It turns out that the add-in model for Reflector 4.0 is so powerful that it enabled Denis Bauer to build an add-in that leverages the built-in R4 disassembler to disassembly an entire assembly into source code files. Very handy for curling up on a sunny afternoon with a chunk of source from your favorite assembly, a cigar and a single malt Scotch.

And the hits, they keep on coming...

Roy points out some Windows Forms controls that Mike pointed out to him and now I’m pointing out to you: NetXP, which includes all kinds of fun controls and components for use for free for personal and freeware use. It's amazing the number of high-quality free .NET controls exist. Wahoo!

Whoever put this site together had the right idea. I was hoping to work my magic to get MS to publish a giant interop DB, but instead of waiting, Adam Nathan (of .NET and COM: The Complete Interoperability Guide fame) put up a wiki to collect all of the P/Invoke signatures that the community already knows about. Yeah, baby! This could finally be a wiki I can get behind! (Sorry, Ward, but I've just never found a wiki that makes me want to hang out there...)

In his June ’03 Bugslayer column, John Robbins made a sideways comment when discussing Son of Strike (SOS), a debugging extension from Microsoft for doing all kinds of low-level, mixed native and managed code debugging.

What Jon said was this: “Interestingly, starting with Visual Studio® .NET 2003, you can load SOS when doing mixed-mode debugging.” And then he didn’t say how to load SOS into VS.NET, even after spending the rest of the article telling us how cool SOS was.

Luckily, Mike Stanton, an SDE on the CLR team, has created a set of instructions for loading SOS into VS.NET. Actually, he posted those instructions in December of last year, but it wasn’t ’til today that they were accurate because it wasn’t ’til today that I tried them and couldn’t get them to work. Now they are and I can and I have all kinds of low-level goodness to explore with Son of Strike.

Rob Mensching, an MS SDE, has finally released his WiX tools for building MSI files from XML. I say “finally,” because I’ve been using his tools for months to build the MSI files that MSDN puts up on microsoft.com/download. All of our downloads have to be wrapped in an MSI so that you have to agree to the EULA before you get the files. Plus, we need to bundle some descriptive text and author name in there, along with the code that pops open the install folder after the files have been installed. Instead of using VS.NET to create the MSI files for each set of folks, I built a tool and the best programatic interface to creating MSI files that I could find was easily Rob’s. Check it out.

If you were listening to the .NET Rocks show today, you heard me invent something that Microsoft has already shipped: The Microsoft SQL Server Best Practices Analyzer. <whew> One less thing I have to build myself. : )

I used to live and die with Visual Studio Service Packs and the DevDiv Sustaining Engineering team has just released another SP for you Visual C++ 6 and Visual Basic 6 programmers. Millions of folks still use these products and it warms my heart that we're 2.5 generations past this, but still releasing SPs. I don't anticipate any more of them, though, so I recommend using this SP for your current projects and moving to Visual Studio .NET 2003 or Visual Studio 2005 on the next one, depending on the timing.