scooblog by josh ledgard : download

Strong free one two combination for creating localized applications

jledgard — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 00:21:10 GMT

So you started your application and now realize you've hardcoded strings and you need to start offering localized version. There are two freely available tools you can use to help with this transition.

Step One: Remove hardcoded strings and put them in resource files.

Our team released the 1.0 version of the Resource Refactoring tool last month.

Step 2: Generate Translated Resource Files

Jeremy recently discovered this tool.

ResEx is the composite, translation friendly .NET Resource editor.

Enjoy!

2006 Microsoft Developer Out of Box Releases

jledgard — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 04:24:00 GMT

So Visual Studio 2005 shipped last year. We shipped a service pack in 2006, but in addition to working onthe service pack and the next version of Visual Studio team's in Developer Division have also shipped a lot of cool stuff "out of box". Here is a quick list I put together...

Update #2: Forgot to mention that the latest book by James Avery and Jim Holmes "Windows Developer Power Tools" is now availible. It features some of the earlier contributions from our team on this list.

AJAX Control Toolkit

http://www.codeplex.com/AtlasControlToolkit

The AJAX Control Toolkit is a joint project between the community and Microsoft. Built upon the ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions, the Toolkit aims to be the biggest and best collection of web-client components available.

Pack Installer

http://www.codeplex.com/PackInstaller

Beta 2 just shipped today! The Pack Installer is a tool that will let you see the latest Power Toys for Visual Studio, and other great developer oriented tools. It allows you to easily mark any tool or set of tools for download and installation, and streamline the installation process.

MSBuild Extras - Toolkit for .NET 1.1 "MSBee"

http://www.codeplex.com/MSBee

MSBuild Extras – Toolkit for .NET 1.1 “MSBee” is an addition to MSBuild that allows developers to build managed applications using Visual Studio 2005 projects that target .NET 1.1.

Resource Refactoring Tool

http://www.codeplex.com/ResourceRefactoring

Resource Refactoring Tool provides developers an easy way to extract hard coded strings from the code to resource files.

VSCmdShell 2005

http://www.codeplex.com/VSCmdShell

VSCmdShell provides users with a shell window inside the Visual Studio IDE that can be used for Visual Studio commands as well. Current version allows user to use either Windows Command Shell (cmd.exe) or Windows PowerShell.

Managed Stack Explorer

http://www.codeplex.com/MSE

Do you ever need to get stack traces for your .NET 2.0 applications? Want a quick and easy way to monitor managed processes and threads? Need a way to view a thread's stack trace to investigate an application hang? If so, Managed Stack Explorer is for you.

Microsoft Best Practices Analyzer w ASP.NET plugin

http://www.codeplex.com/BPAEngine

The Microsoft Best Practices Analyzer is an general-purpose engine that allows for a user to analyze settings in their systems to quickly identify problematic or sub-optimal configurations. The BPA tool comes preinstalled with an example plug-in for analyzes an ASP.Net 2.0 server and website's system.web configuration settings for problematic configurations.

VS 2005 IDE Enhancements

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=cd7c6e48-e41b-48e3-881e-a0e6e97f9534&DisplayLang=en

Visual Studio 2005 IDE Enhancements are a set of Visual Studio extensions that are designed to make you more productive. These enhancements are directly integrated into the Visual Studio IDE. This set of enhancements includes Source Code Outliner, Visual C++ Code Snippets, Indexed Find, Super Diff and Event Toaster tools.

TFS Power Toys

http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2006/09/07/744993.aspx

We're trying something new with this Power Toy release. It's the first time where we have new features that integrate seamlessly into the VS2005 IDE and are virtually indistinguishable from any other TFS feature in the IDE.

Interop Forms Toolkit 1.0

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vbasic/aa701259.aspx

The Interop Forms Toolkit 1.0 is a free add-in that simplifies the process of displaying .NET WinForms in a Visual Basic 6 application. Instead of upgrading the entire code base, these applications can now be extended one form at a time.

VB Power Pack

https://connect.microsoft.com/site/sitehome.aspx?wa=wsignin1.0&siteid=223

Visual Basic 2005 Power Packs may contain Add-Ins, Controls, Components, Tools or Samples for you to use with Visual Basic 2005 to make developing great applications even easier!

TFS Administration Tool

http://www.codeplex.com/TFSAdmin

The TFS Admin Tool allows a TFS administrator to quickly add users to all three platforms utilized by Team Foundation Server: Team Foundation Server, Sharepoint, and SQL Reporting Services, all through one common interface.

Update#1 IronPython!!

http://www.codeplex.com/IronPython

IronPython is a new implementation of the Python programming language running on .NET. It supports an interactive console with fully dynamic compilation. It is well integrated with the rest of the .NET Framework and makes all .NET libraries easily available to Python programmers, while maintaining full compatibility with the Python language.

Let me know if I missed anything!

How do I find out what's running when I start windows

jledgard — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 00:46:00 GMT

And furthermore.. how do i turn it off?

I was recently asked what application you should use to detect programs and services that run when you start windows. While it's not my area of expertise I would personally recommend Autoruns. It's fairly comprehensive, links to online searches, is free of additional spyware, and works on just about any version of windows.

Refactor String Resources to Resx Files in Vb.Net and C#

jledgard — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 21:43:41 GMT

Last week our team released the 1.0 beta of a new refactoring menu option for Visual Studio 2005. Bertan, the developer, has the details on his blog. The Resource Refactoring Tool provides developers an easy way to extract hard coded strings from the code to resource files.

We have finished working on the beta version of Resource Refactoring and just posted it to Codeplex. Also with this release Resource Refactoring Tool became a shared source project under MS-PL, so we have published the source code as well. If you want to help development of the tool please go to Getting Started with Development section on the project site.

New features and fixes for this release are:

ASP.Net web project support for C# and VB.Net code files. However your resource file must be located in App_GlobalResources directory otherwise no code is generated for it.

.....

Creating a simple multi-install package for your customers

jledgard — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 06:46:18 GMT

If you've downloaded something like the "Google Pack" in the past and wanted something like that for your companies products. Something that, with a small footprint, lets users pick and choose a suite of components to install, downloads the requested components on request, and installs them all in one swoop. Then I'd recommend you check out the "Power Toys Pack Installer" project on codeplex.

With the beta release of our Power Toys Pack Installer we've also released the source code! This means that you can check out how we've done this and leverage our work to build something similar for your companies components. We'd of course love, if you did this, to get some credit and perhaps some source code back. :-)

Even if you aren't interested in using this tool for your own needs you might want to use it to download the additional development tools released by Microsoft. We'll be constantly adding new releases to this list and I expect it to grow significantly over the next several months.

We've already had one happy customer.

"Please add more to the download and setup list. This is great!!"

If you have an idea for a Microsoft tool we should include... please let us know.

Download hotfixes without contacting support!

jledgard — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 02:06:00 GMT

I'm thrilled to say that today we've launched the Devdiv hotfix Public Availibility Pilot Program. This pilot program will allow you to download the most frequently requested Visual Studio 2005 hotfixes without having to contact Microsoft Developer Support. For more information about this pilot and a list of hotfixes that are available for download please visit the pilot home page.

The current set of hotfixes that are available for download are the top 10 most requested ones for Visual Studio 2005, but we plan to expand the list dramatically in the next few weeks.

If you have suggestions for the program you can submit them via the connect web site. I also welcome comments on my blog.

Update: There is also a discussion of this on Brian Harry's blog. He deserves some kudos for this since he used some of his weight as a higher level manager to make this happen so quickly. I've always been impressed with his level of customer engagement and think he typically exemplifies how someone at his level at Microsoft should engage and push his teams to respond to customer issues quickly.