After working on the DDCPX team and in the Developer Solutions group for over a year, I’ve switched to a new team in Microsoft. Consequently, this means I’ll no longer be working on the MSBee project. This was a difficult decision considering how much...

MSBee has been on CodePlex for a little over 2 weeks. In that time, there have been 1,350 downloads of the 1.0 Release and it's been the most downloaded tool on CodePlex! Additionally, the Power Toys releases have garnered attention from blogs, including...

One of the most satisfying moments for any project is saying "It's done." For MSBee, this moment has come as the 1.0 release and its source code were posted to CodePlex yesterday evening. Thus, if you go to http://www.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?ProjectName...

As the post's title indicates, MSBee's source code will soon be available on CodePlex ; we're just waiting on final approval of the shared source license. CodePlex is an environment for creating, hosting, and managing open and shared source projects,...

MSBee 1.0 is now code complete, meaning we're just a few days away from the final release. Subsequently, our MSBee shared source release is also on track and will be available soon. Earlier today, I was reading a blog post by Josh Ledgard, a co-worker...

About eight months ago, I spent time working on a solution for a gap in MSBuild VC++ support. When you currently build a VC++ solution with MSBuild, MSBuild is really executing vcbuild.exe to do the actual work. There are no cl and link tasks or any other...

In my previous Developing MSBee posts, I mentioned some issues I was having with FxCop and NUnit. Regarding FxCop, the IDE kept crashing when I tried running fxcopcmd.exe as a post build event. Jeffrey Van Gogh from the FxCop team debugged the problem...

For the upcoming MSBee shared source release, I've spent time migrating our unit tests from MSTest to NUnit since NUnit is freely available to the developer community. MSTest and NUnit have similarly named attributes and Assert methods, which helped make...

I've been remiss in blogging lately so let me update you on MSBee's progress. We're heading into the third week of Sprint 3 and we're still on course for RTM in early May. With our ResolveComReference work complete, we're focused on preparing for the...

About a month ago, at the end of our first sprint, we invited Ken Levy to check out our first 3 power toys for Visual Studio 2005. Channel 9 has now posted the video , in which you’ll meet our team and catch demos of MSBee, Managed Stack Explorer, and...

We've just released MSBee Beta 2! You can download it by going to the Beta 2 homepage and clicking on the MSBee Beta 2 Release link. Beta 2 adds more great features to MSBee, including: Support for the ResolveComReference task! Redirecting...

We have exciting news from the MSBee home office; we've passed the 2,000 downloads mark! This is a great milestone for the Beta 1 product. Even more exciting is that Beta 2 is now code complete. As promised, Beta 2 will include support for resolving...

In my previous Developing MSBee post, I began discussing how the ResolveComReference task is being implemented. As I mentioned, we want to produce .NET 1.1 COM interop when necessary. Consequently, our code must run with .NET 1.1. To do that, I proposed...

As I mentioned in a previous post, we planned on implementing the SignFile task in MSBee during this sprint. This decision was based on early adopter feedback, which indicated that users wanted this task. However, as we've reviewed the situation, we realized...

Jamie Cansdale, who develops TestDriven.NET , is adding a new test runner that uses MSBee. This means that for a C# or VB project, you'll be able to try building the project using MSBee as a test for .NET 1.1 compatibility. You can read more about...

It's time to discuss how the ResolveComReference (RCR) task will work in MSBee, since I've already finished a prototype. Before delving into an explanation, however, let's recap the problem: When the standard RCR task runs in MSBuild, interop assemblies...

To give you an update on MSBee's progress in sprint 2, we've already finished retargeting the CompileLicxFiles target. Now, I'm working on a prototype for the ResolveComReference task. In a later post, I'll discuss our approach and some of the issues...

The second SCRUM sprint has begun for MSBee and it's completely feature focused. The biggest task will be designing and implementing the ResolveCOMReference task, which has been a popular request. Additionally, we're retargeting the LC and SignFile tasks...

We just released the first MSBee Beta! You can download the Beta by going to the new MSBee homepage: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=59384 and clicking on the MSBee Beta 1 Release link. About a month ago, I posted a blog entry describing our...

Over the past week, I've spent a good chunk of time working on the MSBee Installer. We want an installer so a user no longer needs to drag and drop the MSBee DLL and targets files into the appropriate directory. Additionally, the installer ensures all...

Josh Ledgard, the lead PM on the Aftermarket Solutions team, has collected and posted the feedback we've received from the MSBee Early Adopters for the first CTP. The survey results are posted in his blog . If you have any other suggestions or feature...

A question I get regularly is: when will MSBee be released? Now that we already have a CTP done and have processed our early adopter feedback, I can finally give a better answer to that question. Given that we're about half way through the first sprint...

I hit another TFS snafu on Tuesday which I thought I'd share. MSBee has a unit tests project which currently has tests for my GetRegistryValue and GenerateResource tasks. Some of these tests use a task's execute method which, as mentioned in an earlier...

The first week of the first MSBee sprint has been very fruitful. The MSBee code and its unit tests are just about FxCop clean. Additionally, I've had time to investigate different infrastructures for our scenario tests. Some things I've learned over the...

Down here at DDCPX Solutions, we've been spending our time preparing for our first SCRUM sprint. For those of you unfamiliar with SCRUM, it's an agile development methodology that we'll be using for MSBee and other tools produced by the team. We've just...