Rob Mensching, an MSSDE, 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.
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
