Powertoys WebLog : Code Profiling, Generation, Optimizing

Free Wizard to Create C# Typed Collections in VS 2003

Powertoys — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 19:25:32 GMT

Via the mailbag… We used something similar to this tool when making our automation libraries for Whidbey. It comes in handy when you work with lots of collections.

Page: http://www.geekproject.com/tools.aspx#9

Description

This is a wizard for C# in Visual Studio .NET 2003 which creates custom typed collections. The wizard will generate code for the collection with options to have a an enumerator nested or not and possibility to have custom validation code.

C# Programmable Calculator

Powertoys — Wed, 19 Jan 2005 08:05:00 GMT

This one comes from Eric through the mailbag:

http://www.personalmicrocosms.com/html/cspcalc.html

"If you like Reverse Polish Notation (RPN) calculators and you like to program in C#, use C# Programmable Calculator to create custom functions using your favorite programming language. C# Programmable Calculator includes pre-programmed functions in the following categories: math, trigonometry, computer math, finance, and date and time manipulation.

Additionally you can write your own functions in C# using the integrated source code editor. C# Programmable Calculator is distributed as open source."

WSCF 0.4 "Web services Contract-First, for real"

Powertoys — Tue, 28 Dec 2004 00:08:00 GMT

We featured the WsContractFirst Add-In in an earlier post, but Christian let me know they have a much improved release of WSCF now. Check out the walkthrough for complete details.

New Features in v0.4 (compared to v0.3):

WSDL creation wizard
- Abstracts away WSDL details.
- WSDL conforms to WS-I BP 1.0 recommendations.
  - Only Doc/literal support
- One portType per WSDL.
- One binding per WSDL.
- One header per message.
- No fault support.
- Documentation items.
- Right-click message .XSD file in VS.NET to start wizard.
- No round-tripping, i.e. currently one-way WSDL generation only.
Command line interface (wscf.exe), for including the code generation features in batch files or build environments.
Intrinsic support for RPC/literal WSDL descriptions.
Adds task list items for important steps to take care of after code generation.
Should run with VS.NET 2002.

Blog Review

Via smguest: "In short, this tool rocks. It works as follows: You create an XSD using your favorite editor (for example, Visual Studio .NET or XMLSpy) and import it into your Visual Studio .NET project. Right clicking on the XSD in Solution Explorer brings up an option to generate a WSDL file. "

MZ-Tools 4.0 the "all-in-one" add-in for VS .Net 2002 and 2003

Powertoys — Wed, 01 Dec 2004 21:32:00 GMT

Via The Daily Grind

"MZ-Tools 4.0 for Visual Studio .NET - I used MZ-Tools for VB6; it's a great set of add-ins. I hadn't realized that there was a version for VB .NET with such features as fast control name editing, some refactoring, private clipboards, autosave, an extensibility API, and much more. Licensing from $39.95 (via John Barone) "

Official Site: http://www.mztools.com/v4/mztools4.htm

Feature List: http://www.mztools.com/v4/features.htm

Josh

VBCommenter for XML Comment Generation in VS .Net 2003

Powertoys — Wed, 24 Nov 2004 02:44:00 GMT

A personal entry for me. Today I reached the end of my intended roadmap and released version 1.2 of the VBCommenter addin. The VBCommenter is an addin for VS 2003 that gives you the ability to automatically generate XML comment headers in the VB .NET editor similar to what the C# editor automatically generates. It will also generate the XML comment file to go along with your VB assemblies at build time. You won't need this tool in VS 2005, but for VS 2003 users...

Buzz

Patrick Coelho Gives VBCommenter customization tips.
David Truxall: "It seems to be very usefull..." BTW - David, you can turn off the build generation of comments if you are concerned about the build performance.
John Mueller on using the VBCommenter with NDoc. "At this point, it might be easy to say that VBCommenter is a perfect tool with everything you need to combine class or application comments with your documentation efforts. "
Code Horror: "I've started to aggressively adopt the VBCommenter add-in, which adds XML comment support to the current version of VS.NET. "

When searching today I found a ton more articles and stories about the VBCommenter than I had ever seen. I'm really excited to have played a role in releasing something a lot of people have found useful!

Josh

Links

VBCommenter Workspace
Release Downloads

Add-in Express: Make Office Add-in Development Easier

Powertoys — Tue, 09 Nov 2004 01:02:00 GMT

This looks pretty cool - Josh

Web Site: http://www.add-in-express.com

Quick Description: "Add-in Express is completely based on the rapid application development paradigm, installs several .NET or VCL components, and adds to IDE several wizards. The wizards generate specific projects with a couple of clicks, the components implement everything required by COM add-ins, Smart Tags and RTD Servers. In other words, Add-in Express implements all interfaces and techniques required by the supported technologies, you write functional code only."

Make Code Comments Pretty with CommentReflower

Powertoys — Mon, 08 Nov 2004 21:31:00 GMT

Ian wrote a cool VS 2003 plugin that makes comments in code more readable. From the Site:

"Comment Reflower is a Visual Studio .NET 2003 Plugin to reflow the text in comments in source files to have even word wrapping. It does more than simply just wrapping all text in comment blocks. It attempts to recognise and wrap appropriately:

bullet points and doxygen tags
lines that should never be reflowed
XML preformat (<pre>) blocks
HTML break (<BR>) commands

The results are best seen by example. ExampleFile.cpp is a sample file before Comment Reflower has been applied, ExampleFileAfter.cpp is the much neater and more readable result. "

Edit: Direct Link: http://commentreflower.sourceforge.net/

VB.NET Class Builder Utility 1.0

Powertoys — Tue, 12 Oct 2004 19:58:00 GMT

Sure... I think the Whidbey Class Designer rocks. But you don't have Whidbey today, so you might be interested in a class building utility like this one from Mod2Software.

Check it out here: http://www.mod2software.com/ProductPages/cbu.htm

"This program allows you to build, maintain, and deploy Visual Basic .NET classes quickly and easily, with no fuss. Simply point and click to add class items, tweak their settings, and deploy your class to your project – it’s as simple as that! Now you don’t have to waste your valuable time writing things like redundant Property Get-Set blocks, the VB.NET Class Builder Utility does that all for you – freeing you up to work on what’s important – your code!"

Josh

WsContractFirst Add-In for improved “Contract First” Web services development

Powertoys — Wed, 15 Sep 2004 19:51:00 GMT

Christian, an RD from thinktecture sent us mail about thier WSContractFirst Add-In.

From the Add-In Description: http://www.thinktecture.com/resources/software/wscontractfirst/default.html

"Maybe some of you know that I am a big believer in contract-based Web services design and development. Web services contracts can be expressed explicitly in .NET code or by using schema (XSD) and WSDL. When using the second approach you may want a tool that can generate .NET code from your WSDLs/XSDs. The .NET Framework's and Visual Studio .NET's intrinsic tools somehow don't cut it, sorry.So, did you ever want to simply right-click on a WSDL file in Visual Studio .NET and generate code from that Web service contract?

Now you can - whether it be a client-side proxy class or a server-side stub skeleton, you choose. Our add-in for Visual Studio .NET 2003 automatically determines the project's programming language and accordingly generates source code (currently C# and VB.NET are supported). "

Download: http://www.thinktecture.com/resources/software/wscontractfirst/WsContractFirstSetup03.zip

Try it out and let Christian know what you think.

Visual Assist X from Whole Tomato Software

Powertoys — Thu, 12 Aug 2004 19:26:00 GMT

People send me mail that asks "What about Visual Assist X?". This blog gets comments like "Tool X is nothing compared to the Whole Tomato stuff". In chats I've seen "Why don't you guys just buy the Whole Tomato stuff and ship it in the box?". I'll admit, they do some great work through our extensibility interfaces and giving them props in this blog was long overdue. So, if you haven't already, you should check out the free trial of Visual Assist X from Whole Tomato Software.

Some of this stuff (better code coloring, code templates, etc) you'll see in Whidbey, but there is a bunch of other stuff in there as well that we just aren't doing like the "hovering class browser", spell checking, automatic case correction, etc. Good times! Josh

Code Template Autocompletion for VS 2002 and VS 2003

Powertoys — Wed, 07 Jul 2004 22:02:00 GMT

When it rains it pours. I found this in my inbox this morning and it looks pretty cool. Here is the description from Alvaros

AutoCode v2.0 is an Add-In for Visual Studio .net that enables AutoComplete for any language in Visual Studio .net. Generated code is based in custom templates that can be easily created with AutoCode Templates Editor.

Here is the intro from thier web-site:

AutoCode v2.0 is an Add-In for Visual Studio .net that enables autocomplete for any language in Visual Studio .net. Generated code is based in command templates that can be easily created with AutoCode Editor.

For example, typing in the editor:

Hello World! ws

And pressing Control+Enter, we get:

Console.WriteLine( "Hello World!" )

The template command ‘ws’ is one of the different command templates that comes with AutoCode, but what makes AutoCode a powerful tool is the ability to easily create new custom templates.

Version 2.0 includes:

·          Smart templates using ASPX like syntax

·          Set cursor position

·          Create, edit and organize templates with the built-in editor

·          Multiple file templates to be easily shared

·          More new cool features…

Click Here to download:

http://www.devprojects.net/acdownload.aspx

devAdvantage for C# code analysis and automated code reviews

Powertoys — Wed, 07 Jul 2004 20:00:00 GMT

Another one from the mailbag via Dan!

devAdvantage beta 2.0 is now available for free download and use. devAdvantage performs C# code analysis to automate code reviews. Unlike other code analyzers devAdvantage allows you to quickly correct any coding violations found using its refactoring engine. Version 1.0 has rules for threading and design while this latest version comes with a large set of configurable C# naming convention rules.

Download for free now at http://www.anticipatingminds.com/Content/Products/devAdvantage/devAdvantageBeta20.aspx

Update Via Dan!

devAdvantage now finds and fixes problems in C# exception handling
Anticipating Minds has just introduced yet another set of rules to its devAdvantage product - now nearing the end of its beta. It now contains a little over 15 rules regarding best practices and standards for error and exception handling. Like the other rules (naming conventions and threading) it can automatically correct them. So if you are tired of ensuring that specific methods test for null arguments before referencing and throwing a ArgumentNullException, this tool can automatically detect and correct.

Check it out at
http://www.anticipatingminds.com/Content/Products/devAdvantage/devAdvantage.aspx

We are getting ready to tackle our next group of rules focused on performance. We would be very interested in hearing what types of rules and development guidelines people would like to see from us - either as part of the performance collection of rules or any other types of rules (design, security, technology specific areas, etc.).

Reflector Graph v1.2 Add-In released

Powertoys — Sat, 12 Jun 2004 21:55:00 GMT

After I posted about Reflector a user asked "What does this do that the built in object browser doesn't?” Here is another good example. Josh
[Via Peli's Blog]

New features:

Unit Test Generation Add-in,
Type Graph Add-in,

Warning: This release has been compiled agains .NET v1.1 (because System.Drawing is buggy in v1.0), therefore you must create a Reflector.exe.config file in the directory of Reflector and add the following:
<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<configuration>
<startup>
<supportedRuntime version="v1.1.4322" />
</startup>
</configuration>
About bug reports:

Please, DO NOT post bugs in the blog. It is much more easy for me to monitor bugs through the http://mbunit.tigris.org issue tracking system. :)

Download Now

devMetrics 1.0: Free C# Software Metrics

Powertoys — Sat, 05 Jun 2004 08:41:00 GMT

From Dan at anticipatingminds....

Anticipating Minds has a new Visual Studio .NET Add-in: devMetrics is a C# code analysis tool that gathers software metrics so that developers, leads and software managers can quickly identify potentially problematic and high-risk areas of their .NET code. devMetrics analyzes C# code measuring:

size (files, classes, members, statements, lines, comments)

complexity (cyclomatic code complexity, statements per member, members per class).

devMetrics runs as either a Microsoft Visual Studio .NET Add-in or a stand-alone command line utility.

http://www.anticipatingminds.com/Content/Products/devMetrics/devMetrics.aspx

This was cool to see. As an intern at a company in RI one of my first projects was to write software that generated size and complexity reports for ADA code. Josh

Easy Multi-Threaded Design in VS via an Add-In

Powertoys — Wed, 19 May 2004 19:47:00 GMT

[Via Michael Harsh]

One of the prototyping guys at MS, Roland Fernandez, has created a VS.NET 2003 add-in to make multi-threaded programming easier.

The premise is that you write your app just as you normally would if it was all running on the UI thread, then adorn the methods you want to run on a background thread with a simple attribute. At compile time, the add-in reads the attributes and generates the code necessary to run your code on a background thread.

Read the article and download the code and installer from http://www.windowsforms.net/articles/easythread.aspx

- mike

Looks pretty cool! - Josh