There and Back Again : My Toolbox

ReSharper 4.0 is Released!!

hdierking — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 00:02:43 GMT

I don't have much more to say on this one except - WOO HOO!!! You can download it here.

Building NHibernate 1.2.1GA on .NET 3.5

hdierking — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 00:49:14 GMT

I recently reached a point where for reasons that I'm sure you can all relate to, I decided to clean my laptop and rebuild. I therefore did a clean install of Vista with SP1. As a quick aside, SP1 does actually seem to improve performance - particularly when starting up or closing down. Anyway, after I was back up and going again, I setup NAnt and then downloaded the NHibernate 1.2.1 GA source. However, I ran into 2 major problems building, so I thought I would share those, along with how to work around them.

Both problems can be corrected by modifying the markup in the build-common/common.xml file.

The first problem had to do with the fact that the build was expecting the clover library. The solution was simply to add a condition to the property set declaration. I'm not going to spend any more time on this one, because the problem/solution is documented here.

The second problem is that there is no target in the build file for .NET 3.5. On most machines, this isn't a big deal because you've probably upgraded framework versions incrementally, and the build file can target 2.0 with no problem. Because I have a fresh OS/Framework install, I got an error saying that .NET 3.5 is not supported for my build of NHibernate. This can be worked around by adding a target declaring a configuration for .NET 3.5, like so:

<target name="set-net-3.5-framework-configuration">
    <property name="nant.settings.currentframework" value="net-2.0" />
    <property name="current.build.defines" value="${build.defines}NET,NET_2_0" />
    <!-- not using SDK_v2_0 because ndoc throws an exception -->
    <property name="link.sdkdoc.version" value="SDK_v1_1" />
    <property name="merge.targetplatform" value="v2.0" />
</target>

When you get into the config file, you'll see that all I did was create a target with 3.5 declared as a part of the target name, and then coped the body from the 2.0 target inside of my 3.5 target. Initially, I had actually configured the properties to make them specific to .NET 3.5. Unfortunately, I later discovered when I tried to use the compiled assemblies that many of the source files have preprocessing directives that are specific to the defines declared in the build properties. For example, the ISet<T> source code is wrapped with the following directive.

#if NET_2_0

Anways, after making these 2 changes, I was able to build with no problem, and NHibernate continued to work as advertised.

New Addition to My Toolbox

hdierking — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 06:46:30 GMT

When it comes to creating CDs and DVDs, I pretty much have a singular need - burning ISO images of software. Therefore, I always find myself pretty annoyed with the "everything and the kitchen sink" tools like Nero and Roxio and I've been quite content over the past year using an internal command line tool. Unfortunately, over the last month, I've been encountering all sorts of problems with this tool and as I'm about to pave my workstation for Vista with SP1, I needed to find a good (free) DVD burning tool - and stumbled across this little gem. Bottom line from my experience thus far - it's free, it's simple, and it works as advertised.

Wow - That Was Annoying

hdierking — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 05:18:53 GMT

So I'm in an awkward place right now when it comes to programming. In addition to the fact that I no longer program on a day-to-day basis (which is starting to bug me a little more than it used to as I'm afraid I'm starting to atrophy a bit), I'm also now up on Visual Studio 2008 - which is really great in a lot of respects - but at the same time is kind of bumming me out. I'm not bummed because of anything inherent in Visual Studio - I'm bummed because Resharper just doesn't really work all that great in it. Don't get me wrong - R# works - but the semantic analysis tools don't yet work with a lot of the C# 3.0 language enhancements - and as much as I tried to ignore the R# compiler errors on things like Linq queries, I finally just got tired of it an uninstalled R#, impatiently awaiting the 4.0 release.

Firstly, let me just say that not having R# is miserable from a refactoring standpoint.

Secondly, losing R# led me down the path to another headache (which is the subject of this post) - I no longer have a VS add-in runner for NUnit. Yes, I know - I could (and probably should) go back and download TD.NET - but instead, I was curious to see how easily it would be for me to just convert my NUnit tests to VS 2008 unit tests. In short, it's not terribly difficult, but getting there was a frustrating journey.

Why? Because unlike NUnit, where a test fixture is explicit in code (and only in code) via the TestFixture attribute, VS tests rely on a second piece of metadata in order to have them run via the VS test manager/test runner. That metadata is not found in the *.vsmdi file - instead, it's actually a property in the project file of your unit test project.

Therefore, if you started from a regular class library project and need to have it recognized by VS as a "test project", open the *.csproj file in notepad and add the following to any PropertyGroup.

The first Guid identifies your project as a test project (the second is the language I believe - feel free to correct me if I'm wrong).

A Little C# 2.0 Gem

hdierking — Wed, 30 May 2007 23:06:47 GMT

You may already know this (maybe I did at one point, but if so I surely forgot it), but I learned it today and was pleasantly surprised (I'm easily impressed). I would like to thank ReSharper for this discovery <g>!

Anyways, here it is. If you're using anonymous methods on a defined delegate type and your method body is not using any of the parameters for the delegate signature, you can simply omit the entire parameters section. Here's an example.

   1: Timer t = new Timer(2000);

   2: t.AutoReset = false;

   3: t.Enabled = true;

   4: t.Elapsed += new ElapsedEventHandler(delegate {

   5:         bugFlowSvc.CloseBug(instance.InstanceId, bug);

   6:     });

I'm so easily amused!

ReSharper 2.5 is Released!

hdierking — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 19:32:00 GMT

This is my absolute favorite developer tool (short of its host of course)! This latest release is supposed to have many performance improvements – particularly in VS.NET startup. Also, I believe that it is supposed to play more nicely with Vista. I'm installing it now, so I have my fingers crossed!

http://blogs.jetbrains.com/dotnet/2006/12/resharper-25-for-visual-studio-2005-released/