This is an interesting problem that I come across often. There are three types involved in this pattern: 1.  C – The type of the parent object. 2.  O<P> – A collection of instances of P . This is a hybrid collection-dictionary that allows...

The following is the C# implementation of the Fortran algorithm posted in the previous post for generating all possible partitions of a set of items. We consider the items to be unique although they may be the same item (that is Object.Equals returns...

Note that the following implementation is a faithful reproduction of the NEXEQU algorithm in the book Combinatorial Algorithms For Computers and Calculators by Nijenhuis & Wilf. However, the implementation given in the text has been updated to Fortran...

The following code shows the implementation of the all permutations generation algorithm that was discussed in the previous blog post in C#. /// <summary> /// An enumeration of all the permuations of a set of items. /// </summary>...

Note that the following implementation is a faithful reproduction of the NEXPER algorithm in the book Combinatorial Algorithms For Computers and Calculators by Nijenhuis & Wilf. However, the implementation given in the text has been updated to Fortran...

If I have a machine say FOO and I want to retrieve all web services on that machine how do I do it? I can use WS-Discovery and I know how to do this with the .NET 4.0 Discovery API. However, the only sample I could find is multicast, which in my use...

If your application or library wants to kick off a child process C and you want to redirect standard output and error, this is what you do: ProcessStartInfo psi = new ProcessStartInfo (); psi.Arguments = this .CreateArgumentsString(); psi.FileName = this...

I have been getting this error lately when trying to debug a test. I would be stepping over line by line and suddenly the debuggee process will exit suddenly. The proces exits with the error code is -2147023895 (0x800703e9). There are only a few reasons...

I am working on a project. The idea is to persist stack trace information for each test failure in a database so that we can automate/facilitate analysis of related test failures. For example, we can query for all tests that fail at a particular method...

This post deals with the MyTest sample. I will start at the beginning of time. Pre Requisites I copied over the MyTest folder in the Visual Studio SDK to a separate directory. In doing so, I discovered some issues with the MyTestUI project. You...

I have been investigating this topic for the past couple of days. Not much progress, but some interesting things to note. It might be an illuminating experience to use .NET Reflector to disassembly and study the unit test type implementation. The...

As anyone who has been looking at my blog knows, I have been mostly working on VS integration of the test tools used in our team (apart from setting up and managing TFS for the builds and various other initiatives.) Anyway, so, I started to author...

Introduction This and the next few blog posts will be focussed on implementing a custom test type for Visual Studio 2008. We have an internal tool that our team uses for testing quite extensively and which pre-dates the testing capabilities introduced...

This blog post deals with a vareity of things I feel would be nice to have features in the next generation of programming languages. I keep learning about compiler technology and I am hoping that in the next few years, I will be able to build a compiler...

Beware!!! The method InitializeShapeFields appears in each shape class that is generated by the DSL tools. However, this method is only invoked ONCE per shape. It is due to this code /// <summary> /// Per-class ShapeFields for this shape...

In the DSL project I am working on, I am performing layout for the model diagram myself. This problem mostly arises because we want two-way synchronization between model and code. Hence, after one of our users has modified the diagram by hand, if we update...

The DSL projects created by the DSL package wizard are configured to target AnyCPU .However, if you write a command line tool that references the generated DSL library, you should set up your project to target x86 even if you are working on a 64-bit machine...

As I learned today, DTE events are different. Event handlers that are local are marked for garbage collection when the handler goes out of scope. That means the event handler is likely to be fired at most once or never.

I was trying to implement an AddIn that modified the context menu for project items. Specifically, C# files. After poking around for a couple of hours, I succeeded. Adding a menu item (or CommandBarControl) is relatively simple. What was complicated was...

I found an interesting feature when creating a Visual Studio project template. (Details about how to create a template is left to a forthcoming post.) I was working on a wizard for the project template. In the IWizard::RunStarted method for the wizard...