blogs.conchango.com

While I was on holiday Microsoft released a new version of Microsoft Source Analysis for C#, in the new version - 4.3 - it has been re-branded to it's original internal Microsoft name - StyleCop. There was a bit of a backlash against the initial release of Source Analysis - a few members of the community were warned that the existing Terms and ...

The JetBrains team have been working hard at getting functionality and bug fixes into version 4.0 of ReSharper.  I'm very excited to see that it's finally reached RTM status and now fully supports Visual Studio 2008 and all the C# 3.0 goodness!  Go get it here.  For those who have been involved in the EAP program, it's actually ...

[UPDATE] See post ''StyleCop for ReSharper on CodePlex'' for more info.  I've worked on a couple of projects for Microsoft UK - one of the many great aspects of those projects was being able to use some very cool internal tools; my two favourites being the pre-cursors to Team Foundation Server (Product Studio + Source Depot) and StyleCop - ...

As technology and engineering zealots there is nothing we can't build. Seriously. It is all a question of time, resource and budget. And there's the rub. There comes a point in almost any business process where we hit those points of diminishing returns with technology. All those edge cases where the coincidence of a series of unfortunate events ...

Abstractions are a beautiful thing, and it is said that any problem in technology can be solved with another level of abstraction or indirection. Tremendous. But like with most things, there is a flip side. Once upon a time you would program by hardwiring hardware. This evolved to general purpose hardware and machine code. Higher level ...

Some metrics that we captured on my project: (I think the numbers speak for themselves) Operation    VS 2005    VS 2008          % ImprovementStart the IDE00:3000:0970%Load solution03:4500:4580%Get Latest (no changes)00:1300:0562%Rebuild solution02:2101:5816%Run ...

In my new project, we're using Team Foundation Server (TFS) as our source code repository and also as our continuous integration (CI) engine.  The CI aspect is handled neatly by Automaton which leaves me to setup the build process (or the Team Build Type, as it is referred to in TFS parlance).  Automated unit tests form the backbone ...

I've been working on a WiX installer recently and I was asked to integrate it into the project's continuous build process.  This turned out to be surprisingly easy. Early on in the development, I decided to use WiX version 3.  It is nicely integrated with Visual Studio and has some great property windows for controlling ...

Previously I gave a high-level introduction to the WiX and MSI technologies.  I'm going to dig a little bit deeper here and get a bit closer to the nuts of bolts of these technologies.  Note that I'm not intending to give you an introduction to the details of writing WiX installers, the tutorial I linked to previously (which is ...

Currently I'm doing work using the WiX toolset.  There doesn't seem to be a lot of documentation around the web, so I thought I post my various travails in getting it to do what I want.  But first an introduction to it and some links to useful resources: What is WiX? WiX stands for Windows Installer XML (don't ask me why ...