I swear I only stopped reading blogs for a coupla days, but interesting news has just surged! For example, I just found out that MSDN has an entire web site dedicated to extending VS.NET. This includes the legendary VSIP and a set of extensions that lets you build VSIP packages in managed code. Very cool.
I knew Mindreef had cool testing tools, but I just found one today on their web site that I ended up using all afternoon. You feed it a WSDLURL and it generates a form, allowing you to see the SOAP request and response packet in several formats include raw XML, to pseudo-code, pretty-printed XML and tree. It’s much more flexible then the built in one that ASP.NET provides and the price is right.
Mark Parks, a PM on the Visual C# Debugger QA team, has posted ways to fix common VS.NET debugger problems. He’s even got a fix for why I can’t debug the localhost version of my site. Thanks, Mark!
After much delay (man, this Microsoft gig keeps a person busy), I’m happy to announce Genghis v0.5:
New HtmlLinkLabel class from Jeff Key that knows how to launch IE and EXEs directly w/o requiring you to handle the event
Much prettier images in SimplePad from Chris Burrows
Updated MRU code from Michael Weinhardt to match .NET event signature conventions and to fix a problem when using more than one MRU components on a single menu
Updated FileSearchEngine code from Mike Marshall to check for whole words at beginning and end of line correctly
Updated validation code from Michael Weinhardt with support for validating controls at a container level, e.g. validating controls on a tab instead of on an entire form
Updated FileDocument from Chris Sells to match text of Windows Forms Programming to include more MFC-like features like a pluggable scheme for serialization handling, registration of document extension with the shell, and adding to recent docs, i.e. Start->Documents
Updated HandleCollector from Ethan Brown to work with .NET 1.0 and .NET 1.1
Performance enhancements from Ethan Brown in the MappedDrives and SystemShares classes
In early 2000, Mike Woodring moved Heaven and Earth to write a tool that would inject a DLL into a process’s memory for purposes of finding the command line with which the process was launched. While hanging around Don and Tim this week, Don was all hot on WMI, so we fired it up in .NET and rebuilt Mike’s tool like so:
using System; using System.Management; class cmdline { staticvoidMain(string[] args) { if( args.Length != 1 ) { Console.WriteLine(“usage: cmdline <processId>“); return; }
ManagementObject obj = new ManagementObject(string.Format(“Win32_Process.Handle="{0}\“”, args[0])); Console.WriteLine(obj.Properties[“CommandLine”].Value); } }
This makes WMI pretty darn cool in my book. I’ll be reading Jon Fancey’s article on WMI + .NET in the latest MSDN Magazine.
BTW, I have to admit that I’m nowhere near as manly as Mike. I’ll take this sissy code any day. : )
For those folks asking, another drop of Genghis is on the way, which includes an HTML link class that handles links for you, a user-sizeable panel, a gradient progress bar, a completely revamped FileDocument and a host of fixes and enhancements, including stacking support and terminal server support for toast windows. However, before that can come, Mike Marshall, the Genghis build-master, stopped to email me about the impending arriving of his first child. Now *that’s* dedication! I doubt if I’d stop to email any of the folks in charge of the shared source projects I’m involved with on the way to the hospital… : )
