Powertoys WebLog : Design and Modeling Tools

Xaml Viewer for Whidbey

Powertoys — Wed, 24 Nov 2004 20:36:00 GMT

Gaston Milano posted a VSIP based Xaml viewer for Whidbey.

"Features:

Right click in xaml files to call to the viewer.
Switch from viewer to associated file
Show errors in output window and task list, so you can go to the line with double click.
Call the viewer directly from View\Other Windows\Xaml Viewer
Text to Xaml, sometimes I need to transform just a text fragment, so you can paste the text in the text view and refresh the viewer in order to see the result. "

People working on Avalon took notice:

Chris Anderson: "I love it when folks in the community do a better job than us! <G>"
Rob Relyea: "Screen shots look great!"

Enjoy!

Josh

PagePorter Professional 1.0 to Ease Frontpage <-> Visual Studio Migration

Powertoys — Wed, 04 Aug 2004 21:27:00 GMT

Honestly, I haven't been able to try this one out since there is a restriction on the install if you have VS 2005 on the machine, but it looked to cool not to post it. Robert E. Weatherford left the following comment to the powertoys blog that describes their add-in. - Josh

DULUTH, GA - August 2, 2004 - Parastream Technologies announces PagePorter, a Visual Studio .NET add-in that integrates the web site development ease of FrontPage with the programming might of Visual Studio .NET to form a truly powerful web application development tool.

PagePorter helps developers create and maintain ASP.NET web sites with unprecedented speed and ease. With PagePorter handling many of the mundane repetitive tasks, developers have more time to focus on important design tasks.

PagePorter operates with Visual Studio .NET projects in one of three modes - using FrontPage for layout and design, without using FrontPage at all, or converting a FrontPage web site to ASP.NET and then using Visual Studio .NET only. By itself, PagePorter adds real web site development capabilities to Visual Studio .NET with support for themes, shared borders, hyperlink management, a GUI site navigation editor, and seven FrontPage compatible web controls. If you want to use FrontPage with Visual Studio .NET, PagePorter is the component that bridges the gap between them.

You can check it out for yourself here:

http://www.parastream.com/software/pageporter/

Regex Much? Check out "The Regulator"

Powertoys — Thu, 10 Jun 2004 21:25:00 GMT

So recently I've been tinkering a bit with an app to scrape my .Text referral logs. I also wanted to extract all the search terms that led to my blog into a readable form without the URL garbelygook. It was a good chance to get my hands dirty with writing some REGEX with .Net. One of the two tools I used was The Regulator from Roy. The UI is a bit confusing at first, but that was probably because I was a regex noob. My favorite part is the connection to web services at www.regexlib.com. It was cool to find that several people had already cooked up pretty similar expressions that I could base what I ended up with. I'm not ready to post my tool and I'm not sure I will. But if you are into REGEX you owe it to yourself to try out <Arnold Voice>The Regulator.</Arnold Voice> - Josh

Notes for Latest Release (2.0.2)

What is the Regulator?

Download the Regulator

Snippet Compiler - Write and test snippets of code outside of VS without saving

Powertoys — Wed, 19 May 2004 19:33:00 GMT

[Via VSData Team Blog]

One of the things people like about VS2005 is that you can create projects and not save them until you hit, er, File/Save. Keeps you from getting those WindowsApplication1 thru WindowsApplication5999 directories. Anyway, via Rick Strahl's weblog, here's what looks like a cool tool that lets you quickly test small apps without having to save the code.

From the homepage: http://www.sliver.com/dotnet/SnippetCompiler/

If you're like me, you probably have hundreds of Visual Studio solutions that consist of a few lines of code to test out something outside the scope of whatever you're currently working on. Of course there's nothing wrong with that, but the time it takes to launch a new VS.NET, create the project and so on is just unnecessary. Today one of the voices in my head said that it's easy enough to compile code using the framework, so why not do something about it, so I wrote this little thing. (It then told me to eat lunch, which I dutifully did.) Snippet Compiler leads a simple life. Here are its features:

Compiles and runs single or multiple C#, VB.NET and ASP.NET snippets.

Optionally builds WinForm EXEs, console EXEs or DLLs.

The user can store a library of templates

Displays compile errors and warning, including wave lines in editor with error/warning tooltips.

IntelliSense for static members and method signatures, as well as constructor signatures.

Imports VS.NET projects.

Conveniently sits in the notification area waiting to be useful.

Exports snippets to HTML/RTF.

Enjoy - Josh

AssemblyToVisio - Visio 2003 UML diagram generator

Powertoys — Tue, 27 Apr 2004 08:22:00 GMT

Sent to me ( Josh ) from one of our Microsoft consultants....

http://www.gotdotnet.com/Community/UserSamples/Details.aspx?SampleGuid=375f1eea-c60c-4cbe-ac12-1335899c6566

AssemblyToVisio - Visio 2003 UML diagram generator

This tool fulfills the need that arises when one wants to update his/her design docs with the up-to-date UML diagrams which would provide the reader with detailed code map, illustrating the classes, their properties and methods, and relationships between them. Visio 2003 seems as the perfect tool for achieving this, and Visual Studio 2003 even has the reverse-engineering feature which generates the UML shapes out of the C# code. But, VS 2003 only generates classes in so called Model Explorer view, and it doesn't show class relationships (neither inheritance nor references). AssemblyToVisio tries to fix that shortcomings.