txt. Follow the instructions in the latter to modify the .reg file, and then double-click the .reg file to register the version control checkin policy.
• CCCP11_20061228_SourceSetup.zip (1.49 MB): Includes the above plus all the source code (BSD-licensed). This is a complete build tree minus only one tool: ILMerge. This must be downloaded separately. Please see the Source folder for the solution file, and PostBuild for instructions on how to build the final cccppol.dll assembly.

Further information:

• CCCP - Code Comment Checking Policy aka "Policy Triple-Slash" for VSTS / TFS, the initial post about the making of the checkin policy.

Updates

• 2007/1/21: TFSCCPolicy and CCCP Merge
• 2007/1/1: CCCP 1.2 Available With Setup (this is the latest released version)
• 2006/12/28: A newer version supporting VB.NET is available

The idea for this VS Team System version control checkin policy came up in the week before Christmas when I was pointed to one of the shortcomings of TFSCCPolicy, namely that it would flag commented-out methods as missing code comments. That triggered me looking at the source code and I saw that it was using regular expressions.

Why use RegEx when you can use a full-blown parser engine with a DOM? Well, that's what I thought and therefore got in touch with Daniel, technical lead of SharpDevelop. We discussed two potential ways: either going to the metal using NRefactory alone, or go it easy using the DOM and visitors. He even supplied me with a few lines of code to get started - of course for the latter option because I am a lazy coder.

So I set out yesterday to write that checkin policy. To make it really useful, I set up a library project which would contain all the logic, a unit test project for it, plus the actual policy project. The advantage? Well, the logic library can be reused in an MSBuild task, the idea is as follows: calculate the "comment coverage" just like you can do with code coverage and unit testing. (Sorry, but this isn't part of the package just yet)

Given that plan, I of course got around to the policy project as the last one today. When I was pretty much done, I set out to test it for the first time inside VSTS - whoa, what a surprise. It balked almost immediately. You can read my quest for enlightenment here, the main takeaway: don't outsmart yourself when you create a checkin policy which consists of multiple assemblies that don't live in the GAC.

That way I at least got around to deploy my first project using ILMerge. There is only one downside to using ILMerge - the merged assemblies don't retain their version numbers, which can be seen in this screenshot of the configuration dialog (NRefactory should be 2.1):

Aside from this minor glitch, the checkin policy is working fine. What can it do / what can't it do at the moment:

• It is currently limited to C#. VB.NET will be added later, all I need to do is instantiate the parser. It is as easy as that.
• Auto-update when files are saved. Someone please hit me with the clue stick.
• It doesn't exclude all auto-generated files, just the .designer files like TFSCCPolicy. I need to sit down and make a list.
• Not all elements correctly report the line number.
• Unit tests - well, only one at the moment. More to follow of course, including the full build automation.
• Cleanup in the logic library.

Other than that I would love to get feedback from you on this initial version! Simply post feedback on this blog entry.

Finally, the source code (BSD-licensed by the way) and the binaries:

CCCP10_20061227.zip (964.34 KB)

If you are interested in using it only, then please go to the Drop directory. For those interested in the code: start with the solution file in the Source folder (and then go to Setup).

Updates to the code / checkin policy will be linked to at the end of this post, so feel free to bookmark this blog post for your reference on CCCP.

Today I got around to trying CCNetConfig, which provides a UI for editing CruiseControl.NET's ccnet.config file. Thanks to the SharpDevelop project, I have a rather good test case with a couple of continuous integration plus nightly builds:

Our ccnet.config file is maintained by using Notepad (yes, you read that right). As such, I added a few <!-- --> comments here and there, mostly for pointing me to documentation, blog articles or just disabling a feature temporarily. Therefore, you can already guess my biggest gripe: on saving the file, it is auto-reformatted and all my comments are gone.

Other than that, it is a really good way of editing ccnet.config especially because all properties are easy to edit and you are presented the documentation automatically, no more searching around for tag / attribute help on the Web.  Overall: very useful if you don't spend all day being release manager.

I have been promoting this tool more than once on this blog, so this time just the download link for version 2.1.

Read the release announcement in the PS blog. The English download is here. Now that is a CLI!

Today, we shipped Beta 2 of SharpDevelop 2.1 (release information). Usually, we only ship two betas (followed by release candidates), but last weekend we decided to add a third one to this release cycle - to build a rock-solid foundation for the releases coming after version 2.1.

Speaking of last weekend: three of us met for the annual #develop developer days (#d^3 2006, a four day event) - way short of the original invitation list. But this turned out to be an advantage for discussing architecture and componentization. A lot of improvements already made it into Beta 2, a few more are yet to come in Beta 3.

Part of this effort was the creation of a presentation on SharpDevelop, which includes an area of interest to all .NET developers out there: a list of our components that can be reused outside the context of SharpDevelop plus the documentation and samples for those components. Remember: SharpDevelop is LGPL, so feel free to use our components!

In addition to this "general" slide deck, Daniel (SharpDevelop technical lead) also created a "Level 600" introduction to NRefactory, which can be found here. Definitely interesting for those of you that want to use code completion in our text editor control.

Finally, SharpReport now is a project in its own respect. The reason(s)? Well, SharpDevelop and SharpReport are developed on different schedules, so now we are customers of each other and no longer intertwined. Cool stuff coming on this front: export to various formats, allowing you to use SharpReport - yes - for generating reports in ASP.NET sites!

Last Tuesday, I held the talk "Advanced Code Access Security" at UG Styria in Graz. This talk was originally part of the MSDN Security Briefings held in Austria earlier this year, for which MS Austria had asked MVPs to help create and deliver security content. Advanced CAS seemed an interesting enough developer topic to re-run at user groups, and Mario (the author of this session) has allowed me to publish the slide deck and demos for the general public.

AdvancedCodeAccessSecurity.pdf (4542 KB)

AdvancedCAS.zip (599.6 KB)

Please note that I have published only demos four (setting CAS via setup) and six (using CAS in addin application) - those are the "completed" versions of the demos.

Beta 1 of SharpDevelop2 2.1 is available for download. While I was putting together the annoucement for v2.1 yesterday, I realized that for a point release, we really managed to put in a lot of new cool features:

• FxCop Support
• Component Inspector
• WiX Support
• Incremental Search
• Code Navigation History
• List Data Sources in SharpReport
• XPath Queries
• Code Completion for Different Frameworks
• GoTo XML Schema Definition
• Targeting Different Frameworks
• Hosting of SharpDevelop in 3rd Party Applications

A couple of WOW features (for me, at least): Not only can you compile an application for different versions of .NET, you also get version-specific code completion support. Another cool one is that you can host SharpDevelop in your application, providing your application a "macro editor" (on steroids I might add) with full .NET support. And to pick a third, code analysis rounds out our professional offering in addition to code coverage as well as unit testing.

Two features did not make it for the Beta 1 announcement as they don't yet cover all the scenarios we are hoping for: integrated Subversion support (yeah!) and targetting the Compact Framework for Windows CE devices. Those slipped silently into this release.

As you can see, SharpDevelop is ever growing and the developers working on it can be rightly proud of their achievements!

Finally, a kind of "call to action": let us know what you think! Not only in our forums, but also in your blogs, communities, et cetera. We need your feedback regarding feature set, stability, and much more.

MWconn got a new homepage which is also available in English (here). What is MWconn anyways? Take a look at my short MWconn setup guide / introduction plus if you use a Merlin UMTS card on Windows Vista, my installation instructions for the U630.

EasyBCD is a must-have tool for Windows Vista to manage the new bootloader:

Disclaimer: I am the PM for the #develop project.

After almost two years in development, the #develop team has shipped version 2.0 of its open source integrated development environment (IDE) SharpDevelop2. The new version supports the .sln / .*proj project file formats of Visual Studio 2005, therefore you can open and edit existing projects inside SharpDevelop2. The team however does not view SharpDevelop2 as a competitor for the Express line of products (comparison) from Microsoft, but it aims at software developers that need best of breed tools for their software development process - like unit testing, code coverage, documentation generation and more. In the same vein, version 2.1 will complement those existing features with integrated source code control, code analysis tools as well component testing.

SharpDevelop2 is especially well-suited for developers that chose the Boo language, because SharpDevelop2 offers first-class support for code completion as well as the Windows Forms designer. Aside from this unique selling point there a couple of smaller but nonetheless productivity-enhancing features in version 2.0: code conversion (eg VB.NET to C#, but see for yourself), support for Mono, documentation preview, RegEx compilation und quite a few more.

A lot of the features are owed to the ease of integration and extensibility provided by the addin system found in SharpDevelop2. This addin system can be used by developers in their own application - this being the reason for the rather unconventional license choice for SharpDevelop2: LGPL instead of GPL, which is much more common for development tools such as #develop. Re-use by third parties has been the driving factor to change the license.

Thanks to all the contributors that made SharpDevelop2 a reality, especially the technical lead on the 2.x effort, Daniel Grunwald.

When working with a team, it is always a good idea to have dependencies in a separate folder so everyone can reference them using relative paths:

References from this dependencies folder then look as follows in the MyWinApp.csproj file:

  <ItemGroup>
    <Reference Include="Boo.Lang, Version=1.0.0.0, ...">
      <SpecificVersion>False</SpecificVersion>
      <HintPath>..\Dependencies\\Boo.Lang.dll</HintPath>
    </Reference>
...
    <Reference Include="System" />
...
    <Reference Include="System.Xml" />
  </ItemGroup>

So every team member that checks out the project will be able to work in their workspace, as well as the build server will have all the proper references. Great.

But what about the following scenario: depending on Release or Debug, you need different references - how can you solve this problem? The first step is to go and create a directory for each configuration below the Dependencies folder:

Next, copy the assemblies to the respective directories. Plus, you have to modify the .csproj file and add $(Configuration) to the external reference's hint path:

  <ItemGroup>
    <Reference Include="Boo.Lang, Version=1.0.0.0, ...">
      <SpecificVersion>False</SpecificVersion>
      <HintPath>..\Dependencies\$(Configuration)\\Boo.Lang.dll</HintPath>
    </Reference>

That's it - even Visual Studio will honor this change and still provide you with IntelliSense.

Before closing, I want to mention a new tool - even though it doesn't (yet) support editing the hint path, you should check out Attrice's Microsoft Build Sidekick. It allows you to graphically edit .*proj files:

Disclaimer: I am the Senior Project Wrangler for #develop. Therefore I am biased as well as knowledgeable.

Today, we shipped RC2 of SharpDevelop2. For those of you who haven't heard of it before, it is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for .NET. I will get to the features in just a second. First, I want to thank all developers that spent time on making v2 a reality. Daniel, the lead developer on v2, actually implemented a nice little tool for showing the project statistics, you can read more and download the utility in his blog Analyzing the code in SharpDevelop. Wow, we started quite a long ago on this baby.

I promised to get back to the feature set. Let's tackle it with more than a grain of blog posts and feature videos:

Supported Programming Languages

My definition of support is as follows: full code completion (aka IntelliSense) and a working Windows forms designer. Therefore, three languages qualify: C#, VB.NET and Boo. Aside from those fully supported languages, you get syntax highlighting for many more.

Speaking of syntax highlighting and code completion: both features are supported for XML files. You can check it out in the xml editing experience feature video (yes, this is available since v1.1!) You get this for MSBuild files too!

Features You Would Expect

Let's start with the integrated debugger. This has been our achilles heel since the very beginning, as implementing a debugger isn't exactly a piece of cake. However, thanks to David, v2 sports a debugger and you can watch a demo.

Let's continue with a simple list: Search & Replace, code folding, code templates (just try Ctrl+J in the editor), a toolbox and more.

Cool Features

Ahhh. At last. Let's see what we got:

• Unit testing (since 1.1, NUnit-based)
• Code Coverage (2.0, based on NCover - read more in Matt's blog post)
• Documentation generation (since 1.1, based on NDoc)
• Quick XML Doc (since 1.1, just try Ctrl+Q to get a preview of the HTML help that will be generated for your XML comments)
• Auto code generation (since 1.1, just try Alt+Ins)
• Code converter - convert your projects from C# to VB.NET and vice versa (since 1.1). New in 2.0: three way with Boo.
• Reports. Yes, SharpDevelop ships with a free-to-use report engine, #report. It was added late in 1.x, now improved for 2.0. Watch the demo
• Support for multiple frameworks - although 2.0 is the default, SharpDevelop can target 1.1 as well as Mono. Even Gtk# is supported.
• Ctrl+Mousewheel zooming. You will like it. I do.

What's Not There

We ain't a big software company, so we have to tackle features in order. Therefore, you won't find ASP.NET support in SharpDevelop, as well as others: CF support (planned for 2.1), version control (planned for 2.1), ClickOnce (planned for 2.1)...

Even if you don't plan on using SharpDevelop for your daily work, give it a try and let us know what you like and what not on our forums. You might even learn about a cool new feature like Component Inspector that is coming with 2.1, code-named Serralongue. And we'd be more than happy to welcome additional developers, testers, writers and translators.

Mildly surprising content on my blog: Office 2007 Beta 2 (public) is here! From the moment I saw the new UI at PDC05 I was waiting to get my (dirty) paws on this piece of software. Let's see what working with it is like, because the setup experience was already a positive one. 

The TAM tool is now available as release candidate 1. If you don't know it (already), here is the quick scoop from the download page: Microsoft Threat Analysis & Modeling tool allows non-security subject matter experts to enter already known information including business requirements and application architecture which is then used to produce a feature-rich threat model. Along with automatically identifying threats, the tool can produce valuable security artifacts such as:

• Data access control matrix
• Component access control matrix
• Subject-object matrix
• Data Flow
• Call Flow
• Trust Flow
• Attack Surface
• Focused reports

By the way, use this link to search for the video series on threat modeling in the Download Center!

Today I set up my new laptop with Windows Vista - a "dry run" for Beta 2, because I want to use it as the primary OS on that machine. Part of the drill was getting my UMTS card (a Merlin U630) up and running.

First, I tried it using the standard software that came with the card. Installation went smoothly, however the Connection Manager software is based on an HTA solution, and IE7 most definitely didn't want to cooperate and kept throwing JavaScript errors (Note: I view this as a bug of the Connection Manager software, this is most decidedly not IE's fault). Dialing using this software therefore was out of the question.

So I went out on the Internet to search for a solution. At first, I tried dialing manually using AT commands, but it turned out that initializing a Merlin card isn't exactly easy-peasy. So I decided that a thorough forum search was in order. Thankfully, that search turned up a great piece of software (onlinekosten.de Community to the rescue).

What I found is MWConn (looks like that this time the international audience is out of luck, at least at the time of this writing as the software is German only). It does support the Novatel card, allows for dialing (make sure you check the default connection that is generated, at least my provider is using a different dial-in number), gives feedback on UL / DL traffic you generate, plus signal quality information. Way cool & saved my day!

Six labs, both available in C# and VB.NET. Download (nuff said)

From the download page: The Microsoft Consolas Font Family is a set of highly legible fonts designed for ClearType. It is intended for use in programming environments and other circumstances where a monospaced font is specified. This installation package will set the default font for Visual Studio to Consolas.

To give you an idea how this Consolas looks like in VS I have created a before / after screenshot comparison - here is the "before" screenshot:

And this is how it looks after installation of the Consolas font pack:

It is has landed, you can download the Atlas March CTP here. More information on Atlas itself can be found on the official Atlas site.

THE security scanner has been made available in version 4.0. Nmap is a tool you should not miss out on when you are in need of scanning networks and hosts.

From the download page: The IIS Diagnostics Toolkit is a combined release of popular tools used by today's IIS users. These tools include tools aimed at resolving problems related to Secure Socket Layer (SSL) issues, permission or security problems, gathering data for your SMTP server included with IIS, as well as the famous Log Parser utility used to sift through hundreds or thousands of log files very quickly.

The toolkit consolidates all the tools into a convienant download and is supplemented by updates every 90-days to ensure that users have the most current diagnostics tools at their fingertips.

Works with IIS 4 thru 6, and is available for x86 and x64.

New runtime components are available which are compatible with the release versions of .NET Framework 2.0, Visual Studio 2005, as well as Office "12" Beta 1 (which I don't have anyways).

When I saw the MSDN Magazine article A Visual Studio Add-In That Converts C# Code To Visual Basic I simply had to extend this addin with our parser-based converter. Basically, I took the code I wrote for Code Converter for .NET 2.0 - Online, as well as Offline and put it into the addin, which has now an additonal conversion service in its list (conveniently the first one):

I have also updated the installer (which is now a release build, why was that provided as a debug build in the first place?), to be found in the PasteAsVBSetup\Release directory.

PasteAsExtended.zip (721.36 KB)

Enjoy!

Downloads are available for x86, x64, as well as the documentation.

Download here GIFs are included in different resolutions, as well as PhotoShop files. Quite handy if you want to show which version of .NET is required for your application, supported, as well as unsupported.

   

This week I got started and I implemented a C# to VB.NET conversion. Today, I added VB.NET to C#, as well as C# / VB.NET to Boo. You can find the new converter at this URL:

http://developer.sharpdevelop.net/codeconvert.net/

In addition to the "usual" Web interface, I also added a Web Service. This enables you to remotely exploit the code conversion features of #develop. For example, in a Windows Forms application:

It behaves exactly the same way as the online converter. To get you started, the following download contains both the executable (in the bin/release folder) as well as the source code for the application shown in this screenshot. Have fun, and please don't forget to report conversion errors so we can improve the underlying NRefactory!

CodeConvertServiceClient.zip (38.57 KB)

Here you will find various documents to get you started with Monad. Includes a getting started guide (now that was a surprise), MSH language reference, using tracing and three hands-on labs. Downloads for Monad itself can be found in the Related Downloads section.

Nikhil demonstrated it last week at the PDC, now he released the new version of the Web Development Helper to the public. Read more about the exciting new features here.

Go here, and download samples, slides, and for almost all sessions, actually watch it! Especially interesting might be this one here: WEB340 IIS7: Discover and Move to the Next Generation Web Application Server Platform.

The Microsoft ASP.NET Developer Center has the Provider Toolkit online. It sports the Access Provider as a C# class library project for download!

Process Explorer is a really nifty tool, that comes in very handy when you want to take a deep dive into what's running on your machine, and what might be happening behind the scenes:

When you double-click on a .NET application, you get a tab dedicated to AppDomain and performance counter information:

Nice for a quick look around to see what that application is doing.

The new version of MBSA is finally available. Go get it here.

The Ajax.NET library has been open-sourced by Michael Schwarz. You can now download the most current bits here. What I didn't see so far though is the source code for the library... nor the license.

After quite some struggle, I got the mono::live CD to boot & actually work in Virtual PC. The first step to sucess is to create a new VPC image, and capture the ISO of mono::live for startup of your VPC image:

This thing will now ask you a couple of questions, such as country, keyboard layout, and screen resolution you would like to use:

Now for the stumbling block - mono::live (or Ubuntu, the underlying distribution, to be more precise) detects the graphics card emulated by VPC, however, uses the 24BPP mode with the VPC-emulated card only supporting 16BPP. Looks weird at first and had me stumped too. But I got help on GotMono.com (actual post, interesting snippet provided here for reference):

As far as I am aware, the easiest way to handle this is to just allow the machine to boot up all the way, and then when you can see the fuzzy background image (i.e., the stretched Mono logo) so that it looks like booting is complete, hit CTRL+ALT+F3 to bring up a command prompt.
 
Then type (or rather, cut and paste), this command, all on one line:
 
Code:
sudo sed 's/DefaultDepth\t24/DefaultDepth\t16/g' /etc/X11/xorg.conf > /tmp/xorg.conf && sudo cp /tmp/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf && sudo killall Xorg

to restart the X server at a color depth Virtual PC can handle.

Because pasting didn't work the way I wanted it to, I ended up typing this stuff using US keyboard settings on a German keyboard (don't ask). Anyways: this did the trick! Now I can start exploring mono::live without having to reboot my machine.

Dino Esposito has posted code updates here for his book Introduction to ASP.NET 2.0. I was tech editor on this book, so I definitely recommend getting the book (and no, I don't get anything for this shameless plug).

Another release based on contributions by Ben Lowery:

• Colorized diff support
• CSS uses an external CSS file.  No longer in the code.
• Added configuration setting for CSS file to use
• Added "svnlook changes" parsing support for _U (property updates)

SvnPostCommitHookv1.5.zip (420.62 KB)

Found on Nikhil's blog: the ASP.NET Development Helper. Absolutely cool.

You can now download the latest and greatest release of #develop. It features NAnt integration, Help 2.0 support, great XML editing experience, PInvoke import lookup, #report, Web References and more. Some of the cool stuff can be watched as feature videos.

Saw this over at OSNews.com: OpenMFG, the makers of open source ERP software, have released OpenRPT, a report writer for ad-hoc Web-based reporting. It creates graphical, embeddable reports, similar to the commercial software Crystal Reports or Microsoft Access report designer, but runs on on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. It supports graphs, integrated barcodes, label printing, and watermarks and report definitions can be stored in a PostgreSQL database as XML, or exported to individual files.

Looks worth checking out.

Beauty is not tonights topic, neither a talking mirror - Subversion repository mirrors are. There are a couple of ways to mirroring your repository, one being SVN::Mirror. With my pronounced distaste for the make install dance, I was on the prowl for some solution with a more Windowsy touch to it.

Not too long into Google-Fu I stumbled across SVK, which has (a) a WIN32 setup, (b) loads of features which will be the topic of future blog posts:

• Trans-backend mirror and sync for Subversion, CVS, Perforce (not on Windows currently if I gather correctly)
• All operations can be performed while offline. Now that is way cool if you are working while travelling!

SVK uses Subversion FSFS for local storage, which means prior to installing SVK you need to install Subversion. With both packages on your machine, you can start exploring. All you need is a command prompt and Windows Explorer.

svk depot --init

This will initialize the // (default) depot. Create c:\svkroot, we will relocate the default repository there next.

svk depot --relocate // c:\svkroot

I am not really interested in hosting a read-only copy of a Subversion repository in my user profile. Thus for this relocation to proceed, you also need to copy the contents of C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\.svk\local (which is a bare bones SVN repository) into the c:\svkroot directory.

svk mirror svn://glumpatweri.emailgwiax.com/Fidalgo/trunk //SharpDevelop/trunk

Now the mirroring can begin - svk mirror is used to set up a link to an existing Subversion repository.

svk sync //SharpDevelop/trunk

Depending on the repository, grab a cup of coffee. This sync operation will take some time. Oh, and for keeping a mirrored repository in sync with the master, create a scheduled task with this command.

svnserve -d -r c:\svkroot

Testing, testing. Fire up svnserve and use TortoiseSVN to check out the read-only mirror:

Done. You have successfully mirrored a Subversion repository. Read-only. Working offline and other features of SVK will be covered later.

Two more important downloads in addition to all the other B2 craze:

• SQL Server 2005 Express April CTP
• SQL Server 2005 Express Manager April CTP

The # of VPC images starts skyrocketing (now that's a stupid word combination) on my dev machine...

From the "shameless self-promotion departement": we just pushed 1.1PR out the door. You can read the detailed announcement here. It has a bunch of cool new features, now we enter the stablization and polishing phase. Shouldn't take too long to follow it up with a Beta.

Just seen on NTBugtraq, quote from the Web site: SQLRecon performs both active and passive scans of your network in order to identify all of the SQL Server/MSDE installations in your enterprise. Due to the proliferation of personal firewalls, inconsistent network library configurations, and multiple-instance support, SQL Server installations are becoming increasingly difficult to discover, assess, and maintain.

SQLRecon is designed to remedy this problem by combining all known means of SQL Server/MSDE discovery into a single tool which can be used to ferret-out servers you never knew existed on your network so you can properly secure them.

Didn't yet have time to try SQLRecon myself, but sure will.

From the Windows Media home page, you can download the Windows Media Encoder 9 Series. This nice little encoder application isn't only limited to post-processing (very nice indeed in this area), but can also do live-broadcasting as well as screen recording.

Narrated screen recordings are sometimes simply more useful than written step-by-step instructions (even if "littered" with screenshots). That's why I recorded a quick (non-scripted, you will be able to tell) how to set up Windows Media Encoder for screen recording.

HowToScreenRecording.wmv (1.88 MB)

The IIS Diagnostics Toolkit is a combined release of popular tools used by today's IIS users. These tools include tools aimed at resolving problems related to Secure Socket Layer (SSL) issues, permission or security problems, gathering data for your SMTP server included with IIS, as well as the famous Log Parser utility used to sift through hundreds or thousands of log files very quickly.

The toolkit consolidates all the tools into a convienant download and is supplemented by updates every 90-days to ensure that users have the most current diagnostics tools at their fingertips. Download for x86

This is a course for Visual Studio .NET 2003. Download

Another AppDev training CD has hit the download center: this time, it is the ISO image of the Developing Applications in Visual C# .NET (CD1) training course. Note that in contrast to Exploring ASP.NET 2.0 Using Visual C# 2005, this courseware is for Visual Studio .NET 2003. Download

From the description: This presentation is an overview of best practices and issues with the usage of exceptions, and different issues surrounding memory management including the IDisposable pattern, finalizers, memorypressure, HandleCollector, and why the using statement (Using in VB) is your friend! It's an excellent overview of some fundamental exception and memory management topics.

By Brad Abrams, so download it now.

Via Kent Sharkey's blog: February CTP now available

• http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/express/vbasic/default.aspx
• http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/express/visualc/default.aspx
• http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/express/sql/default.aspx
• http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/express/vjsharp/default.aspx
• http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/express/vcsharp/default.aspx
• http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/express/vwd/default.aspx

 

When doing development for Windows Mobile, you definitely need the Windows Mobile Developer Power Toys. Especially because of the included Emulator ActiveSync Connection Tool, which allows Activesync to connect to your Emulator session from Visual Studio .NET 2003. The other tools are also quite nice, such as ActiveSync Remote Display, CECopy or PPC Command Shell.

CERapi is a managed API for using the Windows CE Remote API (RAPI) from C#, VB.NET and other managed languages. It comes with complete documentation, examples and currently supports:

• Retrieving device and OS information
• Retrieving Battery (main and backup) charge details
• Retrieving Memory details of the device
• Retrieving Special Folders, Storage details and more…

Found here.

Christian commented (though I'm inclined to say complained) on my post Currently downloading: Exploring ASP.NET 2.0 Using Visual C# 2005 that he cannot open the image. Well, I have to admit I didn't try one of the tools he mentioned, I stick with the #1 when it comes to ISO images: DAEMON Tools. Oh, btw, it is free.

CodeHTMLer is a Web application for creating nicely formatted (and colored) HTML from your source code (C#, VB.NET, et cetera). Aside from the functionality, the newsworthy bit is that it comes with (C#) source code, which is BSD-licensed as far as I can tell from the wording.

New in the Download Center: an ISO image of Exploring ASP.NET 2.0 Using Visual C# 2005 (CD1), a training course provided by AppDev. CD Contents include:

• AppDev user interface
• Video demonstrations
• Testing
• Full courseware on PDF covering the content on the CD

As stated in the title, I am currently downloading. So I can't yet tell what is all in there.

Port Reporter (PortRptr.exe) is available in v1.01. Port Reporter logs TCP and UDP port activity on a local Windows system. It runs as a service on Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003. The information provided by the service can be helpful for security purposes, troubleshooting scenarios, and profiling systems’ port usage.

Quite a few things happened whilst I was whileing away on the community wintercamp: the Enterprise Library was released, and PatternShare.org went live.

The Webcast ".NET development for free with #develop" which I announced recently is already available for download (it is still German though). Those who missed it, go get it.

TrueCrypt is a free open-source disk encryption software for Windows 2000 thru 2003 (and this indeed includes XP). You can create virtual disks, which, as the application name implies, are encrypted: mount with the correct password - you magically see another volume. Don't have the right password? Enjoy looking at gibberish. A recommended application for laptop users, especially the British public (and secret) services should take note as they tend to loose quite a few laptops per year.

The second application is KeePass, which is nothing more or less than a nice password safe which keeps your secrets locked away (even from you, should you forget the master key). Cool features: it simply runs (no installation required), has a password generator, and does support importing.

A friend of mine asked me today "Do you know a software / service to (centrally) maintain bookmarks across browsers and machines?". No, I didn't, but I went straight to Sourceforge and did a search which turned up SiteBar (the marchitecture name is ":: SiteBar :: The Bookmark Server for Personal and Team Use", but you already know that from the title). Of course I took them up on the "test on public servers" offer, and here are screenshots for both Firefox and Internet Explorer:

SiteBar for Firefox is an extension, the IE screenshot only shows the "quick & dirty" solution, not the fully integrated one (hey, I don't use IE that much any more, so why bother?). So far, SiteBar looks very promising. Oh, and btw unless you already guessed it from the marchitecture name: you can set up your own SiteBar server in your company!

I previewed the search feature last week with a couple of screenshots. Today I did what I promised to do (review the new code thoroughly), and now I'd like to invite you to download the latest version of the registry editor (0.8.2 dated 12/20/2004).

Note on the search feature: it is pretty intuitive in Tree View mode which node is the search root. However, in List View mode, things are inferred in a way that I hope is intuitive enough: when no subkey is selected, then the search root is the current key whose subkeys / values are currently displayed.

Also of note: deployment to the SmartPhone is now easier, please see the PDF for details (I am now using RapiDeploy).

The Mobile and Embedded Application Developer Center has a nice Developer Resource Kits page. Especially interesting are the WeRock247.NET & Football247.NET Training DVDs, of which you can download the WeRock247.NET SmartClient Training DVD (Football 247.NET is order only).

For me, the most interesting parts are (as in I have the DVDs) the bonus sessions that are included on the DVDs. I wanted to blog about those Learn247 projects for a long time, but kept forgetting about it - now the Resource Kits page reminded me once again, for good this time.

RapiDeploy is a command-line that can be used to deploy files to devices connected via ActiveSync (this includes the Pocket PC 2003 Emulator). In addition, if you are deploying CAB files, you can use the optional /install switch to install the CAB's contents. Download

Will be included in the next drop of the Registry Editor for easier installation.

Finally found some time to add a few missing things to the registry editor: most importantly editors for string[] (REG_MULTI_SZ) and byte[] (REG_BINARY), as well as some other improvements (mostly behind the scenes).

Like last time: please read doc\Program Notes (4 Dev and User).pdf before installing!

Details from ChangeLog.txt:

- Byte[] editor added (needs to be improved user-input-wise)
- String[] editor added
- Editors are now loaded via Hashtable and Reflection (easier to maintain)
- Menu restructuring (New Value submenu)
- KeyPress event for DWORD editor modified to only allow numbers to be entered
- New project directory structure

Download (795KB)

The Microsoft ASP.NET v1.1 Membership Management Component Prototype contains classes that allow a developer to more easily authenticate users, authorize users, and store per-user property data in a user profile. The authentication feature validates and stores user credentials which a developer can use to manage user authentication on a web site. The authorization feature lets you treat groups of users as a unit by assigning users to roles such as manager, sales, member, and so on. Combined with ASP.NET's built-in authorization functionality, Windows Shared Hosting developers have end-to-end support for maintaining user-to-role mappings and authorizing users based on this information. The profile feature enables you to provide users of your Web site with a custom experience. By defining and using profile properties, you can track any custom information your application requires, including user information and user preferences. Download

All you need is BetaPlayer (capable of MPEG, DivX and many other formats - best of it, this player is GPLed) and those free xmas videos.

Busy day in open source land for me - after releasing a .NET USB library earlier today, we now finally were able to release the book "Dissecting a C# Application - Inside SharpDevelop" as a free ebook! More than 500 pages of information (architecture and code) on a real-world application written entirely in C#.

The book was originally published (January 2003) by Wrox Press, which went under shortly after the book's release. With all three original authors (Christian Holm, Mike Krüger, Bernhard Spuida) agreeing, I worked with Gary Cornell from Apress to release the book to the general public for free - and I am more than happy to announce this event today! Thanks Gary, you have been really, really forthcoming - and wow, we made it happen before Christmas.

Today we released yet another open source project: #usblib (SharpUSBLib). The history for this project is quite similar to many other OS projects ("scratching an itch"): Mike built a terrarium for his soon-to-be-delivered chameleon, and he wanted to manage the ligthing using a USB-controlled power switch. Not having found a suitable USB library for .NET, he decided to write one himself.

The library is used for low level access to USB devices, and it works under WIN32/.NET and Linux/Mono. Documentation can be found in the wiki, a support forum also exists. The download includes source code for this dual-licensed (GPL and LGPL) library.

Need a ViewState Decoder? Want to view the ASP.NET security context? Generate a machine key? Trying to understand the ASP.NET pipeline? Or looking for a password minding application? All this plus more can be found for free on this page.

In case this weekend turns out to be too long for you (and you get bored without a real .NET challenge), check out the CodeDOM MSIL Code Provider and the CodeDOM Subset Code Provider. The more interesting bits from the download description:

The Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL) code provider takes a CodeDom tree and generates MSIL syntax. MSIL code provider generates all the CodeDom elements that are part of the 1.1 conformance spec. MSIL code provider generates code for most of the CodeDom types that shipped in V1.1. Why emit C# when you can emit IL!

The CodeDom Subset Code provider consumes CodeDom trees in the way the C# code provider does, but whenever a node that does not fall into the subset is encountered, it emits a #error in the generated code. This will alert to the CodeDom tree builder of any place in their code where they don't meet subset conformance. Roll your own subset of the C# language - anyone interested?

Michael Howard did it again in his latest Writing Secure Code column: how you can run as an administrator and access Internet data safely by dropping unnecessary administrative privileges when using any tool to access the Internet (article on MSDN Security Developer Center). Started using the DropMyRights application immediately on my email applications (yes, I'm one of those devs who does run with administrative privileges by default). Really painless. And can save a headache or two.

I had mentioned Paint.NET earlier here, but now version 1.1 is released which has even more exciting features, of which I picked a few ones:

• New Effect: "RotoZoomer" which can perform arbitrary angle rotation, and zooming.
• Layer Properties now visually previews and updates all properties in real time without having to press the "Apply" button.
• Invert and Desature are put into the Image -> Adjustments menu, along with a new adjustment called "Brightness & Contrast."
• User interface upgraded to make full use of XP themes. In v1.0, many dropdown boxes and "updowns" had a Win2K/OfficeXP look to them.
• Extensibility! After you install the program, check out the "RotoZoomerSource.zip" for an example of how to write an Effect plugin. You will need Visual Studio 2003 .NET to write a new plugin. No other types of plugins are supported for v1.1.

Like last time, full source is provided too (which has lots of tweaks and refactorizations). Read more and download

OWASP (The Open Source Web Application Security Project) has a couple of projects online focused on ASP.NET security issues. Current projects include ANBS (ASP.NET Baseline Security), SAM'SHE (Security Analyzer for Microsoft's Shared Hosting Environments), ANSA (ASP.NET Security Analyzer) as well as the ASP.NET Security Guidelines for designing and deploying secure Web applications using ASP.NET (applicable to IIS 5 & 6).

OWASP .NET Projects Homepage

Finally. At long last. It took us four years to lay a solid foundation for #develop's future as a great Integrated Development environment. During that time I worked as the project's senior project wrangler: trust me, steering (open source) developers with their egos makes herding cats look like an easy challenge.

I have to admit that I learned a lot, which after all was the initial idea of joining the project. Managing, architecting, building and testing a project that has a few kLOC of C# code under its belly is a challenge when you have a distributed team - at least the core team was able to meet a few times. I'm proud that it worked out so well.

Read the announcement for 1.0

I can safely assume that everyone knows the venerable Calculator that ships with Windows. Now there is the download for Microsoft Calculator Plus, a nicely spruced up version (non-classic view):

In addition to the visual enhancements, you can see to the left the addition of mathematical functions (well, in the end I still use my HP 48, but...).

The calculator sports Standard and Scientific view, the new Calculator Plus sports a third one - Conversion:

Now that's really nifty!