I am a big fan of Resharper, but right now I am at a client who doesn't use it. Today, I accidentally reset my toolbar, so I was going through and adding my settings (yes, I could have restored an old one..)

As I was doing it, I ran across two items I relied on Resharper to handle.

One will remove unused "using" statements, and the other will sort them in your class by namespace.

Here's what they look like:

They can be found in the Edit Menu items.

Earlier, I posted a useful link at Rubicon Computing Solutions for a poster of all the keyboard shortcuts in the Visual Studio IDE. As I was looking for some more neat shortcuts, I came across this site with more useful tips -- mainly, how to enumerate all the shortcuts, and how to customize them.

I have had many occasions to have to remap the shortcuts, primarily related to add-ons I have placed in my IDE. The macro in the referenced Microsoft link will help show what the current mappings are, which would be extremely useful if you needed to do a lot of remapping.

Since I am going back into full time consulting, I decided lugging around twenty 800 page books is a bad idea. Tonight, I pulled the trigger in a Kindle DX. A bit pricy, but the fact I can annotate my books (and export the annotations) and read native PDFs, I can see the value in the price. I only wish it allowed you to annotate PDFs, as I know I can put a LOT of things in PDF form and place on there.

So I was noticing Amazon charges for placing RSS feeds on the Kindle, and I decided to either find a service which converts RSS feeds to PDF format, or write one myself. Fortunately, I found Tabbloid, which mails your RSS feeds in PDF format at an interval you specify. Even better, it looks free. I may still write one and put some filtering capability in it, but this is a win for now.

The other gadget I have and just enjoy is my Pioneer XMp3 player. It allows me to record XM content, and place all kinds of music on the Micro SD card. It's still kind of buggy, and with the XM-Sirius merger, I don't imagine that will change, but I still enjoy it immensely.

Normally, I don't have enough time to really dig into the bleeding edge technologies, but I am trying to rectify that. The question is always "When is it too early.."

For now, I have been looking at some of .Net 4.0's newer features, and one really cool thing for environments which have years of legacy software is called "Multi-targeting". Essentially, it allows you set the target environment for an application in the same IDE (but later target new versions).

As an example, let's say you are currently using ASP.Net 2.0, and you have to because of client concerns. No problem, you'll be able to set the VS IDE to target the 2.0 framework. However, when you decide to upgrade, you can just change the target framework version. The neat thing is that the IDE willl hide and show Intellisense based on the target framework as well.

Scott Guthie is writing a series on it I plan on following closely. This time, I may just have to be more bleeding edge than I have been in the past.

I am a huge fan of CodeSmith. If you are not familiar with it, and you do any amount of coding at all, you owe it to yourself to check it out.

Below is some template code which loads the foreign keys of a table into a Dictionary object. It stores the name of the table and foreign key field name. As you can see, it generates a notice when it comes across a recursive relationship.

public Dictionary<string,string> GetForeignKeyTables()
{
    Dictionary<string,string> dic = new Dictionary<string,string>( );

 for (int idx = 0; idx < SourceTable.ForeignKeys.Count; idx ++)
 {
        string primaryTable = String.Empty;
        string primaryKey = String.Empty;

  // To get the foreign key columns
  ColumnSchema col1 = SourceTable.ForeignKeys[idx].ForeignKeyMemberColumns[0];
        primaryKey = col1.Name.Trim();

  // To get the foreign key tables
        primaryTable = SourceTable.ForeignKeys[idx].PrimaryKeyTable.ToString().Replace("dbo.",String.Empty).Trim();
        if (!dic.ContainsKey(primaryKey))
            dic.Add(primaryKey, primaryTable);
        else
            MessageBox.Show("This table may contain recursive relationships. You must set those relationships up manually.");
    }

    return dic;
}

Tonight was a short night of development, as my folks were in town as my dad needed to go to the doctor. I did get some database work done, and my business objects done. I use a hybrid of Rockford Lhotka's CSLA. I don't need all the functionality (such as layers of undo) so I trimmed them back the amount of functionality I needed and created CodeSmith templates to generate my classes. Let me just say I can code really fast now. :) If you haven't taken a look at Lhotka's Business Objects book, I highly recommend taking a look at them. I began using his concepts in VB, and they have proven very reliable and scalable.

QDJ: Do you use ORM's, and if so, what flavor do you like?

I have to admit, I am not the biggest fan of the various ORMs I have tried. They do serve a purpose though, but I have found most inflexible. I am currently using nHibernate, and while they make themselves readily available to code generation, so far, it seems like a lot of code. See my previous comments about another ORM I tried. My brother uses it, and seems to be happy with it. I just thought the learning curve was very steep, and the documentation was very lacking. I took a beating for that opinion. :)

So tonight, I want to post a couple of links I used today. Soon there will be a control for this on the Rubicon Computing site, but until then, I will post them here.

First, I referred to this before, but here's a site with a lot of good links to various "cheat sheets". Some are really good and useful. You can find those here.

Next, I found some neat add-ins for Visual Studio 2008. The first is the Source Code Power Toy. It outlines your code in a treeview, which makes navigating your code, especially in complex classes, very easy. Best of all, it's free! It's available for VS2005 as well.

I also installed the Power Commands for the VS 2008 IDE. It has some useful right-click functionality, such as opening a command prompt, and opening the containing folder, and that's just a small glimpse of what it can do. It seems to be well documented, and I look forward to exploring all it's functionality. And best thing, this one is free too.

I'll probably post some useful CodeSmith templates I created. I love CodeSmith, but sometimes it's tough to find out exactly how to do things, so I will spare the world the trial-and-error where I can. In the current project I am working on, our team saved 1,100+ hours, and over $50,000 dollars last month alone by generating nHibernate code from the templates we created. Yeah, I earned my rate last month for sure. :)

So it has been hit or miss posting here, but I am trying to correct it by bringing on some additional help. I set up a new blog, developernation.net, and begun getting some content on there. Likely I'll crosspost on here too (my content anyways) but likely most new entries are going to be there first. I figured if I could get someone else on there helping doing some content, it will have more regular posts. This blog will continue, just a lag a few days on the content of theother site, and contain more personal observations.

So swing on by and pop in. I've started off with a bang, and I am in the process of posting a web service design I created and tested which handles paging and sorting of data on the server, which my initial tests have shown to be highly efficient. I am walking through the entire design, and by the end of the weekend I hope to have the series done and the code posted. If not, you can wait a few days and I will post it all here as well.

Thanks!

I had a great need again for WinCV today, and was beginning to work out in my mind how I would rewrite it, as I posted earlier. However, it hit me that Lutz Roeder's Reflector for .Net might actually do what I needed. It does, it turns out. I did have to modify the .cfg file to look at the new assemblies for VS2005, but once I did that, the search functionality worked wonders. So, even though it would have proven to be a great learning experience, I am going to forego putting a rehash together, and stick with something that works very nicely..

I found some details on WinCV for VS2005 (or the lack thereof). As near as I can ascertain, if you have VS2005 only, and place WinCV on that system it will work for the .Net 2.0 libraries. I don't know how that works as it seems the information is hardcoded into WinCV.

So, it was such a great utility, and I think it lends itself to some great enhancements, so I think I am going to write a version which is VS2005+ compliant. Some features I want to add:

• Quick linking to the help topic for a class/method
• Ability to easily add external assemblies WITHOUT having to use the command line

I plan on keeping the same basic interface though, as it was simple and effective. Not sure how much I willl get to work on this, or how long it will take, but I will post it here and probably CodeProject when I get it finished.

Is it just my installation, or is WinCV missing from the latest version of .Net? Granted, I can still use the old WinCV by changing the config file, but why was such a useful tool pulled from VS2005?

If you've never used WinCV, check it out for VS2003 and prior version. It essentially lets you search the framework for a certain keyword. For example, if you want to find out which namespace "Registry" is in, type it in, and see the entire implementation. By using the configuration file, you can add additional assemblies for WinCV, to search your own libraries or those of third party vendors.

A year ago, I completed my MCSD for .Net. One of the attractive
benefits of this certification (as well as the MCDBA) was a $500
discount on a one-year MSDN Universal subscription during the first
year of certification.

Although the MCSD benefits page still lists this benefit
( http://www.microsoft.com/learning/mcp/mcsd/benefits.asp ), they
quietly removed it as of April 2005. The text on the page still
states the following:
Rebates or discounts on a one-year subscription to MSDN during the
first year of certification.

If you call or write to get the certificate as I did, you'll get the
terse response it's no longer available, and they just haven't
updated the site. I figured I would help them get the word out since
they didn't deem it important enough to change on their site or
announce. It would be a shame if anyone expected this benefit based
on the MS web site information.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Above is what I posted to our local .Net community group on Yahoo. Now I am going to add some personal comments. Once again, MS has dropped the ball in supporting the developer community. Earlier this year, MS announced the MSDN Universal would not include the new .Net Team Development system (or some name like that -- I am too lazy to go look it up). Fortunately, enough of an uproar went out that they reversed that decision. Their waning support of VB also caused a petition/uproar. Likely, since the MCSD/MCDBA community is a lot smaller, there isn't likely to be a huge outcry on this issue.

This is a HUGE mistake on MS's behalf. Someone that is likely to spend the extra time and money to get certifications are the ones MS should really cater to. There's always been a criticism that the certifications are worthless, and that benefit alone made it real easy to justify spending the money on books, training materials and exam costs for achieving the certification. I won't argue the merits of the certifications here, but I have a lot of them -- MCP, MCDBA, MCSD for VB, MCSD for .Net (C#), and MCAD. Will I continue? I may have to given I am an Independent Contractor and it helps to get me in the door. Will I recommend it to someone not in my position? Not likely.

Don't get me wrong, the MSDN Universal is still a great deal. My disgust over this situation is that the benefit is still listed, as well as no announcement in April 2005 when they made this decision (or if they did, I sure didn't see it). I have been one of the most stalwart supporters of Microsoft over the years, and I have personally been involved in projects which have generated millions in licensing revenues for Microsoft in the last 10 years. The past 1.5 years I have watched MS anger the core base of developers.

I think this is indicative of the internal problems at MS, and why Google is going to be a viable competitor to MS. In a paraphrase of the words of Stephen King, and the Dark Tower series, MS has forgotten the face of their father. One of the reasons MS dominated the market over Apple was that MS supported developers way beyond the norm. In the name of profit, I think we are seeing this slowly change.

OK, time for a little fairness in the world. When I wrote my blog entry on Monday, I was certainly frustrated with LLBLGen. Franz Bouma has responded to my comments about LLBLGen (little did I know I had such illustrious visitors!). So in fairness, I want to make sure anyone out there reading my blog sees those comments so they can see both sides of the review and form opinions on more than just my emotional outbursts, and my semi-apology for blogging while frustrated. :)

I have tons I need to blog about but no time to do it, as once again I am up to my head in projects. So this entry is going to be to vent....

One of my current clients is requiring me to use a product called LLBLGen Pro (see it at http://www.llblgen.com). I am certain it's a powerful product, and while it generates enough code to make a COBOL program to look efficient, it seems to perform OK, although my gut tells me this thing would be a pig in a high-demand environment. But here's my gripe -- the documentation is horrendous. I have spent at least 50 hours trying to get this thing to generate code effectively as well as consistantly. And even then, I don't understand a tenth of what's generated. I understand enough to make minor changes, and after a lot of wrestling, I can finally get it to generate code. OK, 50 hours may not seem like a lot to learn a new paradigm which might reap a lot of benefits later, but let me tell you what that 50 hours (billable to my client, I might add, since I begged them after 10 hours to scrap it) bought you. I managed to add 2 fields to a table, and add two tables. The two new table still don't work right.

Let's put that into perspective. First, I code lightning fast. Not spaghetti code mind you, but robust code which typically is right the first time. In that 50 hours, I could have re-written a good chunk of the app, and believe me, it needs it. Fortunately, I did my consultant's duty to bring that point up. It would have taken me three hours tops to make the changes which we are looking at 50 hours and still not working. 

Second, the code is difficult to read at best. The project has fallen behind because of the insistance we use this tool, so they brought on two other developers. Guess what, they are having the same problems. They have spent two solid days now, and not one line of code written. Using standard objects, any developer with experience in .Net can peruse the object model quickly and begin coding. Not with this tool!

You can't compare CodeSmith, which I have praised before, with LLBLGen. LLBLGen is far more sophisticated, unfortunately to the point of being unusable. I know there are a few people who swear by it, and that's great, but I get paid to come in and make a difference fast, and LLBLGen has proven to be more an expensive hindrance than a solution.

OK, that's the end of the vent. I have been deploying some web services for another client, and once we have everything debugged, I have a ton of tips related to web services and deployment which I promise will save a ton of hours to other developers entering into this domain. Until then!

Tentatively, my current project is set to end in October. No big deal there, as I have had absolutely no bench days in the past 10 years as an Independent Contractor. In fact, during most of those 10 years I have been working 55-80+ hours per week and having a great time doing it. I don't do the book thing or magazine article thing because quite frankly, I don't have time because I am busy doing billable work which pays a lot more. I havn't needed self-promotion thing either because almost all my business comes from referrals from current or past customers.

Then along come kids, and dang if you don't suddenly want to spend more time at home and improve their quality of life (and mine). My current project wants to bring me on full time, and we've had some preliminary discussions on it, and I am willing to take the pay cut in my pay for one simple thing: I want to work remotely and raise my kids in the country. Their attitude is like mine, which is that should be fine since I have a strong work ethic and can get things done, what does it matter where I work as long as I have a phone and internet connection. However, there are data security concerns and management concerns which would need to be overcome.

I have plenty of time, since barring disaster, the contract won't be over until October sometime. But I figure I will start self-promoting just in case someone from a company who doesn't mind remote employees stumbles on this blog. Towards October, I will go full bore trying to close something out, and in the meantime I plan on blogging much more so I can display what talents I can bring to the table.

If any companies out there that come up on this, and want a great employee (C#/VB developer with lots of SQL Server and architect/designer/coding and full-life cycle development) that brings a lot of experience, a great professional attitude and presence as well as the ability to code like the wind (and good code at that..), then drop me a line and let's talk.

Here's a resume just in case..

I bought CodeSmith back in v2, but I was so busy I never got a chance to do more than play around with it. So now v3 is released, and I was looking at the improvements (like Intellisense) and decided I would take a look at it again. Boy, was I glad I did..

Don't get me wrong, I wasn't putting it off because I think code generation and templates are bad. In fact, quite the opposite. When I first started my business, I had a few people working with me part-time, and then finally full time as the business grew. What I found was that in the end, I apparently hold my coding standards to a higher value than others and I would end up coding 90% of the application myself. I realized quickly there were a few huge advantages to automated code generation. Here's a few:

• Fewer errors (as long as you fix the templates as errors are encountered)
• One developer can do the work of 4-5 once you get a good architecture set up
• Standards enforcement is a no-brainer when you are all working off the same templates
• You can spend more time on UI usability and data structure because 90% of the infrastructure stuff is done automatically
• Changes are easy. Change the structure and regenerate the code, and you are off again.

I could go on and on about it. I had written a series of VB6 addins which I used based off Rocky Lhotka's BusinessObjects book for VB5. In hours I could generate almost all of my middle and data tier code. A tweak here and there, and I was doing the fun stuff like UI coding.

Along comes .Net, and my addins were irrelevant. I created a couple of quick and dirty addins, but I was so busy heads-down coding, I didn't have time to create new templates to reflect the impact of .Net. I did create some common libraries of functions which got me through a good chunk of redundant coding, so that was going to have to do the job for the time.  I had always intended on going back and re-coding some new templates, but it never happened.

I am currently working on a project and we are horribly understaffed, and there's no relief in sight. There are some huge deadlines coming up, and it's time to make the rubber hit the road. I already code fast (and tight), but I needed to clone myself a couple times over to make the deadlines. So when the announcement came this week of CodeSmith 3.0, I decided I would take a new serious look at it and see what it could do for me.

Holy crap! In a matter of hours I had some pretty solid templates up and running, which will save the team many, many hours of redundant coding tasks in building this application. I have so many ideas for new templates it's scary, and I have only scratched the surface for what the tool can do. If you haven't looked at it yet, I recommend immediately going to CodeSmith and downloading a trial.

I was out late last night in my first “real” poker tournament, so I am a bit too tired to whip out some good code. (I did OK at the tournament, and hit my target, just as an FYI). So tonight's tip is going to be about a great set of free components I use occasionally in ASP.Net. And at least for this one, you can get the source at a very reasonable price. Check these out:

Excentrics World

They have a great collapsible panel, masked textbox, breadcrumb tracker and a popup calendar, plus a few others. Definitely worth looking, and throw him a bone and buy the source!

More cool tools I have found if I can stay awake!

-- Daryl

The winner of the cool application for the Tablet PC was announced, and the top prize winner was an application called ArtRage. Holy cow! I am no artist but this thing is cool. Although you can use it with a mouse, if you hae a Tablet PC, the play factor alone on this is worth the download. Best of all, it's free.

My favorite part: the trace feature. Essentially, it allows you to place a picture in the background, trace over what you want, then save the tracing (without the picture in the background). I may become an artist yet!

For all the apps (which I am sure to check out!) check the contest out here:

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2004/dec04/12-01TabletPCWinnerPR.asp

or go right to the site at:

http://www.ambientdesign.com/artrage.html

Here's a weak sample:

Notice the brush textures of the paintbrush....

-- Daryl

Someone on the project I am currently working on stumbled on some documentation for WinCV, and in that documentation, it tells you how to add Assemblies which aren't in the GAC. Here's the link from the MSDN, and then I will point out the interesting part:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/cptools/html/cpconwindowsformsclassviewerwincvexe.asp

By using a response file, you can issue the necessary the parameters to look at one or more files. From the documentation:

The following code shows the contents of a response file myFile.rsp. Using a response file eliminates the need to individually type the commands at the command prompt.

          /r:myAssembly.dll /r:myOtherAssembly.dll
        

The following command reads the response file myFile.rsp and executes the commands specified in the file.

          wincv @myFile.rsp
        

          So,
you could set up a standard response file which holds all the names of assemblies
to search! 
        

Pretty neat!

It took me a few minutes to find, so I wanted to blog on it just so I could find it again, and anyone out there can use too. I am currently working in a wierd development environment which uses Novell over an NT network. So I have two passwords, and the only way I can change the NT password is through Outlook or using Terminal Services to go to an all NT machine and do it. Outlook wasn't working, so I went route #2.

In order to send the Ctrl-Alt-Delete sequence in Terminal Services, I had to use Ctrl-Alt-End... Go figure!

On my last project, as part of the agile process, we utilized nAnt with Draco.Net to create automated builds. I didn't implement that part of the project, but I certainly did see the value in automating the build. So, while I set up my environment for my topic of Component Based Development, I am going to write my learning's on generating an automated build. If you've used these tools, feel free to hop in and add some help.

That's one downside of open source projects -- the documentation can either be lacking or just as distributed. So hopefully by blogging about it, I can save someone some frustration.

So I am going to start by looking at the tools I am planning on using:

nAnt Home Page -- Get nAnt here. nAnt is the tool you'll use to configure your build

Draco.Net -- How to generate a build when your source control changes (or you trigger it)

Some other interesting links I saw:

For nAnt help: NAntUsage wiki -- Some help on how to use nAnt

For Draco.Net help: Draco.Net wiki -- Some help on how to use Draco.net

Tomorrow I am going to start implementing nAnt on a fairly complex project, so I will post my findings as I go along!

If you are looking to add logging to your application, whether for error logging or debugging or tracing, one decent option is the open source log4net. I give it a “decent” only in that there seems to be some bugs, and I am still not totally sold on the open source concept for a variety of reasons. But given that, some good thought has been placed into log4net, so that you have a good variety of options on where and in what format your logging information will be output. Note that I looked at v2, since it's the one which allows you to output to the database.

I am a huge proponent of logging error information to a database because you can check on errors real-time, as well as give yourself some powerful searching mechanisms. The client I was working for was logging to a file using an older version of log4net, so I decided to check out the log4net database functionality. Here's where you can find all the information you may want to know, including how to download log4net: http://logging.apache.org/log4net/

What I found was mixed. On the upside, you can (to a degree) use log4net with an existing database error log to a certain degree (I say to a certain degree because without going in an changing the source -- which is a plus for open source). A lot of thought has been placed into the design with regards to flexibility and performance.

On the downside, the code seemed buggy and the documentation is pretty bad. In order to get v2 database logging to work, I had to resort to stepping into the code to determine what the correct configuration settings would be. So as a bonus today, I will save the reader any heartache and post my file, along with a description of what the reader will need to change to use it!

First, I created a database (called test) in SQL Server 2000, and created a table called Log. Here's the fields, and I will leave the size out so you can make your own decisions about that, but given the amount of detail in the Message parameter of an error message, you might want to make some big varchars in there.

Column	Type
ErrorId	Identity (int)
Date	datetime
Thread	varchar
Level	int
Logger	varchar
Message	varchar
Exception	varchar

Create the table, then configure the log4net configuration file. Here's what mine looked like with the table structure above:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>

<log4net debug="false">

<appender name="ADONetAppender" type="log4net.Appender.ADONetAppender">

<param name="BufferSize" value="1" />

<param name="ConnectionType" value="System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnection, System.Data, Version=1.0.5000.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089" />

<param name="ConnectionString" value="server=localhost;uid=test;pwd=test;database=test" />

<param name="CommandText" value="INSERT INTO Log ([Date],[Thread],[Level],[Logger],[Message],[Exception]) VALUES (@log_date, @thread, @log_level, @logger, @message, @exception)" />

<param name="Parameter">

<param name="ParameterName"&#0;value="@log_date" />

<param name="DbType" value="DateTime" />

<param name="Layout" type="log4net.Layout.RawTimeStampLayout" />

</param>

<param name="Parameter">

<param name="ParameterName"&#0;value="@thread" />

<param name="DbType" value="String" />

<param name="Size" value="255" />

<param name="Layout" type="log4net.Layout.PatternLayout">

<param name="ConversionPattern" value="%t" />

</param>

</param>

<param name="Parameter">

<param name="ParameterName"&#0;value="@log_level" />

<param name="DbType" value="String" />

<param name="Size" value="50" />

<param name="Layout" type="log4net.Layout.PatternLayout">

<param name="ConversionPattern" value="%p" />

</param>

</param>

<param name="Parameter">

<param name="ParameterName"&#0;value="@logger" />

<param name="DbType" value="String" />

<param name="Size" value="255" />

<param name="Layout" type="log4net.Layout.PatternLayout">

<param name="ConversionPattern" value="%c" />

</param>

</param>

<param name="Parameter">

<param name="ParameterName"&#0;value="@message" />

<param name="DbType" value="String" />

<param name="Size" value="4000" />

<param name="Layout" type="log4net.Layout.PatternLayout">

<param name="ConversionPattern" value="%m" />

</param>

</param>

<param name="Parameter">

<param name="ParameterName"&#0;value="@exception" />

<param name="DbType" value="String" />

<param name="Size" value="2000" />

<param name="Layout" type="log4net.Layout.ExceptionLayout" />

</param>

</appender>

<root>

<level value="DEBUG" />

<appender-ref ref="ADONetAppender" /

</root>

</log4net>

config.log4net (2.32 KB)

Of course, first thing you'll want to do is change the ConnectionString value to your situation. Now, some weird things I found. It doesn't seem to use the stored procedure it says it does. I stepped through the source, and it looks like it just tries to execute a SQL statement, which can be found in the CommandText parameter in the configuration file. So really, you could likely strip out all the parameters listed above. I have to confess it has been some months since I looked at log4net, so there might be a reason I left them in, such as a different part of the code that uses them and without it, it fails. So, take a few minutes and strip them out, and see what you get. But the saving you get from my slogging through the code should more than justify looking at this configuration file.

My final review is this: If you're creating a production app, here's your two options: roll your own solution or use log4net. If you plan on using log4net, download the source, learn it, and be prepared to spend some time (possibly considerable) debugging it. As a consultant, unless you need to ability to switch logging types (e.g. database to file to application log) dynamically, I would recommend rolling your own logging system, and write it such you can use it in multiple applications. Use log4net to get some ideas on the best way to accomplish it. Why? I think it tries to be too much to everyone, and it's not quite yet complete, and the documentation is lacking. In the end, KISS wins (keep it simple, stupid).

When you install the .Net framework, you also get a ton of utilities with it. For a complete listing, follow this link:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/cptools/html/cpconNETFrameworkTools.asp

One of these utilities is insanely useful if you want to find something fast, and you don't feel like going through the overhead and all the excess listings of the MSDN. This miracle utility is the Windows Class Viewer, also known as WinCV.exe.

To run it, use the .Net DOS prompt, and type in WinCV. You'll be able to enter a serach string (or partial string), and it will list the namespace it was found in, as well as the definitions of the accessible methods.

Now, the neat thing which isn't really mentioned is that you can include 3rd party searches by placing an entry in the WinCV config file. For example, I tested this by using the Infragistics libraries. Once I placed them in the config file, I was able to search them like any other Microsoft assembly. One caveat though -- it only works for assemblies registered in the GAC.  I won't tell you exactly how to edit the config file, because if you can't look at it and figure it out, you probably shouldn't be editing that file.

As a consultant, I need to be able to port a bag of tricks from one project to the next. Accessing MS Repository isn't always the easiest, although I have used it in the past for internal projects.

I ran across CodeLib for .Net by Fish, and it's a great tool, with searching, the ability to append files, notes, code (which it formats) as well as web pages (which I have yet to figure out how to work with).

Best of all, it's Freeware. So give it a try, you'll like it. Heck, once you get a library put together, maybe we can swap! ;)

Ran across this nifty little tool, so I decided to create a whole new feed dedicated to some neat tools I have come across in my travels. So here's the first one.

This tool is an addin which takes source code from the Visual Studio IDE, and formats it in HTML so you can post it on the web, in a blog, etc. It's easy to access and use, just a simple right-mouse click. And now the moment of truth, what it looks like:

             public
            static
            string ReadConfigurationValue(string p_strConfigString)

        {

            try
          

            {

            string strValue
= "";

                System.Configuration.AppSettingsReader l_configurationAppSettings = new System.Configuration.AppSettingsReader();

                l_configurationAppSettings = new System.Configuration.AppSettingsReader();

                strValue = (string)(l_configurationAppSettings.GetValue(p_strConfigString,Type.GetType("System.String")));

            return strValue;

            }

            catch (Exception
ex)

            {

                ErrorHandler.LogError(ex);

            return
            "";

            }

        }

So far, it looks great. I will need to get used to a couple of little quirks, but all in all, I am impressed!

Where to get this great tool?

http://www.jtleigh.com/people/colin/blog/archives/2004/10/copysourceashtm_1.html

Enjoy!